Batman is one, if not the most important comic book film of all time! Along with its importance, the film is one of my favorite films of all time. One of the talking points of the film is Danny Elfman’s brilliant score. The best in his career in my opinion, the score sets the tone for the rest of the film and his opening theme may go down as the essential superhero theme in film history. With that being said, the Academy Award-nominated composer was a recent guest on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast where he talked about his illustrious career. While discussing his process with Maron, Elfman shared that creating the score to Tim Burton’s Batman was particularly awkward. Elfman explained that he had flown out to London to visit the set and see a bit of the film for inspiration. The flight back to Los Angeles is when things got wild. Elfman stated,
“That hit me at the worst possible time,” Elfman began. “On the way home, the thing fucking hits me. And it was like, what do I do? I’m on a 747. How do I do this? I am going to forget this all. I’m going to land and they’re going to play some fucking Beatles song, and I’m going to forget everything.”
“I start running in the bathroom [and hum phrases] and I go back to my seat, and I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Ten minutes later, back in the bathroom,” Elfman said. “And then back to my seat and then back to the bathroom, because I couldn’t do this with the guy sitting next to me.”
At one point, Elfman opened the door and was greeted by a flight attendant who wanted to know if he was OK and did not seem to believe it when Elfman reassured he was not up to anything. “Ten minutes later, I am back in the bathroom, And I open the door and this time there are three flight attendants,” he said. “And they were probably going, ‘What the fuck he is doing so frequently? You can’t do that much blow. You can’t shoot up that often. What is he doing in there?!’ And I piece by piece was working out the Batman score in my head.”
Well, that’s quite the story. It’s ironic that despite its impact on the film,
Elfman revealed that he was not pleased with how his Batman score was used in the film. Elfman said he was “reasonably happy” with the mix of the score, his 10th, but disappointed with the dub, or how the music was transferred into the film.
“They did it in the old-school way where you do the score and turn it into the ‘professionals’ who turn the nobs and dub it in,” he said then. “And dubbing had gotten really wonky in those years. We recorded [multi-channel recording on] three channels — right, center, left, — and basically, they took the center channel out of the music completely.”
