cdYou may remember that last month CHUD.com brought you the world breaking scoop that Danny Elfman and Sam Raimi had a major falling out, and that Elfman wouldn’t work on Spider-Man 3 – or any other future Raimi projects. I followed up on that with Bruce Campbell, who was surprised to learn about the rift, and could only guess that when the stakes in the movie business get raised, everything gets heated.

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.

Zing, motherfucker, zing! There’s plenty more where that came from, so check out this great and lengthy interview here. Also, titties.