Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted prior to the start of the WGA Strike on May 2.
In his latest outing with filmmaker Tim Burton on Netflix’s hit series Wednesday, composer Danny Elfman looked to pen music that would feel “familiar” to fans of The Addams Family, which would at the same time bear “its own identity.” The score he envisioned was one channeling Baroque period composer Johann Sebastian Bach, which also had a bit of “a contemporary edge.”
Remarkably, while the Emmy and Grammy-winning musical icon has written themes for television series in the past — the theme to The Simpsons being perhaps the most famous — he’d never before taken on a full series as composer. So when it came time to commence work on Wednesday, which he and co-creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar felt should be “very thoroughly scored,” he knew he had a substantial, “eye-opening, and really fun” challenge on his hands.
“I have so much respect for…just the idea of episodic scoring, composers who do that. I now bow down to them because it’s so hard,” Elfman tells Gough and Millar in the latest edition of Deadline’s The Process. “The first episode with Tim was very much like doing a movie like I’ve done almost 20 times already, because we had a long time. He brought me in early, and it felt like we had six weeks for the first episode. And then of course, it’s like 10 days. 10 days, 10 days, after that. It’s like, ‘Whoa!‘”
Based on characters created by Charles Addams, Wednesday follows Wednesday Addams (Ortega), a teenager gifted with psychic abilities who looks to solve a mystery and stop a killing spree at her new school, Nevermore Academy.
One might assume that a sense of shorthand with Burton would make Elfman’s intro to TV on the project easier, given his enduring collaboration with the director, which goes all the way back to Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in 1985. But Elfman makes it clear that this was not actually the case. “It’s funny how people will say to me, ‘Oh my God, things must be so simple. You and Tim must have this shorthand, just know each other.’ And I go, ‘Absolutely not,’” he shares. “Tim is almost as much of a mystery to me now as he was 38 years ago.”
Elfman notes that he and Burton bonded quickly given that they were both “monster kids” who grew up with a lot of the same interests and passions. “But I still never know what’s really going on in his head. So, whenever I play music for him the first time, I’m still biting my nails,” he shares. “Because…when he’s sitting in the room with me…he tends to have two reactions. One is, he’s kind of pulling his hair and it’s like, ‘That’s not good.’ And the other is, he’s listening and he’s nodding his head a little bit, a tiny little nod. And it’s like, ‘Yes, that’s good! We like that.’”
Interestingly, says Elfman, Burton has never been one to talk much about music when going about making his films. “He’ll tell me his feelings, he’ll tell me how he feels about a character, he feels about a tone, but it’s my job to come up with music that he can respond to. Because otherwise, it’s just abstract,” says the composer. “What I do is, I’ll always come up with lots of ideas and see what he responds to, because it’s very often not what I expect.”
Says Elfman in closing, “I’ve really learned never to anticipate Tim. Of course, I love working with him, and he’s given me such rich landscapes to work in, and it’s just wonderful. And this was no exception.”
In conversation with Gough and Millar on The Process, Elfman further discusses how he views and approaches the art of scoring film and television; finding the harpsichord and cello to be at the heart of what he wanted to do with Wednesday; creating the show’s main theme, and realizing it would be a hit when he began to get feedback on the show from the children of his friends; what he loved about the show’s casting, and his conviction that any actor other than Ortega would’ve made for a lesser Wednesday; and his penchant for being “a fly on the wall” on Burton’s sets.
Elfman also gets into his perception of himself as both an “eternal pessimist” and a secret “optimist”; the pain of The Nightmare Before Christmas‘s initial failure to connect with audiences and the joy of seeing it embraced in later years; putting on a “wild” performance at Coachella 2022, which he worried at the planning stages was akin to designing his own “train wreck”; and more.
Gough and Millar speak to their proclivity for “propulsion” in both the stories they take on and their scores; their personal relationship to The Addams Family before making the series, and their drive to stay true to Addams’ original vision; Gough’s connection to classic films Elfman has scored, and how they’ve factored into memorable moments in his life; the learning curve of plotting their first murder mystery; the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine as factors with which the production had to contend; what they like about Zoom casting; testing Wednesday‘s first episode with family and friends; and the show’s unexpected, multigenerational appeal, among other topics.
Wednesday proved a breakout phenomenon upon its release last fall, becoming the second most-watched English-language series in Netflix’s history following its first three weeks on the platform and landing two Golden Globe nominations including Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy, also being picked up for a second season.
View the full conversation between the show’s co-creators and co-showrunners and their composer above.
