01:00Simon Franklin, the composer of Avatar, Fire and Ash.
01:18Thank you for being here today.
01:20It's wonderful to be here.
01:22I'm so sorry I can't be there tonight.
01:24I love this concert, and I'm so very, very, very pleased to be part of it.
01:29You composed on Avatar Way of Water, and now we have Fire and Ash, and you have this long-running collaboration with James Cameron going way back to your Grammy win for My Heart Will Go On on Titanic.
01:43Tell us about your early days with James, and how has your work evolved with him over the years?
01:52Jim Cameron cares about music in his films.
01:56He cares desperately about every note that gets written, and I've seen that from Titanic through Avatar 1 through to Avatar 2, and now for Fire and Ash.
02:05So you have new characters, the Ash and the Wind Trader clans.
02:10Tell us about that music.
02:13I suddenly get a new box of crayons to draw with.
02:18New colors, everything.
02:20The Wind Traders are like the Phoenicians of old.
02:23They are sophisticated, and I wanted the music to have a sophisticated air.
02:29They also travel in these phenomenal ships that are 800 feet tall, and so they needed a theme that was grand, but also had scale, but also flew and floated.
02:41First thing I ever did for Avatar 3 was a thing called the Wind Traders jig.
02:46They do a performance on one of these ships.
02:48I did that in January 2018.
02:52That tells you how long these processes are.
02:55And for that, I designed the instruments for the Wind Traders to play.
02:59I sketched out instruments, gave them to Dylan Cole, the production designer.
03:05He then made them into something beautiful.
03:07Then the prop master 3D printed them.
03:10And so we have real instruments that are played as part of the Wind Traders jig.
03:15The Ash, on the other hand, are chaos agents.
03:19They want to burn the world down.
03:21And this allowed me to completely change the textures that we've always had as part of Avatar.
03:27I could bring in my old day job of using synthesizers.
03:31I got some really grungy synth work in there.
03:34But the core of it was, I had been lucky enough to spend some time in Inner Mongolia about a decade ago.
03:41And there's an instrument called the Murin Hur, which is carried on your back and is a sort of strung viola, but is played with two strings.
03:52It can be played with a real frenzy.
03:54And that became the core sound of the Ash.
03:56And you're going to hear this as part of this suite, these two things.
04:00You were working on Avatar going as far back as 2018?
04:03Yeah, Avatar 3, I started in 2018, yes.
04:08Because we did Avatar 2 and 3, they are a pair.
04:12So 3 is very much a follow-on from 2.
04:15And so the shooting for 2 and 3 happened together.
04:19Avatar, Fire, and Ash is three hours and 12 minutes long.
04:23How many hours of music did you actually record?
04:27I have recorded four hours of music.
04:31I don't know how many hours I've written.
04:34But we also do have a wonderful song that we've brought in as well from Miley Cyrus that I'm very, very proud that she was able to come and join us on this journey.
04:45I was going to ask about that.
04:47Is there anything you can tell us?
04:49I phoned up Andrew Watt and Mark Ronson, who are friends, and said,
04:55Hey, does Miley want to do a song?
05:00And the answer was yes.
05:02And we have a song called Dreamers 1 that appears in the film.
05:08And you will hear it in a week or two, I think, is coming out.
05:13James Cameron has said that Avatar 4 will only come about based on the success of Avatar, Fire, and Ash.
05:21That said, have you recorded some music for Avatar 4?
05:26Sounds like you have.
05:28Maybe one or two things.
05:30But at the moment, I'm about to be fired.
05:33So I look at it that, I mean, three is over.
05:37We don't know if four is going to happen.
05:39So as far as my, as we're in terms of Avatar 4, I'm now unemployed.
05:43So we'll see.
05:44But that's meant to come out in four years' time.
05:47If the world likes Avatar 3, then there will be an Avatar 4 and 5.
05:51I can tell you that they're astonishing.
05:54Fantastic.
05:56I want to say one last thing.
05:58This score was recorded in Los Angeles.
06:01This score was recorded with Los Angeles musicians and Los Angeles singers.
06:07I'm very much part of the Los Angeles music community.
06:10And I'm very proud that they were able to put together such a beautiful score.
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