00:04
Lasse Elkjaer
I picked the picture by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor.

00:12
Lasse Elkjaer
I like the simplicity of it, the minimalism, and the calmness of it. The lady sitting at the desk in her own thoughts, we don't know what she's doing. I can put myself in her shoes. I spend most of my time in front of a desk, sitting in a chair in deep thoughts, creating my music.

00:32
Lasse Elkjaer
I would write a classical-based score with a smaller chamber ensemble, a lyrical, nostalgic tone to it, and instrumentation to be not grand, so it's almost like the instruments sit in that room.

00:53
Lasse Elkjaer
A picture like this is a calming focus to me. I'm an old soul. It's like I've been living another life, maybe from that time period with no electronic gadgets. Something in there lures me in, makes me want to be there.

01:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Lasse Elkjaer, a Danish composer and orchestrator. Welcome, Lasse.

01:43
Lasse Elkjaer
Thank you very much.

01:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are in Los Angeles and this is a city that you have called home for a long time now. How would you describe the city to someone who's never been here before?

01:53
Lasse Elkjaer
A very exciting place. And you will be impressed, absolutely, at the start, because it's such a big city. It has a lot to offer. Very different from Denmark, of course. You need to come and experience it. It's palm trees, it's nice weather all the time. But that's on the surface level.

02:13
Lasse Elkjaer
When you start to be here and get into the nitty gritty, there's a lot of interesting stuff. There's a lot of problems also. For example, a lot of homelessness. And then if you go deeper into it, how do people here in LA deal with stuff like that?

02:28
Lasse Elkjaer
Also the work culture. There's a lot of people with a lot of grand ideas, but also with what I do, I'm very much in there. You're surrounded by an elite. So where people say there's a lot of competition here, I would say people just really know what they're doing. There's a lot of people coming, but there's also a lot of people leaving LA.

02:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's a hard city to make it in.

02:53
Lasse Elkjaer
It is, but still, it's all up to you. When I came here to LA, I wasn't in any kind of way among the elite, but I just became better and better and understood more and got more work and so on. You have to be here to figure it out really.

03:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And LA is a big city, as you mentioned. It has little pockets, little neighborhoods that are very different from each other. Beverly Hills is completely different from Silver Lake. Which neighborhood do you call your home, and why did you pick this part of town to live in?

03:26
Lasse Elkjaer
It's around downtown LA, but it's more because it's easy to get around there, and I know the people in that area that could find me a place to live.

03:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How would you describe Downtown Los Angeles?

03:42
Lasse Elkjaer
It's a pocket on its own and it's changed a lot also over time. Before the pandemic, it was very lively. There was a lot happening there, a lot of people on the street. It was really a big city in that kind of sense. Then everything changed during the pandemic and now it's really emptied out.

04:02
Lasse Elkjaer
But isn't it the same with the rest of LA? When I had a walk at Hollywood Boulevard not so long ago, it also emptied out. So LA has changed a lot during the pandemic. Downtown, it's an interesting place. It's cute in its own kind of way, but it's also a bit rough and you should stay away from Skid Row.

04:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which is where the homeless live.

04:28
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah.

04:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Would you say you feel at home in Los Angeles now that you've been here, I believe, since 2013?

04:36
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah. It's absolutely because of the community. I'm a very big part of the film scoring community, and it's very important for me to be a part of a community. Of course, in Denmark, we also have a community, but it's so small compared to here. There's always events going on and workshops going on and so on and so forth. We all make a point of meeting and hanging out and sharing information because this is what we do, we have one job and it's working with film music related stuff.

05:08
Lasse Elkjaer
And we all have ups and downs and so on. And it's a bit unique that you're able to share your experiences with so many people. Whereas in Denmark, you can share that with maybe five or seven people. That's it, and they're usually very busy. We're here, it's different, as it is nonstop freelance work for most of the people. So in that kind of sense, it is very much home for me.

05:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You had completed your master's degree in film scoring in Denmark before you moved to Los Angeles to study at the University of Southern California. What made you want to take this step? Why did you pick Los Angeles?

