There is no amount of money that I could imagine them offering, there is nothing that would get me to do Spider-Man 3. I would sooner rot in hell.

How come this is only your first junket?

I don't know, I think it's because Charlie and Corpse Bride were back to back, and they were each musicals, and because I've done so many films with Tim now I guess it's becoming a little more of a point of interest. Before I've just contributed to part of a junket. Look, I'm only a composer, you know what I mean. In the past, if a junket's calling me to participate, they're hard up. It means they have no stars. So I'm usually let off the hook. I'll do some phoners, like this, but I've never done the full-on week long junket.

I guess with these films you're as much a performer as well.

I don't know, they asked me to do it. And I loved the idea of going to Japan, I've never been there. I got to spend a week in Tokyo, and the Toronto Film Festival, of course, I love film festivals.

How was Tokyo?

It was great. It was so weird, the first day Tim and I had off we walked around Tokyo. Went shopping for toys.

Did he get recognised a lot?

Yeah, fairly frequently. But I have to say he got recognised in a way that people were always really nice and really polite, there was never any mobbing, nobody ever hassled him. But the weird thing is that there was Nightmare Before Christmas stuff everywhere. Everywhere we went, it was like, oh my god, look at that! There were Zeros, Sally dolls, Sally t-shirts, Jack t-shirts, Boogie Boogie t-shirts, all kind of merchandise. It was really crazy.

It's kind of like that in Camden here.

Yeah, that's exactly what Tim was saying, 'This looks like Camden!'

It seems to have blown up over the last year or two. I did an article on it two or three years ago because it's such an enduring cult favourite, it's become part of goth pop culture here.

Well I can't tell you how gratifying it is for those of us who worked on it. For two and a half years, we worked so hard, and then, at the last second, to watch the studio just drop it like a hot potato. That's happened before on other films, but with all the work that went into it, it was particularly disheartening.

They just decided not to market it didn't they.

Yeah. Of course, much to the pleasure of my agent, they dropped all merchandising early. So he starts collecting every bit of free Nightmare merchandising available, things they gave you with a hamburger, promotional items, and he said 'I guarantee you I'll put my son through college with this free merchandise I've just collected.' And you know what? He did. Oh my god. He collected a fortune. He was smart enough to know that this stuff was going to be major collector items.

And then they turned around, because of its popularity, the recent DVD re-release was obviously given some loving care and attention, and wasn't there a ride?

Both Disneyland in LA and in Tokyo are doing a Nightmare haunted Mansion. It's just great, because over a decade it found an audience, and of course that feels really good for something that you put tons of work in.

OK. The Corpse Bride soundtrack sounds like a greatest hits, there are bits that remind me of Edward Scissorhands, there are bits that sound a lot like The Frighteners, obviously Nightmare Before Christmas, and some Wonka stuff. It sounds like you had a lot to play around with.

Yeah. There's kind of two elements, the songs and the scoring, and the songs I had to start a year and a half earlier, the score later. The songs are always a challenge, even though it's so much fun. The score on Corpse Bride, it was really a relief for me, because having finished Charlie just days before, because I did both of them simultaneously, and scored them back to back, I mean the day I finished Charlie in London I moved back to LA and the day I landed I was already scoring Corpse Bride. But Charlie was a very difficult movie to score. It was hard capturing the tone, nailing it...

Why?

I don't know, it just was. For some reason I had to do a lot of experimenting, stumble into what it was, you know, the sentimental part of it, the Charlie as a child part of it, what kind of feel plays inside Wonka world, you know. It took a lot more work than I thought. It's not uncommon, Big Fish was tons of work too. Often they sound easy, listening to it, but getting to where they got to might take a shitload of work. And Charlie was like that, so when I started Corpse Bride I was like, 'Oh my god, this is gonna kill me if it's like that.'

