Nicola Austin chats with Avatar: The Way of Water composer Simon Franglen…
With James Cameron’s long awaited sequel Avatar: The Way of Water still riding high at the box office, we were delighted to speak to the film’s composer, Simon Franglen, on the inspirations behind the main themes, how he incorporated different instruments to represent the switch between jungle and water soundscapes and working with The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia on lead song “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)”.
So how are you following the incredible box office and how well the film is still doing?
I think it’s just a sense of relief for me. The fact that you’ve been working on this thing for so long and just to have it out there and to have people actually enjoying it, is great.
Yes, definitely. And are you out of the bubble now? In the real world?
We still have a few things to do. But yes, I actually get to do something else for a while, which will be good. And then, I dive back into Avatar 3, whenever we start the post production of that.
So when you first began the Way of the Water score, did you get to watch the footage first for inspiration? Or did you base it off the script? Because there are obviously heavy themes in there on the power and connection of family.
Well, both actually. Unusually for a composer I got brought in and was asked to read the scripts in December 2017 and Jim asked me to read all four of the sequels. So I read 2,3,4 and 5, because they had written them all. The idea was that we weren’t going to start filming 2, until all of the scripts were finished. And he said, you need to understand the full journey for you to be able to write the music. And so that was, the first thing I started, the first thing I wrote was Neytiri’s “Songcord” theme, and then the orchestral version of that. And then I was on the set with the actors a lot, which again, is unheard of for a composer to be just hanging out with the crew.
You didn’t join them in the giant water tanks?!
No, I’m afraid that that involves huge amounts of training! But I did actually have music that we played in the tank. Jim (Cameron) asked me to write specific things to do with particular scenes, because there’s things I’ve done for 2 and 3. And there were things that they needed some music for to allow for timing, so that there is a sort of balletic motion that you might have in the water for certain things. And therefore, it couldn’t just be made, it needed to have the sense of a dance. So yes, we had to work out a number of things to do with how to play back the music underwater.
So the action moves from the jungle to the deep sea with the water-centred Metkayina tribe. How did you approach scoring new soundscapes?
Well, I decided that they were, I would say simpler but that’s not quite the right phrase. They are obviously on the sea and therefore, I wanted to change the soundscape. In the first Avatar, I was responsible for the sound of the forest, the glowing forests, so the gamelan textures and everything else, and I needed to evolve this. So there were two major things I did; one was that I decided that they were on the sea and having worked with some nomadic tribes in Mongolia, and also starting to listen to more of the Polynesian music that is down the South Pacific.
I evolved the vocal sound from where we were with that hard edge clip sound that was in the first instalment. This then became a softer, slightly more long tone, because nomadic and sea tribes tend to sing longer notes. So I made a thing about that. And the vocal sound became this slightly softer, more Polynesian effect. And I used some fabulous singers in Wellington that were from the very South Pacific islands to get that sound. And then the percussion had to change. It needs to be less crystalline and metallic, and it became bamboo and it became ankle looms, which are used in Indonesia, and it became clay pots, that sort of thing. There were a number of changes so the texture felt different.
Just to dive a bit more in depth into the soundscapes, “Into The Water” and “The Way of Water” just really brilliantly captured the wonder of the children experiencing the beauty of seeing these underwater habitats for the first time. Which instruments were your go to for those compositions?
Well, there were a couple of factors there. Firstly, Jim and I talked about the feeling of the iridescence and of light going through water. And so you can see that there’s a sense of the light diffusing and everything else hitting the water bubbles. And I created a three dimensional array of the highest percussion instruments I could. And rather than just using a mark tree (also known as bar chimes) through the score, like that Tinkerbell sound – we had things like racks of keys and other little metallic objects, but not like the same gamelan types. And then we had five percussionists playing in a three dimensional space, the highest little iridescence sort of thing and you can hear that, especially when you’re hearing “Into The Water” right at the beginning, you can hear that sort of shimmer. That shimmer was an important part for Jim, he said, “I want that feeling”.
