This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Widows, Mortal Engines - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119665
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019) - *****
John Powell; add’l music & arrangements by Batu Sener, Anthony Willis & Paul Mounsey; orchestrated
by John Ashton Thomas; Tommy Laurence, Geoff Lawson, Andrew Kinney, Randy Kerber, Jon Kull &
Rick Giovinazzo; orchestra conducted by Gavin Greenaway; choir conducted by Eric Whitacre;
bagpipes by the Red Hot Chilli Pipers; add’l drum programming Satnam Ramgotra; ‘Together
From Afar’ written and performed by Jónsi; dedicated to Melinda Lerner & Oliver Powell
HTTYD was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112368
HTTYD 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Director Dean DeBlois: “The clearest way John works came to me on this film. He’d play tunes that didn’t belong to any one sequence. It’s not driven by the imagery, but by a larger thematic sense, which comes through John’s prism. He understands the story in a different way than I do and draws his own throughlines which work as harmonies with what I’m dealing with on the surface level.”
The final How To Train Your Dragon film flew into theaters in early 2019, giving John Powell a chance to complete what the entertainment website Polygon later referred to as my generation’s version of the music of the original Star Wars trilogy. Far less of its runtime is taken up by new takes on existing themes than was the case in How To Train Your Dragon 2 (about as perfectly balanced between old and new as a sequel score can get), so perhaps there may be some disappointment for certain listeners. Some of this was a function of mid-production changes to the story in the wake of the commercial underperformance of Kung Fu Panda 3; DeBlois would say “Jeffrey felt it was because it didn’t do enough new, so he said we need to jettison a lot of slavish continuity.” But Powell ended up feeling it was merited given the new adventures the characters were going on. “That was one of the big things: how are we going to make this big, difficult transition together? If I’d over-indulged in the existing themes, I don’t think I would have got quite the value out of them. It was frustrating not being able to use the [first film’s] romance music more, but it was the right decision.”
And there was a more personal dimension also influencing Powell’s approach. “I did the first one, and then my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer on the day I was nominated [for an Oscar]. And she was going through a hell of an ordeal on the second one. I think the first one’s the most joyful. The second one’s hunkering down and dealing with difficult stuff. The third one’s my most reflective score. What was important was to write material that allowed the story to move forward.”
Powell would produce a plethora of delightful new themes including one for the community’s journey to a new home, a sinister idea for the new villain, a majestic melody for the titular hidden world, and a theme for the romance between Toothless and a female Night Fury dragon, plus a secondary flirtation / mating idea that Powell would cheekily refer to as the “sex riff.” There is more of the magnificent large-scale action / adventure material that folks had come to love about the franchise and was still about as far away from typical Mickey Mousing animated music as one could get. And, as with the first film’s famed Forbidden Friendship portion, Powell had to contend with another dialogue-free scene that ended up creating a highlight musical sequence. “Third Date really kind of killed me. The animators did such a wonderful job with the pantomime of that scene. I had to work to make sure the music matched that quality. They had temped it with Forbidden Friendship, but we didn’t get the exciting sense of love. This was more about the jitters of sex. What if it was just a little more light on its feet?”
Unlike the aforementioned original Star Wars trilogy, where all three scores are considered great but Empire Strikes Back is the runaway favorite among score fans, there is a remarkable lack of consensus about which of the three Dragon scores is the finest. There are folks like me who love the mix of past & present in How To Train Your Dragon 2 the best and others who are more partial to that initial dose of amazement in the first score, but there seem to be just as many who find the new delights of the third to be the most impressive, not just those themes but also the layered choral material conducted by Eric Whitacre and the weird vocal contributions by Jónsi in one track. “There’s certainly choir in the first two, but in the interceding years I had written a whole album of choral music. The choir is a great shortcut for a bonded society, a feeling of togetherness [and] interaction with your neighbors.” And even if you thought the music of The Hidden World was the least of the three, it was still better than 99% of everything else.
DeBlois: “Oftentimes we think something will work in a sequence and it doesn’t. He played a tune for me that I loved, and I’m sure it’ll appear in another John Powell score in the future.”
Another dragon-centric series would end only a few months later.