And on the contrary Corpse Bride went down incredibly smoothly. Everything I played Tim, immediately he was like, 'Yeah, that's fine'. At one point I played him three cues, he came over and he approved all of them, and I said, 'Tim are you OK? I'm a little worried about you, you're making this a little too easy.' He said 'No no, it's fine...' Maybe it was because it was animation, I don't know. You know, everything's so cleanly laid out, the tone, because it's an animated world, is simple to kind of nail. Whereas Charlie's world was very slippery, a tightrope. But Corpse Bride was real fun and real simple, relatively speaking, the score.

Writing the songs, I was having such a great time because I was getting to pull out things that I've always wanted to do and never got to. It was hard putting it together because I had to tell this backstory, and I felt early on that it was crucial to convey a lot of information about how she got there, how is she alone, under this tree, in a wedding gown... How, how how? So I figured it's all gotta be wrapped up in this song. But in the middle of it they said I could do whatever I wanted, when the skeletons do their skeleton dance, and I said, 'Oh boy, this is going to be so much fun... I feel like I'm in a Max Fleischer cartoon in the 30s.' I can't tell you, it was like 'I'm never gonna get to do this again, I'm never going to get to write trombone into guitar into bass into a skeleton playing a xylophone solo on another skeleton's ribs.

It sounds like the jazziest stuff you've done.

Yeah, yeah. And at the end, at the wedding song, I love Gilbert and Sullivan, and even though I had songs like 'What's This?' in Nightmare Before Christmas, inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan, here I got to feel like I was really getting to do the whole Gilbert and Sullivan Mikado treatment. And what's funny is when the choir began singing in Abbey Road, they always begin approaching things in a mid-Atlantic accent, it's somewhat English, but slightly not.

Like the Osbourne kids.

Yeah. It goes back to the 30s actually, it's the way they used to speak in old movies, it's American English. And I think because it takes place in a world that's not particularly one place or another they were being a little cautious, and I said 'No no no, let's do this again. I want the Queen's English, rolling Rs, I want the works.' Then they were having great fun with it as well, I think they very rarely have to do anything like that. I couldn't wait to get the chorus in there, you know, 'Hoosah! Hoosah!' I've always wanted to do a song that had Hoosah in it, and I finally got my chance. What it is is the corpse soldiers all singing their bits, it starts with, the women's chorus are the spiders making Victor's wedding suit, repairing it, and of course, all the dead soldiers, I get to sing their rousing section. When I was working on the songs, I really got to a point where I was like 'Goddamn, I wish I was doing 10 more.'

Does it feel good to be doing a lot of singing again?

Well yeah, that's always fun. Although there was a point in Charlie where I thought 'Why did I take on this concept', of doing all the Oompa Loompa vocals. Because recording the demos was really fun, but then later I was trying to get in front of a mic and re-record them the best I could. But I took no notes, it was all improvised, I just had a mic in front of me and I was just singing tons of parts and just having a blast, and then later I'm up their in Air Studios with a microphone trying to listen, going, 'How many parts did I have in that?' I was singing every part six times, that was the formula I found, and then lightly shifting, the, for lack of a better word, Munchkinising, so out of six voices, I might take two of them and Munchkinise them, on a scale of 12, I would Munchkinise them 6 or 8, and I would take 2 more and do that, shift them 2 or 3, just so it's very slightly pitched... So I would take each part and experiment with little formulas so as a chorus it didn't sound like they were chipmunks or Munchkins singing, yet it didn't sound completely natural either.

I wanted to ask you, do you know Yma Sumac's music?

Oh yeah yeah, of course.

Because that's what the Augustus Gloop song reminded me of, instantly.

Yeah! The fun I had in Augustus Gloop, which was the first song I wrote, was all the chanting. I can hear how the chanting, the 'Weeeeeeooh, weeeooh weeeeeeeoh', all that stuff... I was picturing a lot of things. The model for Augustus Gloop was a Bollywood musical. But at moments with the chanting I was getting a little bit 1930s black musical at the same time, some kind of extravaganza number up in Heaven like there might have been in Cabin In The Sky or one of those movies.

