Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Here's a word that you're going to face,

and you're not going to like this word.

It's the nastiest word in the business--

failure.

You are going to fail.

You are going to fail at something small,

or you're going to fail at something large.

There's very few composers-- well, honest composers--

that I've talked with that haven't had failures.

Things that they saw as incredible roadblocks

were suddenly put in the way.

Or failure that left them-- their ego depleted to the point

where they had a hard time getting going again.

That's part of the territory.

You can be that amazing lucky one

that has a life that is without failure.

And to you, I wish you bon voyage and wonderful journeys.

But to the other 90% of you who might be watching this,

failure is going to be part of your existence.

How do you deal with that?

It's hard.

On the small levels, there is the moment-to-moment failure

of getting turned down for a job.

Starts there.

Let it go, let it go.

And, like, refocus yourself and get back going.

There's no other way to do it.

Now, the next level.

You're working as a composer.

Things are going okay.

But your scores are getting rejected.

You have to find a way to be okay with it.

You're going to be--

if you're like me, you get really bitter

and maybe feel angry.

But you've got to find something to do.

I mean, for me, it was boxing.

I got into boxing very young.

And what the boxing does, like any form of martial arts,

or anything physical you could find

is, I work out a lot of fucking energy of how hard I'd

love to hit that bastard who just gave me so much

shit on the last score.

And hit, and hit, and hit, and hit

until I start to feel a little bit better.

So there are ways to deal with rejection,

and one great way is just any physical discipline.

And if it's a physical discipline that

involves some form of contact--

(CHUCKLES)-- better yet.

But the point is, is there is another level.

Where, it's just, there's no way to deal with rejection

and resistance to things that you can't do anything

more than you're doing.

You just have to be patient and wait.

And waiting is hard, but it's just killing you.

But you just have to work through that.

And then there's the big bomb.

You actually do a whole score, or you're halfway

through a score, and you're fired.

Very few of us haven't had that happen.

And this is where I'm talking about the rejection that

lays you out.

It just lays you out, and you have

to take time and get up from it, because it's an absolute ego

destroyer.

And we all know that artists get consumed

with their own frustration and their own anger

and become self-destructive, and go down

a spiral to just being screwed.

We've all heard about it, we've read about it,

and we've seen it.

It's like somebody just gets into a negative vortex

and they can't climb out of it.

And you don't let that happen.

And the way you don't let that happen

is to somehow take the pain of what you're feeling.

Whether it be for a small thing or a big thing,

there's a shitload of pain that you're

going to learn to live with.

And you learn to put it into perspective.

Somehow put it into perspective.

Put it into a longer perspective.

I'll give you an example.

Tim Burton and I were working too closely

on too many projects together after "Batman"

went into "Nightmare Before Christmas," which

was a two year project, which overlapped "Batman Returns,"

and then went into--

was going into "Ed Wood."

And for our two personalities, perhaps, we

were banging into each other too much.

And I was carrying a lot of frustration.

And "Nightmare Before Christmas," you know,

started out fun, but in the end, it was a big slog.

It was a difficult project.

It was, you know, 2--

2 and 1/2 years.

And I felt-- something happened--

it doesn't really matter what it is, but I felt dissed.

I felt totally dissed.

I was livid.

I said, how can I be treated like this after all this time?

And I left the movie.

I left "Ed Wood."

And I sat there for two years, going, [SIGH]

why did I do that?

Um, I feel shitty about the fact that I had this meltdown.

I had a-- and went nuclear.

I had a meltdown.

I couldn't control it.

I was so angry about this thing that happened.

And fortunately for me, two years later,

Tim it started "Mars Attacks," and I wasn't on the film.

Somebody else was, and the producer told me

they were sitting around in the hotel room

and "Batman Returns" came on and they were watching it,

and Tim said, Danny should be scoring this movie.

And the producer said, yeah.

And I got a call back.

And we used to joke that we'd end up

like Hitchcock and Herrmann, because Hitchcock and Herrmann

famously had this battle after which they never spoke again,

ever.

And no contact for the rest of their lives.

This meltdown they had over torn curtain.

And, um, we would joke about that,

and then it kind of happened.

But fortunately, for us, I got a call saying,

would you ever consider talking with Tim again?

And I'd been hurting because I felt like I lost a brother.

And, um, it was like family.

You know, you get fights with your family

and it hurts, but there's still your blood,

it's still your family.

And it hurt.

The fight hurt, but the results of that fight hurt more.

And so I learned something in those years

after that happened.

And it's like, when I start feeling really emotional

about something-- and by the way,

we met in a Howard Johnson's, a coffee shop out in Kansas.

And we just shook hands, patted each other's backs.

And he says, could we just start again?

Do we even need to talk about that?

I said, no.

Okay.

And we just started another 15 years of working together.

So that was lucky.

We missed each other, and we got back together.

And at that point, I let my ego go completely.

I realized that my ego fucked me.

It got the best of me.

