The Dark Fantastic Interview With Composer Craig Safan (exclusive)

I first came across Craig Safan’s music about twenty five years ago, when I was just a kid obsessed with horror movies. I was watching a rented VHS copy of A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) when something strange happened. I started noticing the score, a rarity for me at that age. To me, it sounded strange, eerie, rousing, and catchy. Going over the credits, I realized that the score was composed by someone named Craig Safan, and ever since then, whenever I find the words “composed by Craig Safan” up on the screen, I know I’m in for something special.

Safan has composed dozens of scores since the seventies, including the scores to Remo Williams (1985), The Last Starfighter (1984), Warning Sign (1985), Tag: The Assassination Game (1980), and several episodes of the 1985 versions of The Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories. His latest release is Sirens: Music inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, an album of original music.

I had a chance to talk to Craig and ask him a number of questions about his music, his background, how he broke into the industry, and about working with Spielberg, John Milius, and Danny DeVito, among others.

So, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is how you got started as a film composer.

Craig Safan

   I started playing piano when I was about six or seven, and my mother had played classical piano a bit, and wasn’t very happy with it, because she said nobody wanted to listen to classical music. So when she started to find a teacher for me, she found someone who taught what was called “popular music”, which was basically more improvisation. From the very first listen I was improvising, and then I started writing songs. I was about ten or eleven, probably, and I wrote songs all through high school. And then in college I was actually a fine arts major, because I never thought I would be a professional musician, plus my family looked down on that. When I graduated university, I was given a fellowship and went to London.

   When I was in college, they had an electronic music studio in the music department, and even though I wasn’t a music major, I’d spend night after night working on the synthesizer. I was always fascinated by contemporary music and electronic [music], since the late sixties, when I was in college. When I came back after living in London, I started getting into songwriting and performing with my brother, and trying to earn a living arranging record albums, and working part-time in my father’s store. Of course, my father was furious that I wanted to be a professional musician, because his idea was you’re a doctor or you’re a lawyer, and you play music at night, when you come home to relax. He couldn’t conceive of it as a profession that didn’t lead to destruction on every level.

   I did that for a while, songwriting and some arranging for record albums, and then one day I just got a call from a college friend who’d gotten married, and her husband was starting AFI here in L.A, and had made a low-budget horror film, and she said you’re the only person I know who does music in Los Angeles, and we need music for this film. He’d made it on Super 16mm. She said, “You know who can do it?”, and I said, “I’ll do it.” And just, I figured, why not. And I did that film, and it was never released. The director was John McTiernan, who ended up being a famous director [the director of Predator (1987) and Die Hard (1988)], but it took him years before he made Nomads (1986) after that, he really just languished. But I did this little film for him that never got released, and I loved doing it so much, it just was perfect for me. I loved that the palate could be so large, and I didn’t just have to write a “pop” hit, which I wasn’t very good at.

   And so I started really pursuing film music at that point, and what was just serendipitous was that I was working with a group of musicians in the the studio in L.A, around Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and people like that, and three of the musicians had all gone to school together, and their parents were all famous film composers. Elmer Bernstein’s son, Ernest Gold’s son, and Fred Steiner, who did a lot of Star Treks and Twilight Zones, and Perry Mason, he wrote the theme. And I started talking to these friends' parents, and they became my mentors. That’s really how I started. It was just total luck that this friend called me and asked me to do this low-budget picture, and I did it. And I knew immediately that this totally fits my talent…my talent is really writing dramatic music, it really is fun, I really enjoy it.

When I looked at your filmography, I saw that you worked with Michael Pressman, and Matthew Robbins, and Nick Castle several times.

Well, I think a lot of composers’ success, besides being good composers, is that they find one director who sort of [uses] them over and over. You can see that, especially in my generation, quite a bit. If you look at Alan Silvestri...Robert Zemeckis always used him from his first movie. It’s a big part of whether you can have success as a composer, your relationship with the director. So, yeah, I did a lot of movies with Nick Castle, I think I did my best movies with Nick Castle, or a lot of them anyway. And with Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood, I did Corvette Summer (1978) with Mark Hamill. We did Warning Sign (1985).

I love the soundtrack to Warning Sign. I was listening to it recently, and I think that many aspects of that soundtrack are way ahead of their time. It hasn’t aged that much.

That movie was not a successful movie, and I’d just forgotten about the score. And then, five years ago or something I get a call from Invada records in the UK, and they are rock and rollers, and they said this is one of their favorites, you know, heavy metal, all electronic scores. And they got the rights, and I sent them my masters, and they released a double vinyl set, plus the CD, with all new artwork. So they were really into it, and they did a great job. It was a pretty obscure score.

Looking at your filmography, what’s really interesting about your work is that you do these big, orchestral scores, and you also do these synth-based, electronic scores.