What's that?

There's so many musicals in the 30s, and there was a series of black musicals where Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong would appear, and they'd do these great production numbers, and some kind of weird stuff. So there was a little bit of that, and still trying to stay somewhat true to Bollywood. But you know Yma Sumac would do stuff that would kind of cross into some of these elements too, you know, with this kind of tropical exotic sound that she did, and I think the exotica of her music and the Bombay element that I was trying to put in Augustus Gloop, I can hear that there's definitely a kind of an element that feels like that.

How many films have you done with Tim now, 10?

12.

How is your relationship now, is it developing?

No, I mean it really hasn't changed much, and I shouldn't say that he's just happier and happier as we go, in some ways he's more difficult. But the process of how we work together hasn't really changed. Essentially, I watch the movie, and after you watch a movie and you're scoring it for the first time we do a thing called a spotting session. And that's where you play the whole movie and talk about where... Can you hold on one second, I have to turn my phone off.

Is that Tubular Bells on your ringtone?

Yeah, no... funny, I hadn't thought about that. No that's Halloween. But they're actually kind of similar aren't they. No, but it hasn't changed radically, we do a spotting session, and the big joke with Tim is that they're the shortest spotting sessions on the planet. Cos I was in the recording sessions for Charlie and I said 'Look, I have to leave, I'm gonna spot Corpse Bride and I'll be back.' And my engineer was like, 'You're not gonna be back today! What the fuck are we gonna do?!' Cos, you know, spotting sessions can take all day. I mean I've even once had a spotting session that took a day and a half, and I said 'I guarantee you I'll be back in two hours.' And I was. When Tim spots the movie he doesn't wanna talk about it. Let's put it that way.

Some directors get very analytical, they wanna tell you the back story, what the characters are thinking, all that stuff. Tim has no interest in that. We just look at the film, talk about music starting here, ending here, and he'll tell me how he feels. How he feels about the movie, the characters. But until I have music to play, he's just not gonna respond to anything. And it's actually very much a relief to me, because honestly, a filmmaker can talk forever, deconstructing the motives, the inner workings, all these things... it actually doesn't mean anything when I start writing. In the end I'm looking at pictures and I'm hearing music. And I'm not intellectualising about motives, layers under layers under layers, no, hopefully if I do a good score it's gonna have a lot of layers to it but I'm not gonna think about that stuff, it's just gonna happen, based on how the portrayals are and the story, and how it looks and feels. Tim just doesn't wanna talk about it, so he just turns me loose and I write music, and when I bring the demos in, cos I do a demo of every cue, now he can respond, now he's got a lot to say. And I can't pretend that it's always easy.

People ask if I have a psychic shorthand with him and I really don't, we have to take a journey to get to where we're gonna go with the music, and sometimes it's a quick easy journey, a la Corpse Bride, and sometimes it's a really circular long path, which finally works around and around to the centre and we go 'OK, this is it, here we go.' And Big Fish and Charlie were like that, they really took a lot of work, and at the end of the day I'm always happy with the results, sometimes I feel like 'Oh my god, this is Tim, and I know him so well, yet, I may not pull this off!' And of course in the end I always manage to come up with something. I can't pretend it's always easy, and yet I won't say that I'm not always very happy and fulfilled, you know? But it's not like the slam-dunk, I just go off, write a bunch of stuff, play it for him and he just immediately stamps everything and goes 'Great, next.' It's not that simple.

But generally it seems like the opposite to what happened with Sam Raimi, from what I've been reading on the internet this week.

Oh, yeah, well that's another story. Let me put it this way, Tim and I have had many disagreements and we even had a meltdown where we didn't speak to each other for a year and a half.

Was that during Ed Wood?

Yeah. Which I think now in hindsight inevitably had to happen somewhere in our careers. You know, with our personalities. We both are very passionate about what we do, in certain ways we're almost too similar, and now, the wisdom of age and hindsight, somewhere in a 20 year period we had to have a blow-up. But in the end that blow-up ended up like... now I see it as a kind of blow-up I've had with my own brother, where we've had some huge, huge battle and I've said 'I disown him as my brother, I'll never speak to him.'

