Background and career
Daniel Robert Elfman (born May 29, 1953) is an American film composer, singer, songwriter, and musician. He came to prominence as the lead vocalist and primary songwriter for the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s. Since scoring his first studio film in 1985, Elfman has garnered international recognition for composing over 100 feature film scores as well as compositions for television, stage productions, and the concert hall. Elfman has frequently worked with directors Tim Burton, Sam Raimi, and Gus Van Sant, contributing music to nearly 20 Burton projects, including Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Alice in Wonderland, as well as scoring Raimi's Darkman, A Simple Plan, Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Van Sant's Academy Award-winning films Good Will Hunting and Milk. He wrote music for all of the Men in Black and Fifty Shades of Grey franchise films, the songs and score for Henry Selick's animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, the score for the animated film Meet the Robinsons, and the themes for the popular television series Desperate Housewives and The Simpsons. Among his honors are four Oscar nominations, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy, seven Saturn Awards for Best Music, the 2002 Richard Kirk Award, the 2015 Disney Legend Award, the Max Steiner Film Music Achievement Award in 2017, and the Society of Composers & Lyricists Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.
Daniel Robert Elfman was born on May 29, 1953 in Los Angeles, California to a Jewish family of Russian-Jewish descent. He is a son of Blossom Elfman (née Bernstein), a novelist, and Milton Elfman, a teacher. He is the brother of actor, musician, and journalist Richard Elfman. Elfman was raised in an affluent, racially-mixed community in Baldwin Hills, California, where he spent much of his time at the local movie theater discovering classic sci-fi, fantasy and horror films and first noticed the music of such film composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman. Elfman has admitted to fabricating stories about his past out of boredom, including a false birthplace of Amarillo, Texas, and parents who served in the United States Air Force. In his early school days, Elfman exhibited an aptitude for science with almost no interest in music, and was even rejected from elementary school orchestra "for having no propensity for music." This would change when he switched high schools in the late 1960s and fell in with a musical crowd, who introduced him to early jazz and the work of Stravinsky and his 20th-century contemporaries. Elfman attended University High School in Los Angeles before dropping out. Elfman left school to follow his brother Richard to France, where he performed violin with Jérôme Savary's Le Grand Magic Circus, an avant-garde musical theater group. He then embarked on a ten-month, self-guided tour through Africa, busking and collecting a range of West African percussion instruments until a series of illnesses forced him to return home. At this time, Richard was forming a new musical theater group in Los Angeles.
After returning to Los Angeles from Africa in the early 1970s, Elfman was asked by his brother Richard to serve as musical director of his street theatre performance art troupe The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Elfman was tasked with adapting and arranging 1920s and 1930s jazz and big band music by artists such as Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker for the ensemble, which consisted of up to 15 performers playing upwards of 30 instruments. He also composed original pieces and helped build instruments unique for the group, including an aluminum gamelan, the 'Schlitz celeste' made from tuned beer cans, and a "junkyard orchestra" built from car parts and trash cans. The Mystic Knights performed on the street and in theaters, and later in nightclubs throughout Los Angeles until Richard left in 1976 to pursue filmmaking. As a send-off to the group's original concept, Richard produced the film Forbidden Zone based on the Mystic Knights' stage performances. Elfman composed the songs and his first score for the film, and appeared as the character Satan, who performs a reworked version of Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher." Before the release of Forbidden Zone, Elfman took over the Mystic Knights as lead singer-songwriter in 1976. In 1979, he pared the group down to eight players to record and tour as a ska-influenced new wave band. That summer, the group's name would change to Oingo Boingo. Their biggest success among eight studio albums penned by Elfman was 1985's Dead Man's Party, featuring the hit song "Weird Science" from the movie of the same name. The band also appeared performing their single "Dead Man's Party" in the 1986 movie Back to School, for which Elfman also composed the score. Elfman shifted the band to a more guitar-oriented rock sound in the late 1980s, which continued through their last album Boingo in 1994. Citing permanent hearing damage from performing live and conflicts with his film-scoring career, Elfman retired Oingo Boingo in 1995 with a series of five sold-out final concerts at the Universal Amphitheatre ending on Halloween night. On October 31, 2015, Elfman and Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek performed the song "Dead Man's Party" with an orchestra as an encore to a live-to-film concert of The Nightmare Before Christmas score at the Hollywood Bowl. Elfman told the audience the performance was "20 years to the day" of Oingo Boingo's retirement.
