- 13 hours ago
In the premiere episode of this special 'Behind the Screen' podcast series celebrating the crafts of 'Avatar: Fire and Ash,' Grammy-winning composer Simon Franglen reveals what he learned from late composer James Horner, defining the culture of the world of Pandora through music, inventing and 3D printing new instruments, and how James Cameron's passion for music has made Franglen's work uniquely streamlined.
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00:01Look, I'm a Marine.
00:04I'm not taking a knife to a gunfight.
00:09Or a prayer.
00:13So what am I supposed to do?
00:16I can't run. I can't fight.
00:19Well, that's right.
00:20Awa will provide.
00:22Yeah?
00:23So where was Awa? Where was Awa when our son-
00:25Jake!
00:26I'm in this place where I have nothing.
00:32If you start listening to the music as music, I've actually not done my job right.
00:37My music should be there to give you an emotional connection to what's going on the screen.
00:42And I hope that I am manipulating your heart rate with the way that I use rhythm.
00:48I'm hoping that I am making you feel something more deeply because of the themes that I've used.
00:56Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen,
01:07in partnership with 20th Century Studios, featuring artisans who helped to create Avatar, Fire and Ash,
01:13from the Oscar-winning filmmaker James Cameron.
01:16I'm your host, THR Contributing Editor, Stacey Wilson-Hunt.
01:20My guest today is composer Simon Franklin.
01:22Hello, Simon. Welcome to you and congratulations.
01:24Well, thank you very much, Stacey. It's very, very nice to be here.
01:27Very nice to have you. And I saw the film, of course, and it's stunning.
01:31And I have to say, I've been humming the music the last few days.
01:34Excellent. Well, that's the job, isn't it? Yes.
01:36Yes, you did your job.
01:38And before we talk about your stunning work on Avatar, Fire and Ash,
01:41I'd love to learn more about your journey as a composer.
01:44And I wanted to know, what was the first instrument that you studied and played?
01:49This thing behind me, a piano.
01:52But the real thing is that my skill came, and where I probably came from, was, I don't think when I used computers,
02:00I could make computers sing. And that sounds strange, but when I first came to Los Angeles, I was a session musician.
02:07And I found a niche, which is I was the guy that could do creative things with synthesizers and electronica and computers and music.
02:18And that became my niche, because it's just natural. It's just like playing the piano for me, creating things.
02:25So that I, the journey starts with me at 13 writing to the BBC saying, how do I become a record producer?
02:33I'm completely useless at everything else. This is the only thing I could ever do.
02:37And the, I had started as doing records in Britain, and then somebody saw me working in Britain, said, you should come to LA.
02:47And do this. And I came out and I started doing somebody, you know, I started doing records with a guy called David Foster, who was a record producer.
02:58Of course.
03:00So, we had a pretty incredible run of records, where I would work with him, and it was him and me.
03:09You know, he would play on a piano, then I would do the drums and the bass, we would sort of separate out things like the strings.
03:15And it was all of the things like the bodyguard, and Celine Dion, and Whitney Houston, and Tony Braxton, and so on.
03:24And I was starting, I had, was doing those sorts of records in LA.
03:28Then Quincy Jones called, then Michael Jackson, and so, and there was the sort of, the thing that happened.
03:34Because people would hire me to do whole projects rather than just as a session player where you just do a few hours.
03:40And at some point in this patch, John Barry called, who was a legendary film composer who won five Oscars.
03:49I was just going to ask you about your work with John, yeah.
03:52Yeah, so John was coming to the end of Dancing with Wolves, and I worked with him on the soundtrack, and I was a tadpole at this stage.
04:01But I was working with John, and John, if you're British, the Bond films, and the Ipcrest file, and Out of Africa, and all of these things are an essential part of our DNA.
04:14And John and I would have a great time, and I then worked with him on Chaplin, and some of the other movies that he did.
04:21And we became very, very close friends.
04:23From that then came Alan Silvestri, who's another fabulous composer.
04:28And I worked for Alan for several years, and then Howard Shaw hired me, because I could make grungy, unusual sounds as well.
04:37So I did Seven, for instance, with Howard, and the Cronenberg crash.
