A biography for Alan Menkenhasn’t been written yet.
“Often my best work comes from somebody trying to stretch me in a direction that I wouldn't normally want to go in. It's not something I fight at all.”
“Part of the job is knowing how to use this medium in the most effective way for the story you're telling, so for me, to pick a genre I want to do is a little harder. I would say it's more about thinking, 'What genre will work for what kind of story?' And then, when all of that comes, I embrace it and run with it.”
“Live-action films are very much a director's medium, and that director is going to be a very strong voice, a stronger individual voice than you'd have in animation.”
“My favorite thing is a brand-new project from scratch because you really never know how they're going to come to life. Going back for the third and fourth time to old ones is very gratifying, but it's not my favorite use of my creativity.”
“The job, when you write film underscore, is to be ignored. That comes with the gig, no question about it.”
“Of my Disney material, 'Tangled' is my most pop-oriented.”
“For a brief period, I had a gentleman's farm in Pennsylvania, but even then, I kept a place in New York.”
“I have a team who I respect immensely, so if they have opinions, I'm interested in hearing them.”
“When I first started working at Disney animation, I can't tell you how many people said to me, 'Oh, man, take a powder.' Nobody takes animated musicals seriously. I swear.”
“I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.”
“I'm very proud of 'Will the Sun Ever Shine Again.' That was a song written very close to the 9/11 event.”
“Most of my collaborations, certainly post - Howard Ashman but even with Howard, are music first.”
“Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.”
“There's plenty of examples of films where they're greenlit to move forward, and they want to get X actor. And they don't get X actor, so they go with Y, and it doesn't turn out to be as good of a movie as it should have been.”
“I was always proud of the score to 'Newsies.' The movie is good, but it was under-budgeted.”
“It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.”
“I love 'The Gospel Truth,' the song that opened up 'Hercules.' I thought that song was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed producing that and writing that.”
“Music can be witty, but it's not funny unless it's conceptually funny.”
“Collaboration is being open to each other's ideas and benefiting from each other's perspectives in an open way.”
“As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.”