05:51
Lasse Elkjaer
One of my colleagues recommended me to study at USC. He was the first Dane that had been going through the film scoring program. And because of my personality and my drive, he was like, you absolutely need to do that. And I had been, since my youth, thinking about making the move to the States in some kind of way, at least doing my higher studies in America. To work here and live here was something that I didn't dare to dream about.

06:21
Lasse Elkjaer
In my early twenties, it was pre-internet time, so everything was way more difficult for me to figure out and so on. So it didn't happen back then. So when he was like, you really need to do this, and he got me in touch with the university, I was like, okay, this is going to be my life mission now.

06:38
Lasse Elkjaer
And it took me two and a half years. And then I was here, and was selected as one out of 20 students from the whole world to do that film scoring program. It's the same scoring program where Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein have been a part of the faculty teaching. So it was very prestigious for me that I could have a possibility to get close to something like that.

07:05
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And very rewarding, I assume.

07:07
Lasse Elkjaer
Absolutely. Not only from a teaching perspective, a teaching point of view. I gathered a lot of information that I would not be able to get in Denmark, that would be impossible. I really thought that I had American film scoring sound down in Denmark, but no, it's totally different here. You have to be here and absorb it here.

07:29
Lasse Elkjaer
And I got to know all the musicians here, recorded at all the scoring stages. I paid a ton of money to go to that school, but it was all worth it, absolutely. Became friends with a lot of great film composers and got my first chance to work here in LA through that university.

07:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You did have some work experience in Denmark. While you were a student, you worked with five-time Emmy winning composer Jacob Groth. Do I say his name correctly?

08:01
Lasse Elkjaer
We can say it in Danish, Jakob Groth.

08:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay! He worked on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and some other projects that you also worked with him on. Talk about what working with somebody like him entails and how did that prepare you for your trip to Los Angeles?

08:23
Lasse Elkjaer
Let's say that everything lined up as it should. When I started to want to head towards LA, Jakob was a very important part of that. If it wasn't because of him, I wouldn't have been as strong a candidate for the university, but also to get work with my resume and all this stuff.

08:46
Lasse Elkjaer
When he was one of the faculty at the Danish conservatory where I studied film music, we became friends. And I'm a fan of him, and since the '90s, he's been one of the few film composers where I memorized his name. There's Bent Fabricius-Bjerre and Jakob Groth for me. When he was a part of the faculty and became one of my teachers, I was like, I need to pay attention here.

09:12
Lasse Elkjaer
And our humor are the same and so on. So we just became friends and started helping him and then started working with him eventually. I also needed that credit. So we were both aware of that and he was also aware of my ambitions with America and wanted to be as supportive as possible.

09:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What kind of assignments did he give you, did he entrust you with?

09:35
Lasse Elkjaer
I started out with just helping his assistant. They used Logic, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) program to score in. And then they had to migrate to Pro Tools and I had ten years of experience with Pro Tools. So I helped his assistant with that. And then they had a lot of work on an action movie, Dead Man Down, starring Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace. They started handing me some Pro Tools stuff because they were like, okay, he knows what he's doing.

10:07
Lasse Elkjaer
And then, preparing some orchestration that I had to hand off to another person in England, I took one of the cues and orchestrated it. And did two versions, one version as it just should be done. And then I did my version and then Jakob was like, Oh, so he's also able to do orchestration.

10:27
Lasse Elkjaer
And I'd been doing orchestration at that point for ten years, starting with amateur musical theater and professional later on and so on. So I knew what I was doing. So he just figured that, oh, he's able to do that, and then we can save some money by hiring Lasse instead of having this hotshot orchestrator in England. And so that was my way in. I gave him proof that I was able to do it.

10:50
Lasse Elkjaer
And that's one thing that I think is very important, because I also get contacted by orchestrators and ghostwriters and so on, but they don't give me proof that they can do the work. They maybe send me something they have done a long time ago, but that's a school assignment. It's not the same as I give you something and you give me that back and have executed it. So that's what I did and how I worked with Jakob.

11:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how did you get your first job in Los Angeles? Did you go out and knock on doors? Did you send your resume to composers? Did you meet people at networking events or was it a different way altogether?

11:29
Lasse Elkjaer
I already had a plan in Denmark before I came to LA.

11:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You had it all sorted out.

11:33
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah, I had it all sorted out. But I'm also a person that's a bit nervous because I didn't trust myself just to head here to LA and knock on doors. So that's also why I did USC, the university, because I know so many stories about people coming to this city and just failing. And I didn't really want to fail. So I wanted to figure it out.

11:56
Lasse Elkjaer
And I saw that film composer Christopher Young was a part of the faculty. He would be one of my teachers and the guy that recommended me to study at USC, the Danish colleague, said that guy is bringing in interns. And I was like, okay, I'm going to have that in mind and I'm a huge fan of Chris and his music. And we actually became friends when he was teaching me at USC.

12:22
Lasse Elkjaer
And I absolutely made him aware that I wanted very much to work with him. So I befriended his assistants, actually. That's how you do it here in my world of music. You have to be friends with the assistant, figure out, are there an open position or something like that. But that's also where USC opens doors for you.

12:46
Lasse Elkjaer
I got some contacts through the university and there's composers that's also contacting the university, we need a guy. And I actually got some offers in the start, and was unemployed for four months, but kept knocking on Chris's door. And then all of a sudden, there was an open position. And then I started working for him.

13:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Christopher Young is a Golden Globes-nominated composer. What did he hire you to do? Did you also have to start from scratch, or did he see that you were experienced enough for something else?

13:22
Lasse Elkjaer
So he was my teacher at USC and we were becoming fast friends there, also because I know his work very much, and can write in his style. So of course, when I did assignments, I was doing close to a Christopher Young version. So he was like, this sounds so great, Lasse. And I was like, mm-hmm, I know.

13:43
Lasse Elkjaer
When you go through the USC program, you get taught all the skills you need to know as an assistant. And many of the students have a ton of experience beforehand. We know orchestration, we know programming, we know composition and so on, we know too much almost.

14:00
Lasse Elkjaer
He just brought me in as his intern, and I was absolutely fine with that. I did a lot of lists in the start, and he saw that I wasn't very amused by that. And so he was making sure, not only me, but the whole team, got some more exciting work. And all of a sudden, we were working on a project with John Travolta and Robert De Niro, recording some cello tracks for a soundtrack and so on. So I was like, oh, now it starts to be exciting.

14:33
Lasse Elkjaer
He quickly saw that I had some kind of potential. So I became his lead assistant very fast. I was his intern for, I can't remember, a long time. And then I got hired and then 14 days after, I became his lead assistant managing his team of 7 to 12 people. I had never tried to do anything like that before, but somebody had to do it.

14:57
Lasse Elkjaer
And he pointed at me, out of the people that were there and I was very honored. And I like that responsibility. You have an overview and it's less stressful when you know what's going on. But of course, Chris tells me what to do.

15:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How would you say that the work culture here in LA is different from what you experienced back in Denmark?

15:20
Lasse Elkjaer
It's so different because it's an international hub here. So there's so many different cultures, personalities, and so on. The cliché here is that you work a ton. And for me, it's fine because I like to work. It's not only my passion, but it's also important for me that what I do is my work. So I have to work ten hours here instead of eight hours in Denmark. I don't care. That's how it is. And I even work more if I need to. It's very freelance-based what I do right now.

15:54
Lasse Elkjaer
But I've been on projects in Denmark where it's been very stressful also. When I work here, it's usually, especially when I worked for Chris, that's a good example, it was a big company. So we were a lot of people doing a lot of different kinds of jobs, and a lot of tasks spread out on a lot of people. Whereas in Denmark, it's very small. And when there's not the budget to distribute the workforce out to a lot of people, film scoring-wise, you end up doing a ton of work.

