‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ Composer Simon Franglen Talks Expanding the World of Pandora
FilmSpeak talks with composer Simon Franglen about his continued collaboration with director James Cameron on ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’.
Composer Simon Franglen has been working on the score for James Cameron’s ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ and ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ since 2018, and, as he tells FilmSpeak.net, the process was fairly elaborate from writing the score to bringing it to life in the Avatar saga’s latest chapter:
“It's been close to two and a half years of solid writing for the score. Because the film is over three hours long, I’ve written close to 2000 pages of music to get to what’s on screen.”
With Fire and Ash finally coming out in cinemas, the feeling was incredibly positive when Franglen viewed the movie during its world premiere in Los Angeles, after living with the project for so long:
“We finished three weeks ago, and to see it properly in Dolby Vision was incredible. We took great care to ensure the sound was as good as the picture. It was very important to Jim, but I think the film's image is completely unique. You are totally immersed in the world. The 3D isn't gimmicky. It just takes you there. You become invested in the characters, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time just looking at what’s on screen. You can't believe they are more real than real. You know that you are looking at, in theory, characters from another world, with a different physiology than ours, but you become fully invested in that world.”
Since The Way of Water and Fire and Ash’s stories are so intertwined, the composer explains that the score for the third installment had to reflect on the events of the previous sequel, especially when Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) family is grappling with the death of one of his own children:
“In The Way of Water, the eldest son, Neteyam, dies. In Fire and Ash, we have to process that death. The family has to process that death. Initially, one of the things I had to do was to give the audience that sense of the separation between Jake and Neytiri. I wrote the music to two lines that were moving apart rather than together. It was necessary because there's a disconnect in this family between Jake and Neytiri. Now, the family is processing their loss, which isn't generally discussed in films. I wanted the music to support them emotionally. Because it’s a Jim Cameron film, you think you know where you are, and then suddenly you get the wind traders, then you get the ash people. So I had a lot of music to write. The wind traders needed to be epic. It needed to have the scale of a 250-meter-high galleon, which is great, because I get to write big tunes.
That theme is based on the first piece of music I wrote in 2018, which was a jig. In the film, we see the wind traders singing and dancing on one of the galleons, which has a particular scale and melody. I based the wind traders’ main theme on something I did in 2018 because the wind traders are more sophisticated than the rest of the clans.”
Of course, there was so much more to talk about in our almost thirty-minute conversation, which can be listened to below, and includes contrasting the new clans from the Omatikaya and Metkayina tribes, the process of scoring the film’s major action beats, expanding upon themes that were written for the first two films, and what his favorite piece for Fire and Ash is. It’s also worth noting that Franglen has recently been nominated for a Golden Globe, alongside Miley Cyrus, Andrew Wyatt, and Mark Ronson in the Best Original Song category for “Dream as One,” which plays during the film’s end credits.