Century City AMC was buzzing with Send Help fans Monday night. We partnered up with 20th Century Studios to give fans an advance screening of Sam Raimi’s return to horror (which you’ll also find on the subscriber cover of FANGORIA #30). But that’s not all, composer Danny Elfman joined us in person for a very special post-screening Q&A, moderated by yours truly.
The first 100 guests received a copy of our subscriber-exclusive Send Help cover along with some other Fango goodies. You all turned up and absolutely packed the house! Writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift also joined us for some all out Raimi fun on the big screen. The audience squirmed and shrieked along with the quintessentially Raimi goopy good time, and the theater was electric with energy.
During our post-screening Q&A with legendary composer Danny Elfman, we traversed topics from collaborating with Sam Raimi to dream jobs, bucket lists, and creating for the “weirdos.”
In true Sam Raimi fashion, Send Help is something of a genre mashup with hefty doses of comedy infused into the horror. But there are also elements of action, adventure, and yes… even romance in the mix. Which means Elfman was writing music cues for a massive genre mashup, all while keeping it cohesive within the world of Send Help. “I knew going in that it was switching gears a lot. That’s something that Sam loves to do,” Elfman said. “My instincts tell me to find something very simple that can run through everything. My first thought was to find a really innocent theme for Linda and use a female voice. I was kind of inspired by Rosemary’s Baby. But then let that run throughout the score so that by the time we’re getting into the last act, that same theme has kind of a twisted edge to it.”
Elfman and Raimi have collaborated many times over the years, on everything from Darkman to Spider-Man and Elfman’s “March of the Dead” theme in Army of Darkness.
“Every director is different. Some directors, Tim [Burton], for example, doesn’t really like to talk about the movies a lot. He likes to put it out there, and he’ll just tell me a little bit about how he feels about certain scenes. The other extreme would be like Sam Raimi.”
Elfman describes working with Raimi as, “He likes to really kind of describe in his mind what the characters are thinking and what they’re doing. There’s a lot of goofing around when I’m working with Sam, inevitably.”
After working with most of our living legendary directors, there are still a few Elfman would love to team up with. “But I won’t tell you who they are because directors find composers, and they hit it off. Often, they form relationships, and as much as I want to kill them, I don’t. And I have to respect that. Out of respect, I’m not gonna say ‘that’s the director, I really want this guy’s job!’”
In the many incarnations of Danny Elfman, he’s done everything from being a rock star to a film composer to creating classical music compositions, but he’s never been one to slow down. So what else is on the bucket list? “I’ve got so many things. Unfortunately, even though I feel like a vampire and I live like a vampire, I’m not. Which means I don’t get one little special thing called ‘eternity’ to get everything on my bucket list, which I kind of almost need to do. But there are just so many things.”
Elfman elaborated on what some of those things entail, including an upcoming concerto for the Montreal symphony he’s currently working on and a new solo album he’s finishing now, as well as “A couple of things that I can’t even mention because they’re top secret.”
To refer to the “duality” of Elfman would be inaccurate, as there are far more than two dueling counterparts within. But if we were to break it down into Elfman the rock star and Elfman the classical music composer, this is damn near the best illustration of an artist who cannot be defined by any singular thing: “I flew to Vienna, and I came out on stage to take a bow for a cello concerto for a wonderful French cellist named Gautier Capuçon. Ten days later, I was walking onto a stage at Coachella with an electric guitar, and I said ‘I like this.’ One respectable, the other anything but respectable, and neither one of them are friends. They don’t like each other, but I get to feed both of them and keep them from killing themselves, which, of course, would kill me.”
In a room full of horror fans who often tend to identify with being weirdos and outsiders, Elfman proudly proclaimed that everything he does across his entire body of work has “Always been for the weirdos and the outsiders.” Which naturally sent the crowd of wonderful weirdos into a frenzy.
On a personal note: As a young movie lover, weirdo, and misfit, there came a certain point where I realized making movies was a job. And the soundscape of so many of my favorite films was created by one guy. Danny Elfman. Learning that didn’t take away from the illusion; in fact, it had the opposite effect.
It made me realize that magic was real, so long as we had artists like Danny Elfman in the world creating real-life magic. I know I’m not alone in this. Elfman is a singular talent with a career spanning so many disciplines that it’s something of an anomaly at this point. That is inspiring as hell, and that inspiration spawns more magic makers unleashing their creations into the world. And we’re all the better for it. As humans, we are at our best when we are creating art.
From your resident misfit — thanks for a night to remember. Send Help is in theaters January 30.