As fans of Oingo Boingo, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985. Elfman was initially apprehensive because of his lack of formal training and having never scored a studio feature, but after Burton accepted his initial demo of the title music, and with orchestration assistance from Oingo Boingo guitarist and arranger Steve Bartek, Elfman completed the score to great effect, paying homage to influential film composers Nino Rota and Bernard Herrmann. Elfman described the first time he heard his music played by a full orchestra as one of the most thrilling experiences of his life. Following Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Elfman scored a string of comedies in the late 1980s, including Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield, Burton's Beetlejuice and the Bill Murray film Scrooged. Non-comedy work included the all-synth score to Emilio Estevez's crime drama Wisdom and the big band, blues-infused music for Martin Brest's buddy cop action film Midnight Run. In 1989, Elfman's influential, Grammy-winning score for Burton's Batman marked a major stylistic shift to dark, densely orchestrated music in the romantic idiom. This continued in his scores for Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, Sam Raimi's Darkman and Clive Barker's Nightbreed, all released in 1990. With Batman, Elfman firmly established a career-spanning relationship with Burton, scoring all but three of the director's major studio releases. Highlights include Edward Scissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 1993, Elfman wrote the score and ten songs for the Burton-produced stop motion animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick, and also provided the singing voice for main character Jack Skellington, as well as the voices for secondary characters Barrel, the Clown with the Tear-Away Face and others. In 2005, he wrote the score and songs for Burton's Corpse Bride and provided the voice of the character of Bonejangles, and provided the score, songs and Oompa-Loompa vocals for Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that same year. In addition to frequent collaborations with Burton, Raimi and Gus Van Sant, Elfman has worked with directors such as Brian De Palma, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Errol Morris, Ang Lee, Richard Donner, Guillermo del Toro, David O. Russell, Taylor Hackford, Jon Amiel, Joe Johnston, and Barry Sonnenfeld. His scores for Sonnenfeld's Men in Black, Van Sant's Good Will Hunting and Milk, and Burton's Big Fish all received Academy Award nominations. Since the mid-1990s, Elfman expanded his craft to a range of genres, including thrillers (Dolores Claiborne, A Simple Plan, The Kingdom, The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window), dramas (Sommersby, A Civil Action, Hitchcock), indies (Freeway, Silver Linings Playbook, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, White Noise), family (Flubber, Charlotte's Web, Frankenweenie, Goosebumps, Dolittle), documentary (Standard Operating Procedure, The Unknown Known), and horror (Red Dragon, The Wolfman), as well as entries in his well-established areas of horror comedy (The Frighteners, Mars Attacks!, Dark Shadows) and comic book-inspired action films (Hulk, Wanted, Hellboy II: The Golden Army). Among his franchise work, Elfman composed the scores for four Men in Black films (1997–2019) and three Fifty Shades films (2015–2018). In 1996, he scored the first film in the Mission: Impossible series, adapting themes for the original television series by Lalo Schifrin as well as composing his own. Elfman scored Raimi's Spider-Man in 2002 and Spider-Man 2 in 2004, themes and selections from which were used for Raimi's Spider-Man 3, scored by Christopher Young. Elfman's Spider-Man theme was incorporated into the MCU film Spider-Man: No Way Home composed by Michael Giacchino. In 2007, he scored the Disney animated film Meet the Robinsons, taking inspiration from other cartoon composers like Carl Stalling (who was responsible for most of the music for the original Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons). Elfman entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe by providing additional music in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, receiving composer credit with Brian Tyler. Elfman also scored MCU's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, utilizing Giacchino's theme to the original Doctor Strange film, as well as themes from WandaVision and X-Men: The Animated Series, and music from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Bach's Toccata and Fugue. For several high-profile sequel and reboot projects in the 2010s, Elfman incorporated established musical themes with his own original thematic material, including the DC Extended Universe's Justice League, The Grinch Dumbo and Men in Black International. Elfman was featured in the 2016 documentary Score, in which he appeared among over 50 film composers to discuss the craft of movie music and influential figures in the business. In 2025, he composed the music for Luc Besson's big-budget French film Dracula.
Elfman's first piece of original concert music, Serenada Schizophrana, was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, who premiered the piece on February 23, 2005, at Carnegie Hall. Subsequent concert works include his first Violin Concerto "Eleven Eleven", co-commissioned by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Live at Stanford University, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, which premiered at Smetana Hall in Prague on June 21, 2017, with Sandy Cameron on violin and John Mauceri conducting the Czech National Symphony Orchestra; the Piano Quartet, co-commissioned by the Lied Center for Performing Arts, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet, which premiered February 6, 2018, in Lincoln, Nebraska; and the Percussion Quartet, commissioned by Third Coast Percussion and premiered at the Philip Glass Days And Nights Festival in Big Sur on October 10, 2019. 2022 saw the first performances of three concert works. Elfman's Cello Concerto for Gautier Capuçon was premiered by the Vienna Symphony on March 18, with subsequent performances by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in May and the San Francisco Symphony US premiere in November. Elfman's Percussion Concerto for Colin Currie premiered on March 25 at London's Royal Festival Hall with London Philharmonic Orchestra, and was later performed at Soka University of America in California, with Pacific Symphony. His Wunderkammer, a commission from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, toured the UK in summer 2022, culminating in a performance in London's Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms, with national radio and TV broadcasts. Elfman's Suite for Chamber Orchestra was premiered on May 4, 2023, by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at St Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. The Suite was co-commissioned by the Library of Congress, the Royalty Pool of Andre Kostelanetz, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Subsequent performances of the Suite include the New York premiere by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in July 2023 at 92NY's inaugural MidSummer Music Fest, the West Coast premiere by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in December 2023 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California, and a performance by the Reno Chamber Orchestra in October 2024.
In 2008, Elfman accepted his first commission for the stage, composing the music for Twyla Tharp's Rabbit and Rogue ballet, co-commissioned by American Ballet Theatre and Orange County Performing Arts Center and premiering on June 3, 2008, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center. Other works for stage include the music for Cirque Du Soleil's Iris in 2011, and incidental music for the Broadway production of Taylor Mac's Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus in 2019.
