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"You have to nail the right tone because sometimes when you just see his films cold, you're not quite sure. It's the same in - I'm trying to think of other directors with a similar sense - David Lynch's films, Tim's films, some of Cronenberg's stuff."
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"It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right."

"Even though you are on the right track - you will get run over if you just sit there."

"Well, I'm still looking for Maurice Ashley. My essential qualities. I think that more than anything, I try to do the right thing, I think about doing the right thing."

"I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia."

"We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right."

"No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right."
Explore more quotes by Danny Elfman

"So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses."

"I think that there's a lot more freedom in the low budget, the independent films where, unfortunately, you don't have the money, necessarily, to get the orchestras in there to play a lot of stuff. But, you have a lot more freedom, very often."

"Doing Tim's film is always going to be the most pleasure. Let me just put it that way. So, without drawing favorites one way or the other, getting back with him and doing Mars Attacks! was certainly a special treat."

"In some types of music I'm working out all the chords one bar at a time - the whole structure, because it's about that. And there are other pieces which are really about - okay, the melody is going to start here and play through to here."

"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."

"You're allowed to rip-off another score so close that it's ridiculous. In my opinion it's ridiculous, how closely one can just rip-off a score that happened a year or two earlier."

"That still has to be there. And so, it's kind of an interesting question you brought up. Because, on the one hand, yeah, it'd be lovely. I certainly don't see that happening. In fact, I see the opposite happening."

"So I've learned in the past, if a company approaches me and they want something like this, or something like that that I've done and I turn them down, they're going to do it anyhow."

"I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging."
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