A Quote by Danny Elfman

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium. — © Danny Elfman
I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
Mentalist is the technical term for what I do and it covers everything from psychic medium through Uri Geller, through to magicians doing tricks with a mental theme.
It's like being possessed: like a psychic or a medium. I felt like a hollow temple filled with many spirits, each one passing through me, each inhabiting me for a little time and then leaving to be replaced by another.
Before writing a single note of music, and even before the spotting session, I find it best to sit down with the director and just listen to him or her talk about the film - what they're trying to say, what they want the audience to understand or believe, and a thousand other similar questions. The director has most likely been living with the film for years before a composer is attached, and so the director's inclinations, desires, and understanding of the film are paramount.
I'm not very good at sounding like other people. When you're going through your 20's and trying to get a break and that kind of thing, and you're trying to do something that sounds like film music, your idea of what it would be, it never really worked out for me and it's only really when I learned to trust the fact that I could only really sound like me.
My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects.
The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for.
I think with every character I get, there's an approach that's appropriate. I feel like my own job is to interpret what there is in the film and show that through me, sort of really channel myself through the role. If I feel I need to get into it to the point where I don't leave it, then I will.
I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.
I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different
I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths of and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism....Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.
I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
This medium that we're working in - film and television - for an audience, it's like you live through these characters because it's things you can't do in real life. Places you're not prepared to go in real life as a decent human being, anyway. Because if you're a conscientious person, so you live kind of vicariously through these people.
They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.
Well, there's two things I have criteria for doing a film: The script, which is the story, and the filmmaker, and it's a filmmaker's medium. I like really strong directors, and so when I do a film, I'm out there to serve the director, really, which is in turn to serve the script, to serve the director cause he's the one making the film. I relied on Todd Haynes for that.
The film is a direct mirror of the director. If your director doesn't know how to dress, there will be an aesthetic of the film that won't come through - whether it's in the costumes if he doesn't know exactly what he wants or the look of the film.
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