16:29
Lasse Elkjaer
Whereas here, you can go into the nitty gritty. Sometimes there's a lot of wasted work, but that's because they can afford it to do the research and so on and so forth. Whereas in Denmark, or in Europe, you have to be more to the point because there's a very strict budget.

16:44
Lasse Elkjaer
But how many film composers are there in Denmark? Here there's a ton. So stuff is done in very many, many different kinds of ways. But I just focus on what I do. And when I'm on a project, I work a lot. That's how it is. But I think in general, people here in America, in LA, they work more, but that's the culture.

17:07
Lasse Elkjaer
Whereas in Denmark, I think it's more focused on family. Of course there's also a lot of focus on family here, but I think in Denmark, number one is family oriented in some kind of way. Whereas here, it's more career-oriented for many reasons.

17:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I've been to some scoring sessions. I was at one particularly great one at 20th Century Fox when that was still a company—

17:36
Lasse Elkjaer
At Sony, right?

17:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No, at the old— the Fox studio—

17:40
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah.

17:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
— on Pico. And that was when an orchestra was playing Ramin Djawadi's score to The Mountain Between Us. You can imagine that was a great experience. And the movie played in front of the orchestra on a big screen. But I don't know much about the process of creating a film score. When a composer gets a job of scoring a movie, what are the steps involved here?

18:06
Lasse Elkjaer
It all starts with a conversation. You need to start getting a relation to the guy with the vision, the director, and start to pick his brain. You get into the several layers of the project and it's important for you as a composer to understand it. And of course, you save a lot of time if you understand what you work on, that's how it is.

18:29
Lasse Elkjaer
So you have to do a lot of detective work, but of course the director will be excited to share. And especially if he picked you as a composer because of certain skills and so on. So it all starts with a conversation, get to know each other, get to know the project. And then with music, with sharing references. So you don't write a cue and then it's just totally off.

18:55
Lasse Elkjaer
I really want to be as organized as possible. And then we come down to the obvious stuff, like a spotting session. You get a cut of the movie, a rough cut, maybe, or some scenes and so on. And at some point you get a final cut. Maybe you have been writing some music before. If it's very orchestral and melodic, I like to do a grab bag of themes that I hand to the composers we can talk a bit about. And maybe hand the themes to the director and maybe he falls in love with a certain theme.

19:25
Lasse Elkjaer
Can be the same with sound design. If it's very sound design-based music, you do a suite or something like that. Just do something before you start writing for the movie. And when you get the movie, then you start writing and send the director clips of your music and have conversations from that. But at that point, it's best that you are on the same page, and it's pretty obvious what's gonna happen music-wise in the movie.

19:58
Lasse Elkjaer
And maybe there's also temp music. Maybe they already have been adding some music in which you should be close to and so on. There can also be some directors that want you just to do your thing, but then it's very important that they know your voice as a composer. And then after three months, you're done, hopefully.

20:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is the most exciting job or maybe most rewarding job or project you've been working on here in LA?

20:27
Lasse Elkjaer
I have to say two projects, but it's for sentimental reasons, because they really helped me to where I am this day. Dead Man Down with Jakob Groth was my first big international credit, and that helped me a ton to be able to go here and be able to study at the university. And then two years after, I was working with Christopher Young, and we did a huge Asian action adventure movie, the sequel to Monkey King.

20:56
Lasse Elkjaer
There's a lot of Monkey King movies out there. So he did his second one. And I was lead assistant on that installment. And I know the story from my childhood, had grown up with that tale and so on, so I was really into the movie. And that was a big, huge experience with me recording with an 80-piece orchestra and 40-piece choir. I am very proud of that. I have to say Dead Man Down and the sequel to Monkey King were milestones and very important projects for me. And also to be trusted to do that kind of work was very big for me.

21:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What excited you about those two projects?

21:35
Lasse Elkjaer
I worked on big international movies. What's not to be excited about? And to do film music. That's the great part of it. I also love movies where you have to really downplay the film music part. There's a lot of European movies, especially Danish movies, where the name of the game is minimalism and so on. And there's an art form in itself in doing that.