Game of Thrones Season 8 (2019) - ****
Ramin Djawadi; orchestrated by Stephen Coleman & Andrew Kinney; technical score advisors
William Marriott & Garret Reynolds; thank you to Hans Zimmer & Brandon Campbell
Season 1 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=112891
Season 2 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=113090
Season 3 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117113
Season 4 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117220
Season 5 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117381
Season 6 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
Season 7 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=118953
Hans to Ramin in 2018: “Binging Game of Thrones saved my life on the [tour] bus at night. Recording ostinatos on Batman, that’s nothing compared to what you’ve been up to. It floors me how you kept this complex structure going. Suddenly putting a piano in - I noticed [you’re] trying to tell me something! And it completely translated to someone as idiotic as me, who to this day does not remember the characters’ names.”
The final season of Game of Thrones wouldn’t require a lot of new melodic material; as with season 7, the show was converging all its disparate storylines into one final spectacle, so Ramin Djawadi was mainly tasked with revisiting legacy themes in new guises (often with great success). The opening piece of music in the first episode of the season would even mirror the music of the first episode of the show, with the House Baratheon theme announcing troops heading for Winterfell just as we’d heard eight years earlier, though now the theme of an accompanying army would be used in clever counterpoint. The final episode’s music would be largely sparse and dour, though the solo cello writing in the penultimate track The Last of the Starks was a fitting farewell to the concept, even if it lent some unintended credence to Hans’ joke from the prior year that Ramin had “been making a living off one solo cello.”
Most of what was new to the score would be centered around the midseason Battle of Winterfell. As the carnage mounted, the music for the dimly lit siege chaos played less like fantasy and more like John Carpenter filtered through the world of Hans Zimmer. By leaning into director Miguel Sapochnik’s view that it was an hour of survival horror akin to Assault on Precinct 13, Ramin ended up having to deal with challenges that Hans had encountered two years earlier on Dunkirk. “I've used electronic elements in the show, but not to this extent before. It was a real struggle. Whenever it became too orchestral it felt too safe, so David and Dan kept asking for the music to be more abstract and weird. I spent three times as much time writing this one compared to the other ones to constantly have the tension rising and then to reset to create a little bit of hope, like our heroes can maybe defeat the Night King.”
And Ramin would morph some small motifs used in the battle into The Night King, a lengthy piece occupying the final stretch of the episode that gave off hints of the composer’s work on the last two seasons of Westworld and was a transparent attempt to duplicate the success of the biggest musical moment of season 6. “This was an opportunity to have a big piano piece, and we wanted to call back to Light of the Seven. I end[ed] up in the same key and tempo. But I also [wrote it knowing] when the piano drops people would sit up and see the Night King on his final march towards Bran, and you'd think back to the Cersei theme and that this is all going his way and all of our heroes are going to die — this is it. But it has the reverse effect at the end.” Even if the piece wasn’t quite the equal of Light of the Seven, it was still remarkable that Ramin’s role had evolved from often having to stay out of the way of the dialogue to writing music that was in-your-face and meant to carry scenes, if not entire episodes.
I could also use the word remarkable to describe Djawadi’s career ascent during the airing of this show. He’d entered the 2010s as a somewhat unknown Remote Control graduate with a few successes but also with a resume chock-full of sound design scores and additional writing credits. By 2019 he was a composer with a distinctive voice and evolved compositional chops, one who was now writing some of the most widely-recognized original scores (I’ve had family members who don’t listen to scores go “that’s Game of Thrones!”) and was also viewed with respect even by those film music fans who had questioned his last-minute replacement assignment on Thrones in 2011, an opportunity that Ramin had almost declined due to his overlapping film commitments at the time. Never mind that Thrones had come from HBO, a network whose best-known dramas (The Sopranos, The Wire) lacked original scores!
Ramin was understandably emotional as the final season was airing. “I definitely feel sad. I won’t be writing or expanding on those themes anymore. [But] I feel very lucky that I've been part of this. It's been unbelievable.”
Penguins (2019) - ****
Harry Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Stephanie Economou; orchestrated by Alastair King;
conducted by Gregson-Williams; drums programmed by Satnam Ramgotra
Monkey Kingdom was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117475
TBTF discovery #62.
Alastair Fothergill and Disneynature would once again enlist the services of Harry Gregson-Williams, this time to provide music for their nature documentary film about (surprise) penguins which Harry had once described as “bloody cute.” Harry’s charming score would be alternatingly playful and noble, with one of his themes containing minor but intriguing similarities to his main theme from The Martian (both start with two pairs of ascending notes), probably coincidental but still suggesting similarities between the films in terms of characters stranded in vast deserts. In a way, Harry was tasked to provide emotions that the birds couldn’t express themselves. “Alastair said that the thing about penguins is that they can’t smile. They don’t have the muscles in their cheeks. So the music [is] going to do a lot of the smiling for them in this picture.”