04:44And then at some point around 1997, this guy called James Horner phoned and said,
04:51come and work on this film, the disaster film that was going to bring down Paramount and Fox, if you remember, which was Titanic.
05:01Yes, I do remember Titanic.
05:03Yes.
05:04Yeah.
05:05And so I worked on Titanic.
05:08I was doing all the synthesizer programming along with the guy called Ian Underwood.
05:12And we had no money, absolutely no money.
05:15So because of that, we had to fake most of the orchestra in the score.
05:21And so because of that, you know, that fakery became part of the sound of Titanic.
05:26And somewhere in the middle of it, James said, you've worked with Celine.
05:31I said, yeah, I've done tons of records for Celine.
05:34He said, I've got this piano sketch.
05:36Did you think this would work for her?
05:38So I said, yes, absolutely.
05:39So I demoed up the song, which was at this stage, was exactly as it was.
05:44He'd written a song with Will Jennings called My Heart Will Go On.
05:48So we demoed it up.
05:51James flew to New York with my tracks and I brought back the vocal.
05:56I made an assembly of the vocal and mixed it.
05:59And then obviously the ship sank and we were all very happy.
06:04And so I then sort of like, for a while then I was doing stuff.
06:08I went back to England.
06:09I stopped doing films for a while.
06:12I was, I think, a bit burnt out.
06:14And I had to, so I went to England.
06:16And my son had been born and we wanted to educate him over there.
06:20And I came back here when James Horner phoned and said, I've got this other movie.
06:26Which has these, come and I see five minutes of what was Avatar.
06:32And I looked at it and it was an astonishing thing.
06:35And so I spent the whole of 2009 working on Avatar One.
06:41Wow.
06:42And my job was the stuff that was not orchestral.
06:45So I was all the gamma land, all the sort of glowing forest, all of the rhythm stuff was my area.
06:51And we sort of reignited this friendship that we'd had during Titanic.
06:56And I then, we just continued working together.
06:59And I became like the score producer for his scores there.
07:02Up until, and we were continuing work.
07:05I remember originally that I had 2013 booked for Avatar 2.
07:10So it was only nine years late.
07:13I'm going to just put a pin in this for one moment because I do want to go back to something.
07:16Yeah.
07:17I want to go back to Dances with Wolves for a moment because it is one of my favorite scores.
07:21And I want to know, what did you learn working with John about world building from that film?
07:27Because I think what Kevin did as a director was quite stunning in the immersiveness of that score and in the period piece.
07:34I think it was just such a landmark moment cinematically, but also for music and film.
07:39So tell me what you learned from John that you have carried with you.
07:42And I can tell you there was one phrase I remember talking to him about the buffalo hunt.
07:48And I said, how come you've got all of the violins and all the violas and all the cellos all playing the same note?
07:59Why are they all playing the same tune?
08:01And then there was the low brass.
08:03And he said, why are you doing that with all this?
08:06I was sort of thinking you'd have to do something more complex.
08:09He said, yeah, but you can't fight a thousand buffalo.
08:11And he was absolutely right.
08:14You know, and one of the things I carried with me is sometimes you will hear a simplicity when things are complicated on screen.
08:22And his use of theme, his use of resonance is something that I think I hopefully bring with me.
08:29The idea that themes are there to emotionally connect is something that James Horner and John both have in common.
08:36They said, James is a huge fan of John's work.
08:39And I think the idea that a theme, the repetition is something that also the Jim Cameron loves in music.
08:48But it's like you could say that the Terminator, the bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
08:52Right. I was just thinking about that.
08:54The minute you said that, I heard the Terminator theme.
08:56Yeah. Music is really important to Jim.
08:59And it can be as visceral as the Terminator thing.
09:03And it's something that, for instance, I think that I took with the sound for the ash in this film,
09:09which was to give him that visceral thrill that you got something that was a motif that you could immediately associate with something.
09:17And so I think that taking that from what John did on Dance with Wolves was that you had the sense of the vista.
09:26You had the sense of the scale of the, of the infitness of the prairies and so on.
09:32And because there is, you know, the John Dunbar is this lone character who's out there and there's a loneliness there.
09:40And, you know, and I think that when I look at where I went with, for instance, the Wind Traders, when we see them, I've got a big epic.
09:47It's one of those things you go, oh, there's this 800 foot tall galleon.