22:01
Lasse Elkjaer
But with me growing up with John Williams' Indiana Jones, Star Wars, one of my favorite movies was The Ten Commandments, a three, four-hour epic. I wouldn't be able to work full time as a film composer here in Los Angeles if it wasn't because of those two projects. So they mean a lot to me.

22:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's go back in time when you were a very young person. It all started in Lolland Falster in Denmark. How did your passion for music start, and in particular, film scores?

22:37
Lasse Elkjaer
I always have had this wandering ear towards cinematic music, film music, and I fell in love with film music very early on in my life. It's one of my first memories, I think, from when I was about three, four years old, where I have, still to this day, a specific theme in my head. I don't know from which TV show it is. It just haunts me.

22:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Probably Matador.

23:02
Lasse Elkjaer
It could be. It's not that one, but it's actually one of my favorite themes. Is it from Matador? Yeah. Yeah. Matador. Absolutely wonderful theme. I just grew obsessed about film music over time and on the surface level, my family were thinking, oh, he just liked to watch movies and so on. But I think my parents could see that there were signs over the years that I had a deeper passion for a certain kind of music.

23:32
Lasse Elkjaer
For example, classical music. I reacted in a very passionate way to classical music. Not saying that I'm a classical music fanatic in any kind of way, but that instrumentation has a certain power over me that I can't deny. And I come from a non-musical family, so I had to discover all this on my own. And so it was, again, I was just mesmerized by something that came out of the TV, had no idea what it was. Was it the explosions, was it the actors, and so on?

24:06
Lasse Elkjaer
For me, it was something else, which I figured out later on. And it was first when I was in my early 20s, where I was like, I really need to take this film music thingy seriously, because I watched too many movies. Yeah, I did at that time. I was really obsessed about it. And I didn't feel it was a problem, but I spent a lot of time listening to film music in movies. But it took me time to figure out it was film music.

24:34
Lasse Elkjaer
And I had people say to me, Oh, your music sounds like film music. And then I was like, oh. And then I picked up a book in the library, again, pre-internet times. I read interviews from LA composers, many I now have befriended and so on. I read through their words and I was like, I connect with this. I connect with this more than when I read biographies from rock-and-roll musicians and jazz musicians and so on and so forth. It was this film scoring thingy. It just computed with me.

25:04
Lasse Elkjaer
And at that time I was at my peak as a guitarist, playing a lot of rock music, metal music, studying jazz and pop and so on, just immersing myself, but thinking that I would be a session guitarist. So it was a shock to my system that I had to realize that I needed to leave this passion for something that had a very big power over me. And that's where I started my journey.

25:35
Lasse Elkjaer
And then a couple of years later, I got my first shitty feature film, had no idea what I did and how to execute it and so on and so forth, but I managed to finish that movie. Luckily, it's a movie that's been evaporated from the face of the earth, but still I did it. And I was like, okay, I could do this. And I understand the process in some kind of way. And okay, I want to educate myself in this and better myself. And let's see where it's going to take me.

26:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned before that there were not many composers in Denmark who were composing scores for movies. Who were your role models back then?

26:17
Lasse Elkjaer
So I grew up with pretty much what's going on here in LA during the '80s. So John Williams, of course, Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, those guys, and also Christopher Young. That's what I grew up with, that sound. And that's the sound that's ingrained in my head and became my obsession, and also this sound that I kept chasing.

26:41
Lasse Elkjaer
And I remember the first time I saw The Ten Commandments scored by Elmer Bernstein. It was such a shock, because as a kid growing up in a non-musical family that just watched movies for fun, I was just like, Jesus Christ, what's going on here?

27:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A very appropriate "Jesus Christ" for the time.

27:07
Lasse Elkjaer
Exactly, yeah, but from a musical point of view. First of all, I saw the movie as a superhero movie. I was was very young and —

27:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It kind of is.

