Mychael Danna

0:06Nice to meet you sir, congratulations. Thank you very much. How are you? Nice to meet you as well. Excellent. So I'm wondering, when you score a film like this, where does it begin? Does Ang show you a cut? And then you say, OK. This is where I can put some whimsical notes. This is where I can go a little suspense. Like, how does that happen? Well, this one started with the book. And read the book being inspired by the book. And then years later, Ang calling me and saying, and laughing really and saying, so this is an impossible film to make. But we're going to make it together. Somehow we're going to solve this puzzle and figure it out how to bring this story to life. And so we've been talking about it for five or six years now. And I've been working solvily on it for over a year. So which is a long time for composer-borne

0:53what a film. How long would it typically be then? Between a month and three months maybe. From start to finish, like writing the full score symphony and all. Wow. I've always wondered about this from composers. Are there certain instruments that are more whimsical and certain instruments that are more suspenseful? Definitely. It's like casting actors for movies. They bring a certain character to the table. And composers carry that in their heads. It's a casting call of instruments not only here in the west. Oboe and bassoon and the guitar and so on. But for life of pie everywhere in the world. So Indonesian Gamelon, Persian name, and Indian percussion instruments. They all have their own character.

1:38They all bring something unique to the score. That's where I was going to go next. I was wondering where these instruments all came from and how did you just find new instruments for this film that you had never heard of? One of the things I've done in my career is work with non-western instruments. I've gone for a long time now. In this film I think every instrument that I have ever recorded or ever heard of all in one film. So that made it very challenging. We recorded a lot of different countries in a very short period of time. So it was a little bit challenging in that way. But there is some very comfortable with work in India many times, really since I know the players and I know how it works. Amazing. Thank you very much. Good luck tonight. Pleasure.