I’m a very eclectic musician, and I’ve done rock and roll scores, like The Legend of Billie Jean (1986), I’ve done The Last Starfighter, which is just a big, giant romantic orchestra. Nightmare On Elm Street 4 or Warning Sign, which [are] all electronic. So I’ve always been comfortable going from genre to genre. What’s important to me is to find what the right sound of the movie is, and that will lead me to whether it’s…is it electronic or is it more ethnic, like Remo Williams, where I used a lot of Korean musicians. So I change from score to score. I guess that’s good and bad in terms of a career, I can’t quite tell (laughs).

I love your new album Sirens. I think it’s very accessible, and I think it’s a great introduction to your work for newcomers, as it has both orchestral and electronic arrangements.

I’m really happy with that album, it’s the last album I did, and the second of just music without a film. But I think of it as music with an imaginary film, as that’s sort of how I write.

Going back a bit, I wanted to ask you about a movie you worked on in 1983, called Nightmares. I think it was initially produced as a pilot before it was released to theaters.

I have to go back one movie before that, which was a movie called Wolfen (1981). I did what is called aleatoric music, which has no synthesizers at all, it’s all orchestra. But the orchestra is making sounds, that are just weird sounds. And then the director on that [Michael Wadleigh] got fired and then they threw out my score and hired James Horner. But I had all this music that I wanted to use in a movie and it was thrown out. Then I got hired to do Nightmares, which was a pilot at Universal, which was an anthology, I guess. It had like four different segments. And I thought, well, I won’t have as big an orchestra, but I can use the same techniques and do the whole thing with just sounds from conventional instruments. And that’s what I did, and then they eventually actually released it as a film, I guess. It’s sort of a cool score. It’s interesting, because people who like film music sometimes mention it to me.

You also worked on the eighties reboot of The Twilight Zone and on the original version of Amazing Stories.

I did two Amazing Stories. “The Wedding Ring” with Danny DeVito, “The Main Attraction” with Matthew Robbins. I did eight [episodes of The Twilight Zone].

I know that version of The Twilight Zone wasn’t a huge success, but the talent behind it was amazing. Wes Craven, William Friedkin, and George R.R. Martin all worked on it. Did you get a chance to work with any of them?

In television, especially episodic television, you almost never even meet the director. The only director I remember I spent some time with is John Milius. And I did one, it was called “Opening Day”, and it’s a really cool thing, it was [in] Vietnam…you know, during the Vietnamese War. And all I remember is sitting with John, and you sit and decide where the music goes, and he finally said, “I don’t know where it goes, write music for everything and then I’ll take out what I don’t like later.” I went, “OK”. I think he used all of it. What I did on Twilight Zone, each one I did had a totally different sound. So one would be electronic, one would be an orchestra, one would be more comedic with weird sound effects. I tried to keep each episode sounding different, so they’d be interesting and not the same. Other than John Milius, I don’t think that I met with other directors. Again, I think it was the producer that I worked with. You’re brought in, you have a week to write it, and you record it on one afternoon.

So was Amazing Stories the same process? I know you again worked with Matthew Robbins, and Danny DeVito. Did you get to meet him?

Yeah. I know him very well. I did a TV series for eleven years called Cheers (1982-1993), and that was a huge, huge hit. And so we became very good friends during that time. So Danny asked me to do the music, and the story of that is that these half-hour comedies like Taxi and Friends, they have very little music. They’re really run by writers who don’t want anything to get in the way of their words. There’s very little music. Danny comes out of that tradition, and so he did this really good piece, called “The Wedding Ring”, and we’re looking at the film, and he wanted very little music. I went, “OK. I would write a lot more, but you’re the director.” So I wrote, I don’t know, fifteen minutes of music, with an orchestra, and he loved it. And the next day I get a call from my agent, that Steven Spielberg (the executive producer of the show) took a look and said, “Tell Craig to write twenty more minutes of music.” So I had to go back and write, because Spielberg, you know, he just wants wall to wall music. And that’s the story of that. It was just two different points of view. So I had to go back in, and there was another whole recording session.

I know you previously said that every project is like a job, and you have to go in and do your job. But do you have a preference, whether you like working on TV shows more or on movie projects?

It’s nice to have more money and more time. With television, people have to get the film finished, because it has air dates. They can’t give you too much trouble. This thing is in a production line and it’s going out. With a movie where they don’t really have a release date, and they’re not so sure how much money they are making on it, they can be much more difficult in terms of making you rewrite...[you’re] not sure if they’re really happy... bringing in another composer. You know, it’s a more difficult process. But when people think of my music, it’s almost ninety percent about the features. I did a lot of television and a lot of good music, but…people are much more aware of the work you do on a feature.

You said that, working on TV projects, you don’t get to interact with the director that much. But in feature films you do get to collaborate with the director a lot more. So do you like that process more, with more input from the director?