I couldn't let it go.

And the reason I couldn't let it go--

and this happens to every artist--

is it was too close.

It was this close.

And when you're this close to any scene or feeling,

you can't really see what's going on.

It's like a photograph, and you're looking to close.

You're seeing one part of the photograph,

and you're obsessing on that thing.

But that's not the whole picture.

And when I start to feel I'm getting

worked up-- because it's just my nature.

I get worked up, I get excited, I get emotional,

I get wrapped up into the moment, I'm impulsive.

Now, that same impulsiveness, I've

applied to a 35-year career.

And it's that impulsiveness that's

helped me be spontaneous and get through moment after a moment.

But that impulsiveness, emotionally, is a bad thing.

And I tried to do a visual lesson.

When I'm feeling really angry about something that happened,

I feel like I was disrespected-- and that's always the thing

that--

that puts me over the line.

Not that they didn't like me, or I was rejected,

it's like, I felt I was disrespected in a way

that I shouldn't have been.

And that puts me over, that's my line.

It's something in my childhood?

Who knows, Dr. Freud.

I just have no idea, but that's my trigger.

And so what I learned is try to take whatever

it is that just happened--

now, put it through a telescope and dial it back,

back, back, back.

Take that picture and try to get back

to seeing the whole frame at a distance.

Maybe pull way back and look at that picture

in a stack of 50 other photos.

And now, I'm getting a bigger perspective on the whole thing.

And then go, is that worth it?

Is it worth making that point?

Was it worth that meltdown now that you're

looking at a wider perspective?

Well, the clear answer was no.

It was just a moment.

I should've just gone home and hit a punching bag,

and did what I had to do, and cry to my wife,

or whatever I needed to do at that particular moment.

And then come back with feeling wounded and raw the next day.

And maybe it would have been a little weird for a few days.

And then eventually, just got back to, all right,

I worked through it.

That was what I should have done,

but that's not what I did.

And so my advice to you, is when you get to this big moment

and you feel nuclear is about to happen--

Chernobyl-- we're close to going Chernobyl.

It's like you pull back, and you pull back, and you pull back.

Now, it may be that whatever happened to you,

it still looks big enough that it's worth--

worth walking from.

It's worth saying, no.

You know, because there also is three words

that occasionally you're confronted

with on a film-- on a project.

Life's too short.

And sometimes, it's just, life's too short for this shit.

You know what?

I got to live the rest of my life,

and this just ain't worth it.

And sometimes you just go, you know what?

You go your way and I'll go mine, we'll try to be friends.

But clearly, we're not doing this together,

because we're just-- it's just not working out.

And you may reach that point.

But you may reach, very likely, the point that I did,

where I go, no, that actually-- from this distance,

it just looks like a moment.

It looks like a bad moment.

There may have been a miscommunication.

There may have been-- he may have been having a bad day.

There's all kinds of reasons why whatever happened, happened.

And the better thing to do would have been to,

like, come back in, breathe deep, and work through it

and move on.

So think about those moments.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You know, when it comes to hindsight versus foresight.

Or really, the question is, what do you

do about making bad decisions?

Which means bad foresight, because I

think everybody can say they've got perfect hindsight.

I mean, really?

Who doesn't see their mistakes behind them?

That long trail of debris that they're constantly got

attached to their leg, where they end up

being like one of, like, "just married" cars

that are trailing cans behind it, making all this noise.

Because that's how I feel much of the time,

I'm just trailing behind a long trail of debris of,

like, why did you do that?

But, um, how do you deal with it?

Is, well, if you have great foresight

and you make the right decisions,

you're not going to deal with it,

other than the fact that you kept

making the right decisions.

And good for you.

But for if you make bad decisions, like--

and I can't be specific about projects only

to say that things have come across my path,

and I said, ah, that'll never turn into anything.

I-- I just-- I don't know, that just looks like it's going

to be--

and it turned into something huge.

And I go, wow.

Did I miss call that?

I didn't see that director as having pulling that off,

based on their prior work.

And, um, you just gotta live with it.

It's something that still, I wake up sometimes,

4:00, or 5:00, 6:00 in the morning,

like, you know, with this kind of clutter in my mind of,

how did I pass up on that?

Oh, my god.

And my wife, who was an actress, and I frequently just

joke with each other about the projects we turned down

or let go that was like the worst

decisions in the world [LAUGHS] and see

if we could top each other with who

had made the worst decisions.

You just-- at a certain point, you go, you know,

I'm going to make decisions, and a certain percentage

of these decisions are going to be bad decisions.

And every composer who's had a long career

does things that they wished they

could erase from IMDb when people go and look

at what they've done.

I just don't have the ability to go, okay, life is long,

this happened, I'm moving on, everything's fine.

I tend to get burdened by mistakes.

And they follow me and haunt me.

And they repeat over and over in my head,

because that's how my brain works.

You just keep trying to learn how to let things go.

But it's a bitch, it really is.