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"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."
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"How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art."

"Film gives us a second chance at a first impression."

"Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film."

"Making your first feature film is actually impossible."

"But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie."
Explore more quotes by Danny Elfman

"Most often the music does end up in the movie, and sometimes there's a point where I wish that it wasn't, just because I think the score would be more effective if there was less of it. But, again, that's not my call."

"Or certainly I would need time - which I would love to have but there almost never is on a film - to just spend a week with a roomful of guys laying down these patterns."

"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."

"I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium."

"The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you're going to go water later in the score. And so, having that removed just made it so much more difficult."

"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 can't get that live and I don't have the time to take the tape, after I've finished recording it, into a little studio somewhere else where I can get a different kind of percussion sound."

"It's just hard. I wish the studios felt there was more value in these themes and these pieces of material - that they're worth protecting more. Because then it just wouldn't happen. If the studios cared, the stuff would be stopped in a second."
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