I love working with the director. I think it’s much better, I think you come up with better ideas. You’re less of an assembly line. I think it’s great. Some directors are better to work with than others, but I think the interaction is great. This may have changed, but in a lot of television that I worked on, I barely met the director, not always, sometimes, like [with] Matthew Robbins on Amazing Stories, or Danny DeVitto or John Milius. But a lot of times on television the director is long gone by the time the composer gets to work.

I wanted to ask you about one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, which is your soundtrack for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. I think it’s a very unique electronic score, and not a typical soundtrack for a horror movie from the eighties. It’s almost an experimental score, really. Can you talk a little bit about how you got that job and what went into recording that?

 I got the job because I’d done a movie [for] New Line, called Remo Williams, and the head of New Line [Robert Shaye] loved the music, and he said, “I want Craig to do the next A Nightmare on Elm Street.” And so that’s how I got the job. I decided it should be all electronic. It was not a very big-budgeted score, and I thought that would be really appropriate for the film.

   So I did it all with Synclavier…at that point we had MIDI, and you could connect a lot of different synthesizers together. So I did that, and I worked a lot with Renny Harlyn, who was the director, so we had a lot of interaction. He would come over and listen to cues, and we’d discuss them, and everything I could play back in my studio, because it was all electronic. And I guess my idea was just to come up with a lot of interesting sounds and voices, and I came up with all of the percussion myself. I recorded it, and did weird treatments of the percussion. Also, each segment of the movie, where Freddy ends up killing a different character, I tried to make it have a little different sound. So with the first one, where the kid dies in the junkyard, I had a lot of samples of metal, banging metal together that I turned into a score. The Kung Fu one, I obviously had a lot of Asian sounds. The one where she’s a cockroach, I used contrabass clarinet samples and made it sound like this weird insect. So I tried to distinguish each segment. I think I used the theme once, which I didn’t write, and I just went from there. It was just a lot of fun to put it together.

   I think it’s a pretty cool movie. If you just go with it, it’s a good movie. Renny did a really good job. The sound effects are really good. The sound effects are very loud, and sort of become part of the music, which is sort of nice. I like that for that kind of film. By that point The Nightmare on Elm Street series was…the first part was really scary, I thought. And then each one got less scary, because it became more like, campy, more like Freddy winking at us and telling one line jokes. But by part four, I didn’t think it was really scary, it was just sort of fun and macabre and weird, and I sort of went with that. In the end sequence, I did a lot of big, organ music, because it all takes place in a church. But I tried to just make it unique and have an interesting sound. It’s on vinyl, it’s on CD. It’s just constantly being re-released.

What are your favorite soundtracks by other composers?

   I like a lot of composers. I love John Barry’s music. I love Out of Africa (1985) and Somewhere in Time (1980), those two scores are gorgeous. I love Jerry Goldsmith, of course. I love Coma (1978). I was at the recording session, and it was just beautiful. The Bernard Hermann music, I love. I love North by Northwest (1959), it’s a fantastic score. Elmer [Bernstein’s] music. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is incredible. Those are my favorites. I like Thomas Newman a lot, in terms of composers who are working today. I like Randy Newman a lot, too. I like his score to The Natural (1984), it is beautiful. I like some of Christopher Young’s scores, I think they are really wonderful. He’s really a good composer. Those are the ones that when I listen to, I find really interesting. I think they are doing stuff that’s really unique.

   I think a lot of music now to me [is] boring. It all just sounds very similar to me. All the big, you know, action and cartoon movies, superhero movies, it’s just like almost the same score, and just from a composer’s standpoint it’s hard to even hear what the score is from the sound effects, they’re so intertwined now, which is what directors want, that’s what happens. But the scores don’t have any individuality that I can hear. I realize there’s a lot of talent and expertise in all these scores, but I just think it’s hard to think of movies today that I love the scores [for] as much as some of the older movies, but it maybe just my generation. I like melody, I also like sounds that are unique, so I like scores that are really unique, and those are harder and harder to do today, because there’s so much temping of the music before the composer gets involved, and the movie goes through more processes in terms of editing and re-editing, always with a temporary music track attached to it, that it makes it very hard for the composer to do anything that is inspired or really different.

So what are you working on at the moment?

Right now I’m working on a new album. It’s going to be released by Notefornote music, which does mostly film scores, but not only. It’s called L.A.-EX, and it’s about my memories of growing up in Los Angeles. So hopefully that will be out later this year.

For more about Craig Safan and his work, check out his official website here.

Text © Ahmed Khalifa. 2020.

Ahmed Khalifa is a filmmaker and novelist. He is the writer/director of the feature film Wingrave, released on Netflix, and the author of a number of novels and short stories, including the YA horror novel, Beware The Stranger, available on Amazon.