And then “Into The Water”, I thought of it as almost like sirens calling them to the water, and mermaids. And so you have the Metkayina, for whom there is this beautiful elegance in the way they swim and I wanted that to thematically have that sense of flow. But I also wanted that idea of the kids’ wonder, but then these almost mermaids singing. And so we hired a fabulous British singer called Grace Davidson, who provides the vocals on “Into The Water”. She is that initial vocal sound, that is her multi-tracked voice. And that was really important to me, the sense of the voices being the call to the water.
It was beautifully layered. So there’s a number of recurring motifs and character themes repeated throughout, I particularly liked Kiri’s and Payakan’s. Did you have a favourite at all?
Well, I think Payakan’s I wrote 11 times before I showed it to Jim and I was there sitting on the floor going through various stages like this is great, this is great, no it’s crap! And eventually to where it is now, I wanted something with Payakan to reflect his elegance in that beautiful almost balletic nature, even though he may be 300 tonnes! But that theme came from discussions I had with the chief whale specialist at the Scripps Institute at UCLA, she talked to me and to Chris Boyd, who was the sound effects designer about how whales make sound. And I started thinking about that.
And when you see Lo’ak first crawling on the top of Payakan and there are these blow holes – now there are six of them because they’ve designed them with two float chambers. Now it sounds stupid, but this is the detail we go to! So that actually allows him to create two notes at the same time. And so I started with some whale song which we never actually used. I created this whole Payakan song because there was a thing about the Tulkun being able to sing, but then I started thinking about a thing called the circle of fifths. This is what happens with tubes when you cut them in effectively various lengths, there’s resonant overtones.
Then I created Payakan’s theme based on that, and I wanted this big leap. So there is quite a big leap in the tune. But I also wanted to incorporate this sort of sense of beauty when you see him swim for the first time, and actually there is this elegance – but he is also 300 tonnes! It was one of those scenes where I kept saying to Jim, can’t you just give me another 20 seconds and he kept going no, no, no, it’s done. Right it’s done, that’s enough. But you know that point when there’s Lo’ak and Payakan at the end with the light coming through them and the whole view of the poster. It is just just so beautiful.
Yes it looks like it could be a documentary!
Well I had to make sure that it didn’t end up in National Geographic territory, as this is still a film! It was really important that you felt that the score was character driven. So there is the family theme, the “Songcord” which becomes “Leaving Home”, and so on, which is the core of the score. But things like Kiri, Kiri is such a complex character. And something we wanted for Kiri and her connection, you know, this mystic connection she has. So that was an important theme for us as well. Although I wasn’t able to use it in its fully expanded form, there is a larger version of the Kiri theme that will appear.
So what was it like composing your own sort of Jaws moment with the thrilling “The Hunt”?
Well, “The Hunt” was originally almost seven minutes of a single cue, but got cut down because everything gets cut. But I wrote it as a single piece. Jim had a very distinct feeling about how he wanted it to go, he said we want to see almost their joy. And he’s like, hey, we’re going on a hunt. For the first two thirds of this is that sense of they’re going off on a grand adventure. And I don’t play it as a tragedy until later in the cue. Then he said there is this point where we need to understand how bad these people are. And you won’t understand that if you don’t understand the callousness of what they’re doing.
And so my cue is a long cue, but it’s there very specifically to play the adventurer side of it from the audience’s point of view. You know, there’s this terrible line when one of the sub captains says you owe me a beer as she spears one of the harpoons into a Tulkun. And he said that’s part of what we’re doing. And when I wrote that, the nearest thing I can say is the “Confutatis’ ‘ from Mozart’s “Requiem”, there are these two higher and lower parts. For me, you had the men being the RDA and you had the high choir, which plays the Tulkun theme, and they are the juxtaposition of those two things.
For “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)”, how closely did you work with The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia on that track?
