When composer Carlos Rafael Rivera joined Lessons in Chemistry, the tone of the score was not fully realized yet. "When I came on, the idea that was proposed was to take something very against the time and the tone of the story," he says. "It wasn't really working, but the experience itself was good…

"I was a bad student of classical piano because I would start changing stuff, so I think in that sense I was always kind of 'composing' when I was a horrible student," jokes composer Takeshi Furukawa. "For classical music, you have to be faithful to the composer's intent… and I was not that."  Based…

"There's something really special about Mario games," says composer Brian Tyler. As a lifelong fan of the Mario series, Tyler was excited to bring the music from all of those worlds into a new animated universe for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. "I realized by hearing the music outside of the game, it…

For Migration, composer John Powell was tasked with creating a theme for a reluctant hero that evolves throughout his journey. Written and directed by Benjamin Renner, Migration follows a family of ducks on a new journey. Mack (Kumail Nanjiani) is a mallard who is content with never leaving the safety of…

For Pixar’s Elemental, composer Thomas Newman was given the challenge of scoring for ‘elemental’ cultures that don’t exist in the real world, while instilling a sense of familiarity for the viewer. He says the real difficulty was to “point towards different cultures and never land on one.” Directed…

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix debuts the first track of Nyad score ahead of the film’s theatrical release. The film is scored by two-time Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Shape of Water). Nyad tells the incredible true story of world class athlete Diana Nyad, played by…

Editor’s note: We are experiencing an issue with the video for this post and will update once it is fixed. “I see The Last of Us as a big story, like a Shakespearean play,” says composer Gustavo Santaolalla. “I think The Last of Us is a fantastic story.” Based on the 2013 video game of the same…

It’s impossible to talk about Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio without considering the music. Del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of the Carlo Collodi story takes place in 1930s Italy, during the Fascist reign of Benito Mussolini. In this story, woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley) loses his son Carlo in an aerial…

For All Quiet on the Western Front, director Edward Berger wanted the film to be created from a German perspective. He tasked composer Volker Bertelmann with the job of creating a score he’s never done before, giving him few insights into what he wanted for the final cut. Based on the 1928 novel of the…

“Cinema was always a passion for me,” says composer Alexandre Desplat. “I was very lucky to have a friend who had directed a short movie and he asked me if I could write the score… and it became my demo tape and opened to me many, many doors.” Having worked with director Guillermo del Toro before on many…

For Only Murders in the Building, composer Siddhartha Khosla focused on underscoring the dramatic beats of the murder mystery rather than the comedy. The series follows a trio of true crime fans in NYC who start a podcast when they find themselves embroiled in their own mystery. In an effort to give it a more "NYC"…

“Writing for narrative was just always the thing that I knew I wanted to do,” says composer Theodore Shapiro. “I was never really interested in writing for the concert hall.” Shapiro started his work in television as the composer for MTV’s The State after being introduced by a friend in the sketch group. “Of course, I…