But, of course, he's my brother. And a year later - well it wouldn't ever get that far, some months later, six months later I'm going 'No. This is horrible. This is horrible. Dreadful.' And with Tim and I it was really like that. Both of us felt really bad, and both put out feelers through intermediaries, I had a quiet phone call, 'Would Danny ever consider meeting with Tim again...' And two days later I was on a plane to Kansas, and you know, I missed him terribly. And you know, it was as simple as hugging and going, 'That was all fucked. Let's forget about it, never speak of it again.' And we've never had a problem since. And that was getting back on to Mars Attacks. With Sam it was a different story. Because of all the disagreements I've had with Tim, it's never been over a piece of music. That's the one thing I can say, in 20 years, 12 films, we've never fought over a piece of music. You know, we've fought over how things are presented and how things are done, and other types of things, but never an unstoppable disagreement over a piece of music. And the thing with Sam, it wasn't personal at all, it was the opposite. It was just all about the music. There was absolutely no way to please him on Spider-Man 2 except to imitate every single piece of music on the temp score.

What was on the temp score?

Well, let me put it this way, two-thirds of the temp score was Spider-Man 1. And I couldn't even adapt Spider-Man 1 close enough. And that's just an example to get you, I won't even go into more detail to illustrate that, I was adapting my own work. But of course it's a different movie and I was changing things as one would adapt for a sequel. And I couldn't even get close enough for me. Leastwise getting close enough to John Williams or Christopher Young or whoever had a cue here or a cue there. And there's ONE thing that I will do not do in filmmaking, the one deal-breaker, the one thing that'll make me turn my back, and in 55 films the only time that I've ever told a director to fuck off... and the only thing is being asked to imitate a temp score.

And in the end they were taking cues that I'd written for Spider-Man 2 that were very much like a cue from the original, dumping it and licensing the ones from the first one and just putting it in. Because I couldn't get close enough. It was at the point where the main title had to be identical, which made me feel real shitty. Because there's so many directions to go with the second main title, and other than eight bars of the Doc Ock scene, they wanted it identical. And in their temp score they were missing seven beats of the original because the new one was just slightly shorter, and so I made subtle time adjustments so I could fit the whole piece in, of course without seven, seven beats is an awkward chunk, right at the big kind of heroic line at the end of the theme, and they actually called once and asked would I mind redoing it with those seven beats on there... So it was almost like they got so insanely attached to the temp, that anything remotely different just wasn't right. And that defines the absolute antithesis of what I look for in a director. That's my biggest fear. So, it was very sad because in my opinion Sam Raimi wasn't there. I've known him for 12 years, 14 years, I've done four films with him... And he's always given me really the longest leash to work on than just about anybody. And he was probably, next to Tim, my second favourite director. It was as weird as... did you ever see Invasion Of The Body Snatchers?

No.

Well, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, there's an invasion and they've got these pods, and the way that they get you is to put a pod next to you while you're sleeping. When you wake up it's taken over your body, now you're one of them. And the characters are trying not to sleep, because if they fall asleep there's already a pod with a genetic code in it. And however it happened, somebody got a pod for Sam Raimi. What I was working with was not Sam.

Was it studio intervention at all?

No. It wasn't the studio at all. It was purely Sam. I mean, honestly, there is no amount of money that I could imagine them offering, there is nothing that would get me to do Spider-Man 3. I would sooner rot in hell.

Right. We'll leave that one there.

I think I've made my point.

OK, I just want to go back to the beginning of your career - I know you'd worked on Forbidden Zone with your brother in 1980, and it was five years before you did Pee-wee with Tim, was soundtrack composing something you'd considered as a career, or was it a complete surprise when he asked you to do it? Were you just steaming ahead with Oingo Boingo?