27:21
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah, it kind of is. But again, it was quite incredible how big a power that kind of music could have over me. And again, that's where I have a weird thing in me that I really fell in love in a huge— like if it was a person with that music, I made sure to hide all my feelings and keep it very much inside myself. But I had an incident where I was singing a song with my sisters and so on, and all of a sudden I started to cry. It had the right intervals and it just struck a chord in me.

27:52
Lasse Elkjaer
Music, again, was not something we really prioritized. It was me begging and so on and so forth that I want to have those violin lessons now, and my parents were like, what the hell is going on here? Also, because I was a gymnast, I was an athlete. And still to this day, my sisters see me more as a wild kid, doing backflips and all this stuff. Yes, I was doing that. But I had been really good at hiding the musical side.

28:20
Lasse Elkjaer
But I was playing instruments from an early age and understood how to read music from the age of four years old. But when you're not encouraged to practice and so on, there's gaps in my life where there was not a lot of music until, for example, with the movie The Ten Commandments, listening to that score and also some other incidents where I was like, I need to be enrolled in the local music school. We need to do this now or else I'm going to go insane.

28:51
Lasse Elkjaer
So that's why I do what I do. And it's easier that it's like that. It's easier that it's an obsession because the music scene in itself is very complicated and tough to be a part of. And if you're not a part of the top ten, it's just a lot of hard work.

29:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Who are your role models today? Who do you look to for inspiration?

29:18
Lasse Elkjaer
It's again the old guys, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams are the usual suspects. They're just so incredibly good at what they're doing. John Williams has the more American American side of film scoring. Jerry Goldsmith has the more European side. When you study the movies and how everything is spotted and so on, there's a lot of good stuff in there.

29:46
Lasse Elkjaer
And I would love to say more modern composers, but they're so close to me. Christopher Young, huge inspiration he'll always be, but he's one of my buddies now. I could say Ludwig Göransson, but I've been studying at the same university as him and so on. Jóhann Jóhannsson, also. There's a lot of people.

30:04
Lasse Elkjaer
But I always revert back to the old school guys because that's the foundation. And we can go back to Elmer Bernstein, back to The Ten Commandments, there's a lot of good stuff in there. I can hear in The Ten Commandments that John Williams had been taking stuff as inspiration and so on.

30:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Have you met John Williams?

30:24
Lasse Elkjaer
I'm part of The Society of Composers and Lyricists here in LA, SCL, where all of us composers meet a couple of times a year. He had a birthday that day, so we were singing happy birthday for him. And I was front row.

30:43
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow, so you could look at him.

30:44
Lasse Elkjaer
Absolutely.

30:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was his reaction?

30:48
Lasse Elkjaer
He conducted us, was very happy, and said that he wanted to keep going for years and years. He's never going to retire.

30:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
He's amazing. He's a nice guy too.

30:59
Lasse Elkjaer
He's a genius, simply a genius.

31:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I met you at a Nordic event here in LA. I think it was an Oscar event on Sunset Boulevard in LA. Are you also part of a Danish or maybe Nordic community of creatives here in Los Angeles? And is that important to you, if so?

31:19
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah. So, the first eight years I was here, I had no contact with, for example, Danish. I had contact with the Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish community. But after the pandemic and I've been back home in Denmark and got back, I finally became a part of a Danish community with also creative people. That's something I figured out was pretty important for me.

31:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Why?

31:48
Lasse Elkjaer
We're just the same species in some kind of way. It comes down to the hang and the humor and stuff like that. Just the basic stuff. I see myself as a Scandinavian person. I don't see myself as a very Danish person, but I also grew up on Lolland Falster and in my own little bubble. I was living in film music land back then. But my values, Danish values, Scandinavian values, are something nobody can take away from me and are very dear to me.

32:22
Lasse Elkjaer
Maybe the first eight years I was really trying to figure myself out, find myself here. Should I play a part, a role, be another person and all this stuff? That's how it is. You come here and you try to figure yourself out.

32:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How you fit into this new situation, right?