09:51And I could channel all of those big epics into something that is, there is this exquisite imagery with this huge vista.
10:00And I could go back to those great 30s and 40s swashbuckling scores of the big thematic idea that because I'm a thematic composer, I believe that tunes are important.
10:15I know there are other composers who do textural things or that's not really my bag.
10:20My bag is really very much the idea that I believe you use themes and rhythms and stuff like that to give people an emotional connection to what they're doing to be the heartbeat of the film.
10:36And that I think is something I've carried from the, from my tutors.
10:41That's amazing.
10:42And I can absolutely see that in your work.
10:44And I want to go back to the first avatar.
10:46And for those who don't know, of course, James Horner passed away and so sad about 10 years ago.
10:51That's a huge loss.
10:52And I'm sorry for your loss.
10:53I'm sure you were very close.
10:54And you spent 11 months, I think, with him on the first film, scoring the first film, helping him score.
11:01And you achieved a really wonderful blend of what I would call traditional orchestral music with the unique Navi vocals.
11:08Tell me how you approach that process without overdoing one of them,
11:12because it is really the seamless blending of the two that I find so fascinating.
11:16The voice is an incredibly important part of an Avatar score.
11:20And if you look at, for instance, this one, the sound has evolved and I had to evolve it with the films as we went through.
11:27So Avatar 1, we have the Omitakaya tribe, we're a forest tribe.
11:31And the vocal sound is quite clipped.
11:34It's quite crisp.
11:35It's sort of almost, there's a semi-African texture to it.
11:39And, but when it came to two, we now moved over to the sea tribes.
11:44And that is the Metcaina, who are the Reef Clan.
11:48And they required a different vocal texture.
11:51And so I went and looked at some of the things I've worked with.
11:54I found Pacific Island singers.
11:57There's that sort of long tone that is used to sing across the ocean.
12:02And so I want, so that vocal texture became much more of that texture,
12:07something that was like softer, something more of that.
12:12So call and response rather than the sort of rather more tacky vocals.
12:16And then for 3, where we are now, for instance, there is a vocal texture for the Ash.
12:23And it is extremely aggressive and extremely, extremely has a real bite to it and it's, and so on.
12:31And those are things that are active choices of mine.
12:35The wind traders have a different vocal texture.
12:39Everybody in an Avatar, when I'm writing vocal music, they write, they sing in Navi.
12:44So it has to, it's that thing that you want the language.
12:49Part of the sound is the language.
12:52And the language is K's and X's and T's.
12:54And it gives a particular texture that is somewhat different to the way that, say, a standard choir is used.
13:01Although I do use choir.
13:03But I also use a lot of solo voices.
13:05You may hear quite a lot of things because there is a natural connection between a voice and the listener.
13:15We are so tuned to the human voice.
13:18And it's something you have to be very careful about in films.
13:20And a lot of people don't want to approach it because it's extremely strong color.
13:24Because you have to be careful.
13:26If you put your lead actors and actresses singing and they are, for instance, talking and there's dialogue you want to listen to.
13:33The moment you put a voice that's singing words in the background, your ear starts going to that.
13:39Whether you like it or not.
13:40You have to be a distraction to the dialogue.
13:41And so you have to be very, very careful about how you use these colors.
13:45And it doesn't matter if it's a choir or it's a solo voice.
13:48The same thing happens.
13:49We are attuned to listening to our species.
13:54And it's something that we have to make sure that when I'm making, when I'm using vocals.
14:00And there are, I am absolutely certain that there is more vocal recording in this film than probably any other film this year.
14:07Maybe any other film this century, because there's a heck of a lot more vocals in A3 than there is in A2 or in A1.
14:16And that's also a picture of what Jim asked of me.
14:19And I have to choose those points where if I've got a soloist singing, you know, I will change the type of soloist for different things to reflect things.
14:31And for instance, on A1, there is a vocal soloist who I know very well because it was my seven year old son, Luca, at the time, who is now, who is now accompanied me to the premiere and has actually sang.
14:44How old is he now?
14:45He's 22 or 23.
14:47Oh my goodness.
14:48And he's sung in all three films.
14:51But the first time James Horner asked him, he was a choir, a chorister, and he asked him to sing on A1.