It was a complete surprise. I was in my band, and Tim used to come and see the band. From what I understand it was a double thing, Tim knew of me through Oingo Boingo, and Paul Reubens, Pee-wee Herman, he knew of my work through a midnight cult film through... this gets a little complicated, but before Oingo Boingo I was with a musical theatrical troupe, 12-piece, called The Mystic Knights. Technically it was The Mystic Knights Of Oingo Boingo, but it has no relationship to Oingo Boingo so let's call them The Mystic Knights. And The Mystic Knights appeared in and did the music to Forbidden Zone, my brother's film.

And Pee-wee was a big fan of Forbidden Zone, and he said he made a note that if he ever did a film he'd like to get whoever did Forbidden Zone. So my name came up on Paul's list, nearly five years later, and Forbidden Zone didn't lead to any offers, it was a very weird movie - and Tim via Oingo Boingo, so I get called into this meeting and I really thought they were... I thought they were crazy. And my first question to them was 'Why me?' Tim and I talked and I kind of found very quickly that we were raised on all the same kind of stuff.

What sort of thing?

Well... Ray Harryhausen, Bernard Hermann, who was my idol. I was a fan of film music, I never thought of doing film music. Vincent Price was his hero, and Peter Lorre was mine, and Hammer horror films and Corman horror films, Mario Bava horror films, you know, we grew up on all the same stuff. So I thought that was very interesting, I went home and wrote this demo, recorded it and sent it off and never thought any more about it.

How was it writing that, what was going around in your head having never done it before, were you thinking of other film soundtracks, or non-soundtrack stuff as well...

No no, when I saw the movie, something about it felt European, Italian, maybe because it starts with a bicycle. And so I came home and in the car I was just thinking this Nino Rota like scene, and I recorded it, and I said 'They're not gonna use this, this is not what American contemporary comedies are about, and two weeks later I got a call saying I was hired. And that demo became the main title for Pee-wee's Big Adventure. But there was a point where I considered saying no. I just didn't think I was equipped, and honestly felt that, you know, I didn't want to take the responsibility for fucking up the film. Then I thought about it and said 'Well, alright, it's on their shoulders... if they wanna take the chance, probably a big mistake, but so be it.'

It's a brilliant score. How does it feel now to hear your style imitated and ripped off so much? I think Edward Scissorhands is the biggest culprit. Or would you disagree with that.

No, I mean Edward is certainly the most imitated thing I've done.

Yeah, here you can hear it on the weather on TV.

Oh yeah, at home, it's gonna be every Christmas I'm gonna start hearing commercials and ads and promos with kind of second generation, third generation now, Edwards. And a lot of them are gonna get sued. Because I mean a lot of it is getting too close. And I've heard it in about eight or nine film scores. And it's weird. It's very weird. I'd kind of got used to that by then, because Pee-wee and Beetlejuice and Batman were all done a lot after I did them, but Edward, for whatever reason is the one that just kept going and going and going, and almost started becoming like Christmas music in America. And it's just weird, people keep telling me 'Oh, it's the ultimate compliment.' And I go, 'Well, yeah, I guess...' It's just weird, I don't know how else to describe it.

OK. Will your film Little Demons ever see the light of say?

I don't know. I'd like to think so. Anything I do and move on I kind of leave it, but I have another script that I'm working on more actively that's not a musical and can be made less expensively. The first three projects I wrote, two of them are musicals, and they linger in turnaround in different studios, one's at Disney, one's at Fox... Then there's a ghost story I wrote for Warner Brothers many many years ago, and I actually, just because of these two movies that I did, I made it part of my deal and got it back from turnaround, so I just got the rights back to my very first script. And I might take another crack on that. It's hard to say.

I don't know whether I can afford ever to dislodge Little Demons from Disney. And they'll never make it. It was written as kind of a crazy fantasy of Jeffrey Katzenberg, and just as I was finishing the script, he quit. And I knew when that happened that it was gonna sit at Disney forever. So, who knows? Maybe I'll do something else, I don't know. I don't ever get too much time to pine over past stuff. And, you know, I would like to get the rights back at one point.

