Report: Nightmare Before Christmas Haunted Evening
Page 5 of 18

Panel Discussion - Page 3
The full moon on the rear of the stage became a video screen and the taped Q&A with Tim began. He explained the process of stop motion and why he chose the medium for his film. "It’s a very exciting process to view." He noted, "Doing it, I think, is probably another story. But I think that even that is amazing because it’s very textural, it’s very tactile. People are actually there in the environment…" As he explained the progression of the story he remembered, "With Henry, with Danny and Caroline and a group of artists and storyboard artists it sort of got compiled, it sort of just got expanded. Not in the traditional way I guess, we didn’t have a script… We started working on the music before anything else."

He recalled working with Danny, "Before there was a script I’d sort of talk to him about the story and he started developing songs based on that and the core script. So he was there at the beginning, or early on in terms of helping develop it." When asked about Jack, Tim added, "He’s a character that means a lot to me, you know, I like, you know, passionate, misunderstood people and he was a character that I liked." He also discussed the contributions of Henry and the rest of the cast and crew in the making of the movie.

Asked what he thought of the movie going full circle with the Disney Company and elements being used at Disneyland, he noted, " I always liked Disneyland and the Haunted Mansion was obviously a favorite of mine… it’s an amazing place from the beginning."

Danny Elfman
Click here for a much larger version of this picture
(1024 X 768, 45,250 bytes)

Cynthia then introduced Danny’s clip, saying, "In addition to penning the amazing score, music and lyrics for the Nightmare Before Christmas, he also portrayed Barrel, the Clown with the tear-away face and sang Jack’s role with it’s distinctive passion. Ladies and gentlemen, the incomparable Danny Elfman." Danny explained his participation in the film, "Nightmare was an exception, unlike a regular film score which takes about three months, Nightmare we worked on together for about three and a half years. I did three movies in the middle of Nightmare Before Christmas." He added, "There wasn’t a script, and we decided ‘let’s just start working on songs’. And so I’d have him come in and … start telling me the story."

Danny Elfman
Click here for a much larger version of this picture
(1024 X 768, 49,596 bytes)

Danny continued "We just went song by song and tried to tell as much of the story in the song as possible until we had covered from beginning to the end, and, it was really fun, we went into the studio together and he acted as the producer and I acted as the entire ensemble, because I sang all the parts to every song, with the exception of Sally’s song… So we had demos now of every song, all ten songs… and that allowed the animators to begin working." When he was asked how he came to sing Jack’s part, Danny remembered, "It wasn’t really decided, but I was really writing Jack’s character around myself, and there was a certain point where I just knew that no one else could do that part because I was writing Jack’s songs almost through my own perspective, my own relationship with Jack, I started becoming Jack."

Danny also had a take on the relationship between the Disney Company and Nightmare. "It makes perfect sense, I mean Nightmare Before Christmas was such an anomaly for Disney. So much a different thing than they’d done, that I think that even they were shocked when they saw it, in terms of ‘what is this?’ and ‘what do we do with it?’ And, happily it’s really developed a solid following… I think it made sense at a certain point that Disney would go ’Hey, we have this Haunted Mansion, there’s definitely an aesthetic here where one thing kind of overlaps the other’ and finally here’s a place where we can use these kind of fun, not really scary characters, but, they’re all dead’"