Danny Elfman recalls composing his Batman score in a plane bathroom

Danny Elfman has opened up about composing his film score for Batman in a plane bathroom.

The famed composer, who wrote the music for Tim Burton’s 1989 DC film, told Marc Maron on WTF with Marc Maron about his unusual circumstances for coming up with the idea for his award-winning work.

“That hit me at the worst possible time. On the way home, the thing fucking hits me,” he began.

“And it was like, what do I do? I’m on a 747. How do I do this? I am going to forget this all. I’m going to land and they’re going to play some fucking Beatles song, and I’m going to forget everything.”

Elfman explained that he went to the plane bathroom repeatedly with his recorder, with a flight attendant eventually asking if he was feeling well after he told them he was not doing anything suspicious

“Ten minutes later, I am back in the bathroom and I open the door and this time there are three flight attendants,” he went on.

“And they were probably going, ‘What the fuck is he doing so frequently? You can’t do that much blow. You can’t shoot up that often. What is he doing in there?!’”

Danny Elfman also revealed recently that he was “terribly unhappy” with the dub of his score on Batman. 

“They did it in the old-school way where you do the score and turn it into the ‘professionals’ who turn the nobs and dub it in,” he explained. “And dubbing had gotten really wonky in those years.

“We recorded [multi-channel recording on] three channels — right, centre, left,  — and basically, they took the centre channel out of the music completely.”

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