How are you going to be celebrating Halloween this year?

You know, I don't usually do that much for Halloween. I might try to put together a Halloween party, but there's not a lot of time, my wife and I were just talking about that last week, that I want to try to do something crazy. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. If I don't I'm just gonna hand out candy to kids in my neighbourhood. I have two daughters that are grown now, I did used to love putting on ghoulish make-up, there was one year I did myself as a total Quasimodo, you know, eye down on the cheek, put a huge rope around my neck, she was dressed as some kind of fairy princess and she dragged me around on the rope, she was about eight, and I would lunge at other kids and she'd have to pull me back. That was probably my favourite.

Nice. Well I'll leave you now. Thanks very much, it was great to talk to you.

You're very welcome. You know, I'm sorry, I don't like getting into ragging stuff, and I probably went off too much on the Sam Raimi thing. The fact is, it is what it is, and I don't know how else to talk about it, it's really weird, it's the most bizarre thing in my entire career I've ever encountered. And the fact that it was a sequel was beyond mystifying, because if there's anything, one would relax, you know, it was one of the most successful movies they've ever had at Sony. And usually people relax when you're on a sequel, about the music. I couldn't even get Barry Sonnenfeld to pay attention on Men In Black 2.

Why?

Because he tortured me on Men In Black 1, but when you get to Men In Black 2, if there was one thing he knew was gonna happen correctly, it was the music.

Yeah, it probably was about the only thing that happened correctly on that film.

Probably! But, the point is, once you've nailed it once, you needn't fret over it, when you have somebody who doesn't slack off, and pays attention, you know, Tim on Batman 2, Barry on Men In Black 2, it was almost like the only thing they didn't have to worry about, because we already nailed it, we had it, and that's exactly how it was with the Spider-Man score, so the whole thing was so weird.

Maybe Sam Raimi will respond because you've gone public about it, maybe he'll say something in his defence.

Well I'm sure he'll say that, you know, there were certain things I didn't seem to understand, there was miscommunication, I don't know. You know, they hired Christopher Young to come in and do a cue that I, I simply would not do a Christopher Young imitation on, it didn't need it. They hired Christopher to come in and do something like what he did for Hellraiser, which was used in the temp, and in the end they licensed Hellraiser. So I couldn't do Danny Elfman close enough, and at that moment Christopher Young couldn't do Christopher Young close enough. There is a point where it gets so loony... productions occasionally get to a point where it's like walking into a kindergarten class and the teacher has left. And it's like kids going insane. And you look around and you go, 'Where is the teacher? Somebody has to step in here.'

It's like that bit in Apocalypse Now in the trench.

Pardon me?

Before they get to the Kurtz compound when they stumble across this chaotic trench warfare and Martin Sheen goes up to this one guy and says 'Who's in charge here?' And he says 'Ain't you?'

Yeah. That's exactly... the production gets to a point where there simply is no control. It's just like a seven year old running completely amok. And when you're in a hugely successful sequel the studio is not going to step in. They're just gonna go, 'Whatever you want.' And unfortunately I think the producer, on the production, was very ill, sadly, and I think in hindsight that might have been the only thing that could have somehow fixed the problem, maybe the producer could have stepped in and said 'What the fuck is going on here? Hey, guys. Settle down. We're fine, everything's fine.' Maybe. But that didn't happen. It was complete and total insanity. I think in the end they had seven people working on redoing different parts of different cues moment to moment. If you look at the cue sheet it'll be 'One minute of Danny Elfman's score from Spider-Man 1.' Then it'll be 22 seconds of another composer. Then it'll be 14 seconds of Danny Elfman from Spider-Man 1. Then it'll be 6 seconds of another cue. And if you'd look at it you'd go, 'This is like a graphic look at extreme filmmaking psychosis.'