14:58Jim then used that vocal again in A2, plus Luca did some other work.
15:03And in three, we brought him in to do some of the Wind Traders vocals and some of the other vocals in there with some of the other team, including John Landau's son, Jody, as well as part of the vocal texture.
15:17I'm very comfortable with using voices as part of my score, but it requires a director like Jim who's very comfortable with the way that they fit within his world.
15:27So I'm curious, Jim is so invested, obviously, in every aspect of this process and has passion for every aspect of it, as we know.
15:34What are the challenges of having a director who is so engaged in the music piece of this?
15:39Because I have to imagine sometimes there could be a gift in the director not being so engaged.
15:44But tell me what the gifts are and what the challenges are of having someone like Jim who's so attuned and actually quite musical himself.
15:51So this is, I think, the perfect relationship for a composer in that I have two people to please.
16:00I have to please myself first and then I have to please Jim.
16:05And there is nobody else.
16:07I don't have any producers who have opinions.
16:10I have no film company who has an opinion.
16:14It is just Jim.
16:16And Jim has an incredibly good sense of what music should be within a Jim camera and a film.
16:23And I have noticed there are times when that's good and that's bad in that you get a very, very visceral response, which is what you want.
16:33And yes, I have had times when I've had to rewrite things again and again because it's not quite right.
16:38But also when I give him something and he goes that, like I played him the ash two years ago and he went, yes, that, that's the sound of the ash.
16:48Then it becomes something that he is, he sort of like assimilates and can actually then inwardly digest it in terms of how he feels about the film.
17:00Because the point is the music is the one bit of the film that he can't control.
17:06He can do almost everything else, but he can't write a film score.
17:12And so I have to be that interpreter to give him what he needs in terms of delivering the music that is his.
17:21I write the music, but the music is Jim's.
17:23And Jim also will often, I will write something and he will go, this is great, this is perfect.
17:31And six weeks later, he will show to me, come and have a look at this.
17:35And he will take in something from two hours earlier and put it there.
17:39And you go, oh yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.
17:44And he has an astonishing sense of the drama that music can do, can give to a film.
17:51He believes in sound, he believes in dialogue, he believes in music as being 50% of the film.
17:58And a lot of people think of music as just being a glorified sound effect.
18:04Jim thinks of music as being an emotional thing to take you on the journey with the film.
18:10It's absolutely a character in this movie.
18:12It felt that way to me.
18:13I felt very engaged and it's very emotional.
18:16And in terms of the relationship that the audience has to Avatar, I was so fascinated
18:21to learn that you worked on the Way of Water ride at Disney Orlando.
18:25Is this true?
18:26You worked on the sport?
18:27I did all the music for the Pandora, the world of Avatar.
18:29Yes.
18:30Five hours of music in there.
18:31Yes.
18:32That is very cool.
18:33And the late, of course, we lost another member of the Avatar family, John Lando, who
18:36passed last year.
18:37Yes.
18:38He had said that he knew that you were the person to fill in for James Horner when he
18:43saw your work in Orlando.
18:45And it made me wonder, how did that experience change the way that you perceive an audience's
18:50experience in relation to music?
18:53I think about when I was on the Star Wars ride as a kid and you think about Space Mountain
18:58and all the effects that go into the physical experience of a theme park.
19:03I left Avatar Fire and Ash the other night feeling as if I had been at a theme park.
19:08That's how it felt.
19:09So I was wondering, what did you learn in that more tangible experience that you applied
19:14to Fire and Ash?
19:15That's a very, very good question.
19:17And I can answer it in a couple of things.
19:20One is that the flavors that you bring to things really give you a sense of place.
19:28And when I did Pandora, as I said, there's five hours of music in the area.
19:34And in the two attractions, I don't know if you've ridden Flight of Passage.
19:38I haven't yet.
19:39I hope so.
19:40Okay.
19:41I've done it hundreds of times and I'm still giggling every time I come off it.
19:46It's astonishing because you really are there.
19:49And John cared desperately about this.
19:53The park was really important to John.
19:56But one of the things is you wanted to have that sense of immersion,
20:00about the sense of being in the place.
20:02And music there gave you a sense of place.
20:05You didn't want to be in Orlando.
20:06You are on Pandora.