32:40
Lasse Elkjaer
Yes, exactly. And again, should I play a role? Should I be another personality? And so on. Now, you know what? I'm just passive, and it's easier like that. But also based on that I got the experience here, and then now it's time, it's important for me to be a part of — because of that, because I found myself in some kind of way, to be a part —

33:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
To reconnect.

33:04
Lasse Elkjaer
Reconnect. Yeah. Also because I spend a lot of time here, I don't travel so much. I'm very stationary and simple in that kind of way. So I don't travel back home to Denmark much. So it's really nice to have a Danish community or Scandinavian community here.

33:19
Lasse Elkjaer
Then with a Scandinavian or Danish music community, film scoring community, it's me bringing them over here and inspiring Danish film composers to come here. We are very, very few. At the university where I studied, in total, in the whole history of the film scoring programs that dates back to the '80s, I guess we're only three.

33:44
Lasse Elkjaer
And I tried to coach young film composers from the conservatory and so on, but it's very complicated to migrate here to America, and plus you also have to be good at what you're doing and be committed to it and leave your family and all this stuff.

34:02
Lasse Elkjaer
That's the first thing I say to a lot of young people, are you in a relationship and what are you going to do about that? Of course you can figure it out and so on, but it's different working here, with what I do here in LA than what you do in Denmark.

34:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Has Jakob Groth been here to visit you?

34:22
Lasse Elkjaer
Yes. And we actually worked here. I don't know if he got inspired by me being here, but after I've been here for a couple of years, he also came and worked on some movies here. And he brought me onto his team also. And that was nice. That was really nice to reconnect again and brush up on the Danish humor and all this stuff. Yeah, it was cool when Jakob came here and we could work here, actually. But now he's back in Denmark. So now I'm alone again.

34:53
Lasse Elkjaer
It really comes down to the hang. It's really simple what I enjoy by connecting with Scandinavian people here, Danish people, it comes down to the hang and to the humor and so on. And the food, I absolutely love the food here in LA. And when I come back home to Denmark, my mom will pamper me so much with all the Danish food that I want to get back to the Korean barbecue or whatever that's here or something like that.

35:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Would you say you've become Americanized? Or are you still the Danish Lasse Elkjaer from Lolland Falster?

35:35
Lasse Elkjaer
So I can, I will never be able to run away from Lasse from Lolland, even if I spend most of my time in Copenhagen. That's just the Danish side of me, the naive side of me, but I've been upgraded over the years and I would —

35:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Upgraded!

35:53
Lasse Elkjaer
Yeah, I haven't been Americanized. Maybe my accent. The Danish accent has changed a bit. But of course you have to change your mindset, you just have to figure stuff out in a different kind of way. I have no ambition of being a Danish person here in LA. It doesn't work like that. It's too complicated. Then I would grow too frustrated about stuff. I just changed as a person. I just matured. But is that being Americanized? No, it's just that I got more streetwise, maybe.

36:23
Lasse Elkjaer
When I came here, I was very naive. I was able to do the work, but I had to be better also. From a personal point of view, very naive and not at all streetwise and all this stuff. And then I was also super scared of LA. Am I scared of LA now? Not at all. LA is not that dangerous.

36:43
Lasse Elkjaer
I feel that I have a realistic point of view of LA. You have to have respect, but don't be super afraid of it. And it's also a bit boring. LA is a bit boring sometimes also. There's a lot of events going on, but that's just events. If you take all the events away, it's just business as usual.

37:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's interesting that you talk about that in that way. I think of myself as the same, very naive when I got here, which I saw as a good thing back then. Because if I'd known what I was getting into, I might have not gone here.

37:16
Lasse Elkjaer
I'm the opposite.

37:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh, explain.

37:20
Lasse Elkjaer
I would love to have been here as a teenager, and been able to take those chances. I was on overdrive with what I did in everything. I mellowed down a bit, but I also need to do that to have my own company. So my personality had to fit that. But when I was young as a guitarist and so on, it would have been amazing to be here in the '90s, and all the opportunities around like-minded that have the same passion for film music.