Orchestra and choir would be backed by ethnic woodwinds, a few quirky elements including an upright bass and a saxophone ensemble, and a spot of whistling to somewhat kowtow to the filmmakers putting his famed Chicken Run music in part of this film’s temp track. “Quite intimidating, because I remember the amount of sweat and blood that John [Powell] and I put in to get to that spot many years ago. Now, no one was sitting there saying, ‘We want you to do this.’ It was a good indication of the place I could go.” There are even hints of the magic of his Narnia scores at times. The whole package made for a lovely companion piece to his earlier Monkey Kingdom.
Harry’s brother would also provide music for an icy story later in the year…
Abominable (2019) - ***
Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music & arrangements by Evan Jolly, Sven Faulconer & Forest Christenson;
orchestrated by Alastair King & Gregson-Williams; orchestra conducted by King; choir conducted by Ben Parry
Bee Movie was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=109726
TBTF discovery #63. Note: this is not to be confused with Lalo Schifrin’s music for the 2006 film Abominable that his son directed, which is one of the nastiest orchestral scores of the aughts (in a good way).
This Dreamworks co-production saw its director fired and rehired and its Chinese partner studio change ownership during its development process, with the end result limping into theaters and giving the studio its most underwhelming performer since perhaps Flushed Away. But it was at least a welcome reunion for the studio and Rupert, who had contributed to several Dreamworks scores in the 90s and the aughts but hadn’t been on any of their films since his delightful music for 2007’s Bee Movie. There are moments of wonder and some nice regional instrumental additions (and possibly throat singing), but it largely played like spare parts from earlier fantasy works by the Gregson-Williams brothers mixed with the usual bustling house style for Dreamworks animation scores.
In between those two aforementioned films came a rare collaboration between the Gregson-Williams brothers…
Catch-22 (2019) - ***½
Harry Gregson-Williams & Rupert Gregson-Williams; add’l music by Evan Jolly,
Stephanie Economou & Tom Howe; orchestrated by Simeon Edward & George Strezov;
conducted by Strezov; technical score engineer Forest Christenson
TBTF discovery #64.
Harry: “Rupert has the jazz gene in our family, if anybody does. (Laughs) Definitely not me.”
George Clooney & Grant Heslov would be the latest gang to attempt an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s satirical war novel, with most critics thinking they certainly fared better than MIke Nichols on his flawed and commercially disastrous 1970 film version. For Harry and Rupert, the miniseries represented an opportunity to finally collaborate on a score, something the brothers had been looking for over the last several years. “Catch-22 was produced and (largely) directed by two people. Why not have two composers?”
A unique demand of this score was having a main theme that was malleable enough to traverse all the elements of the story. The guys would later call it a “bloody strange beast. There’s the time period, the early 1940s during the first World War, and there’s quite a bit of humor in there. It takes you from the depths of despair to joy and triumph then back to despair again. Finding the right tone was our biggest challenge. When we came to the project, there was a piece from Hacksaw Ridge that George [liked] – the tone of it was quite austere, and it had a certain emotion going, but it wasn’t right in the face. He made that quite clear that he didn’t want us to be too overt emotionally to begin with.”
The brothers would eventually settle on an angular theme which could function in a variety of settings and eventually “be beaten into submission.” Once they cracked the code on how to put it into a jazz arrangement (needed to both fit with the era and blend with a few needle-dropped songs, and also to represent the character’s mounting insanity), Clooney would apparently start dancing around the room. The score ends up sounding remarkably coherent despite the many disparate elements at play.
The brothers would jointly work in Harry’s studio on some material but would largely retreat to their own studios to co-write the entire thing. “We divided the work up so that we weren’t writing the same cue. George [let] us know one of the cues [Harry did] didn’t quite nail the middle part. There was a cue that Rupert had written for a previous episode, which they had liked, and we actually discovered that if we were to use some of that material in the middle of the cue we’d be on a winner.” In promotional interviews the brothers would act like the process was seamless, though in an interview done two years later (with another family co-composition on the horizon) Rupert would say it was more of a challenge than they’d let on, especially since they weren’t always on the same continent. “It was tricky. He [often] wanted to go one way and I wanted to go the other. We thought we might fall over, but we didn’t.”
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Next time: “I always treat these books as steampunk.”
