Ramin Djawadi's got a knack for sonic boom. As the composer for movies like Iron Man and Blade: Trinity and TV shows like Game of Thrones, he's created a songbook filled with everything from ominous doom-and-gloom tones to fist-pumping musical adrenaline. Now he's brought his brand of utter badassery to the kaiju-on-mecha saga Pacific Rim.
Under the direction of the film's director Guillermo del Toro and with help from former collaborators like Tom Morello (whose signature guitar work defines the film's title track) and the RZA (who contributed his songwriting and production skills to a bonus track), Djawadi has crafted a behemoth, 100-plus-minute score that ought to convince even the biggest skeptics and genre purists that this is an apocalypse worth getting jacked up for.
When Wired called him last week at his studio at Remote Control Productions – the Santa Monica, California company founded by scoring legend Hans Zimmer, who's mentored Djawadi for over a decade – he said that when he saw Pacific Rim in theaters he could swear it was even more impressive than he remembered.
"Working on the movie, you hear everything over and over, and you do get to see the final product when it's finished, but in the theater, it sounded like they must have been adding extra sound effects up until the very last minute," he said.
Wired asked him about his professional epicification process when it comes to creating soundtracks that are as big – if not bigger – than the stories they vivify.
Wired: How did you originally sign on to this project?
Ramin Djawadi: Awhile back, Guillermo [del Toro] was interested in working with me so he reached out. He was shooting in Toronto, so I flew up there from LA and we met on the set. It was amazing to already see the beautiful sets he'd created for this. So then we started talking creatively and hit it off right away.
Wired: So he was hoping to impress you with what he'd already been working on?
Djawadi: Oh, no, he didn't have to impress me. It was just because he was already working. I've always been a huge Guillermo del Toro fan, so when I got the call, I already said, "I'm in." But yeah, it was wonderful to meet him for the first time, actually on his set. Really cool.
Wired: Were you familiar with the kaiju/mecha genres before you signed on to do Pacific Rim?
Djawadi: Before I flew up [to Toronto], they sent me the script so I was able to read it before I arrived. I actually made [del Toro] laugh: without even having talked to him, I read the script and realized the sheer size of this project – you know, like in Jaws, when they see the shark for the first time and say, "I think we're gonna need a bigger boat"? I read the script and said to him, "I think we're gonna need a bigger orchestra." How are we going to keep up with these huge robots and monsters with a regular-sized one?
Wired: How big did your orchestra actually end up being?
Djawadi: It was over 100 players, and we had a big Russian choir, lots of extra percussion. We just beefed up everything. In each [instrumental] section alone, we had more players than the average-sized orchestra. We needed that big sound. I wanted to be really big, to go all out for this, so we kept it big from the beginning.
Wired: After your work on films like Iron Man and shows like Game of Thrones, you obviously must be pretty used to these huge productions by now. Do you have a game plan from the beginning? What was your goal with this particular score?
Djawadi: We started out with broad-stroke discussions. Guillermo had a great vision of what he wanted for the film straight from the beginning. He wanted it to be a nice adventure film; he said, "I definitely want to be able to hum my theme." He knew he wanted guitars. He always referred to his Jaeger pilots as not really military people, but more like modern cowboys, more rock-n-roll, so he wanted their theme to be twangy, with more guitars. For the kaiju, he wanted to stay more on the traditional side, to pay homage to the Godzilla-type theme, so we used big trombone sections. So based on those conversations, I sat down and started writing theme ideas. Before we even put music to picture, I played him these, and then we started plugging them into the film to see what would work.
Wired: The theme song you ended up with really fit in with your previous work. All these theme songs, Iron Man, Game of Thrones, Blade: Trinity – they all have this repetitive, building, addictive qualities to them. What's the recipe for making a good theme?
Djawadi: I wish I knew the recipe. If only I did, maybe this would come a lot easier to me. I think it's maybe just a way of contemporary scoring, of combining orchestra with modern elements, with synthesizers and guitars. I always find it very tricky, because sometimes the two elements don't necessarily blend well. You've got a big orchestra with a really lush sound, and then a guitar or other single instrument, that's really in-your-face and upfront, so to blend the two can be challenging. I experimented with that [balance] on Iron Man, and it ended up going more in that direction; once we started plugging in a couple guitars, we realized "Wow, [that blend] sounds really badass, let's keep that going."
Wired: And of course, you brought back Tom Morello, who worked with you on Iron Man, to help with that badassery for the Pacific Rim score.
Djawadi: That's right. We're good friends, and when [Guillermo and I] realized that this movie would be going even more into the guitars direction than we anticipated, we started talking about finding someone really special. Of course, Tom was the person who came to my mind—not only because he's a great player, but because the special effects he does on his guitar, I don't even know how he does them. They're so unique. He gave that extra element, that uniqueness, to the robots.
