DANNY ELFMAN / WRITER-COMPOSER

Danny Elfman never sought to be a film composer. But now, not only is the former Oingo Boingo leader one of Hollywood’s leading scorers--with “Flubber” and Gus Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting” (both with Robin Williams) his latest works--but he also has a deal with Disney to write, produce and direct. Elfman, 44, already has sold three scripts (two musicals and a ghost story) and is about to start a fourth.

OUTSIDER: “I know the kind of movie I want to make. . . .

Whether it can be made through the system, I don’t know. I have an executive at Disney, [Walt Disney Pictures President] David Vogel, who seems anxious to make the kind I want--

twisted and scary. We’ll see. I have to create the thing first.”

SELECT CLUB: “[Writer-director] Mike Figgis scores. John Carpenter scores. There aren’t many who do both. But once it came out in Variety that I got a deal for writing and directing, I guarantee other composers are writing that into their deals now.”

KNOWING THE SCORE: “I’m the nay-sayer, the voice of doom. I see film music getting worse every year. I see more and more music factories building up now--faceless composing where composers can become extremely successful by doing nothing but imitating existing scores.”

BUDGET CONSCIOUS: “If you want good film music, you

pretty much have to look for things made for less than $7 million.

As the budget gets smaller, the music tends to get better.”

BORROWER: “I definitely won’t pay homage to a living composer in a score. They have to be dead. I feel kind of dirty ripping off someone who’s still alive. But paying homage to Bernard Herrmann or Shostakovich is fine. And Prokofiev is always over my shoulder.”

LENDER: “Sending my scripts to other writers and then seeing a scene used practically verbatim--I’ve already been hit three times! Directors can steal something and a year later have no memory. Writers snatch bits and pieces from each other and aren’t of the personality to not remember it, but they simply don’t [care].”

MUSIC TO HIS EARS: “I heard a brilliant score a couple of weeks ago on a film I’d never even heard of, ‘The Cement Garden,’ an English film from 1994. Never even heard of the composer [Edward Shearmer]. This gives me hope. There are forums to do something bold, not worry about nervous, insecure directors trying to cram their films into a niche.”