Renowned composer Danny Elfman has revealed he was “terribly unhappy” with how the score of Tim Burton’s 1989 movie Batman turned out.
Elfman, who has also worked on the likes of The Simpsons, Men in Black and Good Will Hunting, explained he was left unsatisfied by the dub of his score.
Speaking on the Premier Guitar podcast (via NME), he said the recording “didn’t have any care put into it.”
“I was terribly unhappy with the dub in Batman… 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. And dubbing had gotten really wonky in those years,” he began.
“We recorded [multi-channel recording on] three channels — right, centre, left, — and basically, they took the centre channel out of the music completely.”
He continued: “It didn’t have any care put into it. I’ve had many scores play in big action scenes that really propelled the scene. And at the end of the [Batman] dub, I realised I could have had the orchestra play anything.”
“I could have scored the film with some percussion, a harmonica and a banjo because all you hear are some percussion hits in big moments, but you can’t really hear what the orchestra is doing.”
Elfman continued on to express his disappointment in “so-called professionals” who used his score “in a very non-committal way”, in which they “plunk it off to the side and just get the dialogue.”
Apart from spilling the tea on Batman, Danny Elfman has kept busy by working on his first solo music in 36 years.
In an interview with NME back in October, Elfman described his track ‘Happy’ as “an absurd anti-pop song, designed to begin as a very simple pop tune that degrades into something more subversive.”
For more on this topic, head over to the Film & TV Observer.
Check out a snippet of Danny Elfman on the Premier Guitar podcast:
