ELFMAN VS RAIMI: ROUND II

Now Daniel Robert Epstein, intrepid reporter for Suicide Girls, has gotten more from the Elf-Man about this titanic tussle.

DRE: I read how you’re not going to work on Spider-Man 3. Do you want to

comment on that?

ELFMAN: Let me put it this way, there is no amount
of money that anybody
could offer me to do Spider-Man 3. I would sooner go
back to bussing
tables,.

DRE: I look on the IMDB and I see six people
credited with the music on
Spider-Man 2. Did that contribute to your
feelings?

ELFMAN: It’s all about how the production went completely
insane at the end.
It was the worst film experience I’ve had in 20 years. It
was all pure
insanity, it was all completely needless and in the end they
went nuts
trying to imitate every single note of their temp score. If I
think
somebody’s obsessively attached to a temp score in any way I’d stay
away
from it. But this was the worst I’ve seen times ten and I’ve worked
with
some pretty anal directors. Warren Beatty and Martin Brest are not easy

people but this was taking anal retentive to a new extreme.

DRE: It’s
odd because Sam Raimi is a guy you’ve been working with for 15

years.

ELFMAN: Sam was not there.

He was there, but he was not
the Sam that I knew. As you said, I’ve known
Sam for almost 15 years. It was
my fifth movie with him and all I can say is
that the person who was there
at the end of Spider-Man 2 was not Sam. I
don’t know who it was, but it
wasn’t Sam. It was as close to living out
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as
I’ve ever experienced. There’s a lot of
micro-managers out there. Tim’s a
micro-manager musically in his own way and
there’s moments where he’ll get
real obsessive over like a certain cue. But
we work it out. Never in 20
years have I come across a situation where I
couldn’t work it out. For a
director to be a micro-manager is nothing new.
If anything I would say most
of them are. But to get to the level where you
don’t need a composer, you
just need a musical arranger to adapt note for
note as close as possible.
There’s nothing for me to do as a composer here.

DRE: Would you work with
Sam again?

ELFMAN: Not if I can help it.

It’s too bad because Sam
was at the top of my list. He was actually even
easier than Tim to work with
and we’d never had a disagreement. To see such
a profound negative change in
a human being was almost enough to make me
feel like I didn’t want to make
films anymore. It was really disheartening
and sad to see the way it ended
up. The end of Spider-Man 2 was a
self-induced hysteria. It got to a point
where I couldn’t even adapt my own
music close enough because two thirds of
their temp score was Spider-Man 1.
If I varied from one note it was like a
self-induced hysteria.

DRE: That’s bizarre.

ELFMAN: They wanted
this one cue that was basically from Hellraiser and I
was like "I can’t get
any closer and I’m not going to imitate [Hellraiser
composer] Christopher
Young. Go fucking hire Christopher Young." So they
hired Christopher Young
to do a cue like Hellraiser and he couldn’t get
close enough to Hellraiser
so they ended up licensing the cue from
Hellraiser.