To celebrate the release of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters we sat down with composer Leopold Ross to discuss his involvement in the series and the challenges of balancing the Kaiju action with more introspective human moments and the differences posed by a 10-episode series compared to a feature film.
How did you kind of get involved firstly with the show and start structuring the sound?
The way I got involved was the executive producer Chris Black is somebody who I’ve worked with before. He reached out to me about the project. Initially, I just said yes, based on the fact that it was him, because we just had a really good working relationship, and I didn’t even pay attention to what the show was about. I was just like, “oh yeah, Chris wants to do a show, let’s do it”. And then when he sent me some pictures, I saw that it was Godzilla, and I was like, “Oh my God.” I suddenly got like extremely excited by the opportunity. To be able to put some music under an icon like Godzilla was very thrilling for me.
Did you revisit the MonsterVerse projects in advance?
I did. Yeah. I watched all the most recent movies because the timeline of Monarch takes place between 2014 and 2019 movies. I watched those ones specifically, but I also watched further back as well, just to kind of get into the vibe.
Godzilla’s had so many iterations onscreen. Was there any particular period that kind of shaped your thinking for the school?
To be honest, not really. Just because I was aiming to, like I said before, carve a new niche, I didn’t want to spend too much time delving into what had been done before. I wanted to kind of stretch out and do something unique.
How did you find balancing the sound of the two eras?
My initial thought was, “oh, I’m going to use these types of sounds in the 50s and these types of sounds and the current periods”. But as I got more involved in it, I found that it was more about establishing character themes. And then voicing those themes, you know, whether it be in the 50s or whether it be in the current timeline, having those themes cross the timeline and just the instrumentation of the theme change depending on what time it was.
How did you find balancing the sort of more introspective moments with those kinds of more bombastic, monster-filled moments?
Honestly, I think that was something that makes it such a fun show musically speaking because there’s so much, it’s so broad and there’s so many kinds of emotions to articulate in the score. So, you do have these huge bombastic Titan sequences but then you also have familial trauma and a lot of kind of emotive family drama, there are romantic elements, so it really crosses the board of feelings to express via music. So, it was really fun.
There’s a globetrotting feel to the whole thing which is reflected in the score.
Yeah, it definitely has that kind of Indiana Jones feeling of like, they crossed the whole world. I kind of veered away from going “oh, they’re in Japan, so let’s have a Japanese sound”. IThe most important thing for me is to have the scale of the music match the images. And that goes for the globetrotting aspect as well as the scale of the Titans and stuff. It’s an incredibly epic show. I wanted the music to kind of capture the epicness.
With 10 episodes and a grander sense of scale how does your process differ to a film?
It’s a good question. Honestly, it’s challenging because there’s so much and particularly in this style of show, it’s pretty wall to wall, you know, paying attention to the music while you’re watching an episode. It’s pretty much going nonstop. So it’s a lot of a lot of ground to cover over ten episodes. But really it becomes about, again, like establishing those themes, you know, the lead show’s theme or the main title theme or whatever. It is like picking out these kinds of thematic elements and then working out how to kind of evolve them across the show, so they grow along with the story.
How did you find scoring the two Lees at such different points in their lives?
I thought they did a fantastic job of bringing that kind of epic action, adventure hero kind of swagger to the role, so it was fun to be able to support them. To do very kind of melodic hero theme, which is, you know, not something that I’ve done that much other across in my career. So that was exciting. But for me, it was about teasing the melody early and then sort of revealing it more extravagantly, if you will. When we first meet cut and then again, kind of embellishing it for others as the series goes on.
Was Chris Black involved creatively with the score?
Absolutely. I mean, most of my creative and collaborative conversations were with Chris because he was also the showrunner. When you work at working on an episodic show as a composer, you deal mainly with the showrunner versus the directors because there are different directors for every episode. So it would be kind of challenging to create a shorthand if you’re having to meet a different person for every episode. So me and Chris would typically have those creative conversations about the direction of the music.
Was there anything that was a particular challenge on the score for the show?
It was challenging in terms of like, for example, scoring the big Titan battles from the point of view that there was so much bombast coming from the sound effects. There’s the Golden Gate Bridge coming down, it’s so loud. It’s like learning when not to play, you know, and letting the sound effects do their thing and kind of bobbing and weaveing because you want to hear the sound when Godzilla rips through the Golden Gate Bridge and you obviously want to hear him roar uninterrupted. So, it’s sort of like bobbing and weaving and finding those moments to hook out and keep the momentum going. So that was a challenge. And the only other challenge, I would say, is finding moments to breathe and finding moments in the show to pull the music out. To give the audience a chance to have a little breath so they don’t get fatigued.
Is there anything else you’d like to cover about the show?
Just to say that I’m very proud of it. I’m very proud of the show. I think it’s a really fun show. And it was an honour, like I said, to be able to kind of create music for such an iconic franchise. It was really thrilling. So I’m glad people connect with it.
Are you able to tell us what you’re working on next?
I just finished a show called Shogun, which is another epic. It’s again something that has huge scale. And they worked so hard on the production to be authentic to the era. And I think it really does look spectacular. So that’ll be another fun one.
We’ve got a new Godzilla film at the moment as well. Why do you think the franchise has resonated so much?
I don’t know. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Honestly coming into this project, I wasn’t aware of the level of intense fandom around the character. I was aware in the sense that everybody knows who Godzilla is in the world and he is that iconic, but I wasn’t aware of the extremely passionate fanbase, which has been so fun and amazing to discover. I love passion in any realm. Being passionate about anything is, I think, fantastic. So, I don’t know what it is. I think he’s just larger than life and it gives people… I mean, honestly, I’m lost for words as to what it is, but I’m happy that it is.
Thank you so much for your time Leo and congratulations on the series.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters airs on Apple TV+ and you can find our reviews of the show here.
Chris Connor