It was fabulous. Jim said to me, do we need a song for the end of the film? I said yeah, but if we do I’m only giving you one name – we didn’t go around approaching anybody else but The Weeknd. He’s a huge film fiend and so he was in New York and John Landau was in New York. So he went to see a cut of the film and he obviously, like anybody with any sense when they came out of the film, went woahhh. He was on tour, though. And so eventually, I think it was early September, he sent a rough track that he and Swedish House Mafia had been working on, after I’d sent him themes, ideas and concepts lyrically about how it should feel, because it was really important to Jim and I that it flowed out of the film and that it felt connected. It couldn’t suddenly feel like a pop song had been thrown on at the end of the film. And they sent me a track and I asked for the arrangement and the lyrics, and they sent me all of that.
And then I started adding the vocal thing and I put the big drums at the beginning and I started changing the chords a little bit to reflect some of the chord structures I was using in the film. For instance, you’ll hear the verse chord structure is sort of similar to both “Nothing Is Lost” and “Darkness to Light”. It’s a very similar theme. And there’s a reason to try and connect those two. And then he had done a lyric and a lead line, but when I sent my version back to him, he started rewriting his top line and his lyrics, then he would send them back and I go, this is great.
Then Jim got involved and would listen and go, “Hey, what about these words? Could you tweak them?” Then eventually, once I got a track that I thought was really good, then Swedish House Mafia came back in at the end, to do a little bit of additional work so that we ended up with that hybrid, which is Avatar, and is Abel. The version you hear in the film is more Avatar-esque and the version you hear on the record and out in the Ethernet is more Abel, and I think that’s the totally appropriate way.
Definitely. You briefly just touched on it, but there’s a 22 track score and a 32 track version. How excited are you for the vinyl edition coming out too?
You know, as a soundtrack nerd and as a fan, it’s great to have something tactile that you can touch and go ahhh, this is a piece of it! Rather than just clicking. So I’m very, very excited by that. I think that I will now have to lobby for all of the things that everybody else wants, like the extended version, and so on.
Part of the problem we had is we were so late on delivery, because I delivered the last cue on November 23rd. We finished the dub on November 24th. And the print mastering happened on December 1st and the film premiered on December 6th. So that is so late, that it meant that we were just focusing on getting those things finished. All of the ancillary stuff that most other films can work on for months and everything else before, was just not available to us because we were only focusing on making sure we finished the film.
How long is the actual full score you wrote?
There are two huge volumes. In the finished film there is just shy of about three hours of music. I’m five or six minutes off remastering the songs, so Jim did give me a little time off. But I have about five hours of finished score.
Wow, that’s insane! I think overall, my personal favourite was “The Songcord”, because it’s obviously just so moving. How involved was Zoe Saldaña with that track? It’s just so beautifully performed.
It was the first thing I wrote, I wrote it off the script. And Jim and I talked about the fact that it needed to be written in Na’vi and that it needed to feel grounded in the planet. And Na’vi itself is a hideous language to sing in, except if you are Zoe Saldana, at which point, for some reason she’s able to make Na’vi feel completely natural, completely fluid in a way that everybody else in the world has to struggle at. I don’t know how she does it, but she is quite astonishing. I spent a long time working on the lyrics rewriting them. You know, initially, I had to write them in English, showing them to Jim and say this is the concept for it.
Once he signed off on the concept, then I read them in NaVi. And then I showed them to Paul Farmer who’s the guy who created the language and he then would just say, hey, tweak this. But then I got it. I demoed it up with one of my lead guys called Graham Foote, who is a phenomenal singer, and one of my team, and he did our falsetto version that I could give to Zoey so she could start to learn it with a lyric sheet. And then she and I worked on that. But the vocal you hear is her live on set, done with a microphone in front of 100 technicians and all the sound crew – there was not a recorded version in the recording studio. It was all live. And what you see with her mouth moving on the screen is her singing it live.
That is incredible! Thank you so much for your time and good luck with Avatar 3 and beyond!
Nicola Austin