Wired: You worked with the RZA on Blade: Trinity back in 2004. How did you link up with him again, for the Pacific Rim song "Drift"?
Djawadi: Yeah, we co-composed that Blade score; that was where we met. "Drift" was actually written by him, me and a singer/songwriter named Blake Perlman. [Blake] was the one who suggested we work with the RZA. So the three of us just got on the phone. It's great that, in this day and age, we didn't even have to be in the same place. The RZA was all over the place, in Canada, then somewhere else, but we just sent files back and forth to put that song together.
Wired: How do you pick your projects, typically? What's a project got to have to catch your eye?
Djawadi: It's a little bit of everything, actually. A lot of it is based on relationships, so if you have a good experience with somebody, it's always nice when they call you back, so that's a lot of it. But what I love about film music is the variety. On one movie you might be asked to do a completely electronic score, and then another might ask you to do orchestral only. I like to jump around quite a bit. So after a big action film like this I might do a little animation thing, so I love to switch up my styles. There isn't really a theme.
Wired: What do you listen to or watch when you're not working on a project?
Djawadi: My background is totally all over the place. I was born and raised in Germany, so I was classically trained. Classical has been deep in me, from a totally early age. Then as a teenager, I picked up the guitar and was really into rock music. Then in college [at Berklee College of Music], I studied jazz for a while. All these elements were a great preparation for film music. I always really wanted to do film scoring, largely because I hate writing lyrics. I just won't do it. I need help with the words. My music has always been on the instrumental side. So my tastes range from Tchaikovsky to Rage Against the Machine – I just love mixing it up. There's always a new challenge, something new to try. I'll never get tired of it.
Wired: Was there anything about this particular score that you'd never tried before?
Djawadi: This score definitely has a huge range of instrumentation, because we go from this epic-scale thing with guitars, then for the different robots – we have that Russian choir for the [Russian Jaeger team]. We used [Japanese] taiko drums, we used this Chinese instrument, the erhu, in the theme for the Ron Perlman character, Hannibal Chau.
But [there was] one fun new thing we incorporated for this movie. When Guillermo first showed me these robots, he always said the main one, Gipsy Danger, was–when it shows up–"the ship horn." I went, "What's the biggest horn out there? Could I actually, literally get a ship horn or fog horn?" So I did. What was great was that the sound effects people incorporated the ship horn into their side of it, so we were always talking and making sure the horns were always in the same key so the tonality was always in sync, so you always have to wonder whether the sound you're hearing is part of the score or part of the [movie] effects? I'd never come that close to mashing those two departments together before.
Wired: Wow, yeah, you'd never think about that being a potential issue, the score and the sound effects actually clashing harmonically.
Djawadi: Yeah, whenever I wrote something and it accidentally ended up being in the wrong key, it was horrible, really clashy. But the way [the music and sound effects departments] collaborated was great. Obviously everyone's working on each scene parallel [to each other], and then we'd meet up every time we'd get an updated visual [scene], to tweak everything and stay on the same page, and then we were constantly handing files back and forth.
Wired: So you worked piecemeal, scene-by-scene?
Every piece that's written for picture, Guillermo would come over and we'd meet, for every single piece. There's something like 100 minutes of music in the film, and we were meeting on a weekly basis, to discuss and tweak. It was very involved, every step of the way. Guillermo knew exactly what he wanted. It was great to work with someone who has so many ideas, and then to turn that vision into music. It made my job easier, especially when everything comes together in post-production and you have someone saying, "I like this instrument here, but I don't want any of that." It gives you certain restrictions you can work with; it's really fun to work within those parameters.
Wired: Okay, I can't not ask you this question. You said before that you got into rock music as a teenager. Were you in a band?
Djawadi: Oh, definitely. There were several, some local bands in Germany, and then in college in the mid-'90s, in Boston, I was in a band called My Favorite Relatives. It was a fun pop rock band; I wasn't the main songwriter in the band, though. I just played guitar. We got pretty popular in the Boston area. (Ed. Note: You can buy My Favorite Relative's EP On Holiday here.)
But that was something I wanted to do even before I got into film scoring. I wanted to play in bands and get signed by a record label and tour the world and stuff, but that never really worked out. I ended up coming out to LA to do this, and looking back, I'm pretty glad I did that instead, because when I was young I never realized how long it took to even get a foot in the door.
That's the one thing I miss, though: playing onstage. When you're a composer, you're in a studio all day, and you write by yourself, but when you're in front of an audience, there's a connection there that's so special that I love. Maybe one day I'll do that again.