37:51
Lasse Elkjaer
There's also a lot of film composers that prior to their careers were rock musicians, jazz musicians, and performing artists and so on, the same as I. I would have been just a part of the community. But then again, it's also been nice to get the Danish values underneath my skin. And as an adult, be here with that. But I would have loved to be here.

38:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What were the experiences that made you less naive?

38:25
Lasse Elkjaer
You go through life, you get overworked, you get burned out. You go through stuff. You get a divorce. Sometimes to be punched a bit in the face is good for you. But also to see that you can do it. And that's the greatest thing.

38:41
Lasse Elkjaer
There's two levels to me being here in LA, there's the personal side and there's the work side. And I'm absolutely impressed that I can be a part of the work side here and that I can make a living doing film music. That's insane. Okay. Never thought that would ever happen in my life, which encouraged me to keep going and going and going.

39:03
Lasse Elkjaer
And then we have the personal side and that's something completely different. And that's where I just go through life. I had to figure out myself, and I had to get some bumps on the roads. You make mistakes here and there also in work life, personal life, and so on. But in the end, you find yourself and you upgrade yourself. And you learn to be quiet at the right moments when you're in relationships.

39:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
All right. Thank you for that advice. Do you foresee that you will stay in the US or do you plan to go back to Denmark at some point?

39:41
Lasse Elkjaer
I was just back in Denmark for three years. So now I'm here. You know what, I try to be very simple minded, and just look at what I have right here and now. And I'm happy to be back in LA. I have a lot of really good friendships here and deep friendships.

40:00
Lasse Elkjaer
I have a lot of friends in Denmark also, but it's a bit different because here in LA, we share the same kind of work traumas in some kind of way. We can relate to each other and so on. We bonded. And especially those that I studied with at the university, we have a very special bond there.

40:19
Lasse Elkjaer
And I've been here for 10 years. That's a long time. And then see that you can build a career and work with something that's so rare in some kind of way. And then you start to appreciate the place where you are, because what I do is a very big part of me. Could I have another job? Yes. Would I be good at it? Yes. But that's not me. So I appreciate LA very much and I really like to be here.

40:51
Lasse Elkjaer
Would I go back home to Denmark at some point? I don't know. And I don't really want to think about it right now because I want to be a simple person and just enjoy the moment. I can always plan ahead and could say, would I retire in Denmark? Yeah, but I can also retire here. I could retire somewhere else on this planet. Doesn't really matter. It matters what I do right here and now.

41:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you. Do you have a bucket list of things that you would like to do, things you haven't done, career-wise yet, that you have to do before you leave this planet, and go somewhere else, wherever we go?

41:35
Lasse Elkjaer
I only scratched the surface, unfortunately. There's a lot of Hollywood movies and big ambitions and Oscars and awards that need to be won.

41:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Needs to be won?

41:46
Lasse Elkjaer
Needs to be won, needs to be acquired. You have to have ambitions. I think that it's important when you are here that you have certain kinds of ambitions. So you're not just a person that takes up space. There needs to be a reason to be here, or else this life is way too tough, because LA is a tough city to be in.

42:08
Lasse Elkjaer
There's a lot of ups and there's a lot of downs. So there's a lot of frustrations. There's also a lot of excitement and happiness and you're able to get closer to goals. Whereas if I didn't have those goals, I would rather be in Denmark. To be here in LA and do what I do is kind of an extreme sport.

42:31
Lasse Elkjaer
So you have to have something in front of you that pulls you towards something, but also because there's a lot of people that have the same ambitions as you. And if you don't strive to become better, then you're just going to be left behind. That's the reality of it. Make sure to be ambitious in some kind of way. But again, you can't force anything, just take it one step at a time. That's how it is.

42:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
All right. Thank you very much Lasse for being part of Danish Originals today.

43:05
Lasse Elkjaer
Thank you very much. It was a joy.

43:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Lasse Elkjær chose Vilhelm Hammershøi's Stue i Strandgade med solskin på gulvet or Interior in Strandgade, Sunlight on the Floor from 1901 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.