20:08And so one of the things we did, for instance, is we had just snippets of people singing that might appear in the background on the light.
20:18They would be randomly playing five or ten minutes.
20:20You would hear some people singing over here and then maybe there'll be some singing over here.
20:24There are tiny little things like that in the film.
20:27Now, this sounds stupid, but there is.
20:30Took and another girl doing a, how many fish go?
20:36In the sea.
20:38Right?
20:39Had to write that.
20:40And so that's actually a piece of, I designed it, then gave it to the choreographer for them to do that as part of the thing.
20:49Those sort of little bits of, I know the technical word always sounds like a mouthful, diegetic.
20:55Things that are of the place really, really help.
20:59It's a bit like the instruments I designed for the wind traders.
21:02The fact that I designed instruments and we then 3D printed them for the actors to play.
21:08And then they are of the place because I've designed them with the production team.
21:12And then we've gone to the prop master and he's 3D printed them and they exist.
21:17And there are six foot long string instruments that are Pandoran that are for the wind traders.
21:24That's part of what I think I learned from doing Florida was the idea that you, if you're going to show a society, then you have to show everything about a society.
21:34And we had a thing on Avatar, which we call Culture Club.
21:38And Culture Club was me and it was Deb Scott, the costume designer.
21:43It was Dylan Cole, who was in charge of the Navi side of production design.
21:47And it was Brad Elliott, who was the prop master.
21:52And we had two researchers and we would build cultural catalogs for the various clans that we came across.
22:01So like when the Meccaina came, there had to be something about how we would deal with that.
22:06When we have the ash, there's something to do with how the ash will be treated or the wind traders.
22:12And that's something I think I can take very much from the work in the park.
22:17I love that.
22:19Who knew that Orlando would play such a large role in your life, right?
22:22Yeah, I know. Absolutely.
22:23Absolutely.
22:24And if you have one hope for what an audience member may experience in terms of your score for Avatar, Fire and Ash, what is something that you would want people to experience when they sit in the theater?
22:35They put on the 3D glasses. And in terms of the relationship that they have to your music, what do you hope that they experience?
22:44I've done, I've made a couple of choices here, which are, should we say, radical-ish.
22:49One was to bring the mix more out into the cinema, to make it more immersive.
22:54Because I wanted the feeling, I never want to get away from the dialogue and you have to be able to follow the story.
23:00You have to, if you start listening to the music as music, I've actually not done my job right.
23:05My music should be there to give you an emotional connection to what's going on the screen.
23:10And I hope that I am manipulating your heart rate to, with the way that I use rhythm.
23:18I'm hoping that I am making you feel something more deeply because of the themes that I've used.
23:24I hope that, for instance, when Jake and Nateria at the beginning, and they are somewhat separated, I used different versions of themes,
23:33but they were separated, two lines that were moving apart, so that it felt like there was that separation.
23:39I hope that you understand that I make you smile and I make you cry.
23:45Because there is, for instance, one bit towards the end when something bad happens, but it makes everybody cheer.
23:52And I am very proud of the music that happens there.
23:56I think I'm very proud of the music in one particular bit in the middle, without giving away too many spoilers.
24:02Of Varong's journey.
24:05There is a point when Varong's arc changes.
24:09And she is in her hut and she is talking.
24:12The cue starts from really strange, weird, orchestral things and ends up going to a sort of solo flute for Varong,
24:20where she tells the story of the ash.
24:23And then it evolves and it changes and then there is one drum beat that happens.
24:30And if I was to say that the film pivots on that drum beat, it's almost like there is one thing and when that drum beat changes, you know you ain't in Kansas anymore.
24:43It's a great scene and definitely no spoilers.
24:47Yeah.
24:48It's definitely my favorite addition to this new chapter.
24:50Oh, yeah.
24:51Una's great.
24:52Absolutely.
24:53Well, Simon, thank you so much for joining me today.
24:55I wish you so much congratulations and luck as you share this movie with the world.
24:59Of course.
25:00I'd like to thank Simon for joining me on this special episode of The Hollywood Reporter's Behind the Screen.
25:06Tune in for more conversations with other artisans from Avatar, Fire and Ash.
25:11I'm Stacey Wilson-Hunt.
25:12Thank you so much for listening.
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