This interview has been edited for written clarity. The full unedited video interview is available here and embedded below.
Tyler Nethers
So, I know we’re gonna talk a lot of Avatar, but I wanted to start with you and where you started with composing, what brought you to that?
Simon Franglen
I was 13 years old, I walked into my school, I’d gone from the lower school to the higher school, and the higher school had a theater, and then the theater had a control room, and I walked in there, and there was a tape recorder, and that was it. I knew exactly what I was gonna do with the rest of my life. And basically, that’s been it. It was an evolution. I knew that… I sort of knew I wanted to get into film composing, but I initially thought I wanted to be a record producer, and I wrote to the BBC when I was 13 and said, “How do I become a record producer?” So, this was the only thing. And after going to college, I went straight to London and started working in recording studios there. And I was working in a tiny, tiny studio. And they got one of the first music computers, and the great thing about it was, it kept breaking down. And the breaking down meant that I had to go back to the distributor to get it repaired. They also distributed a thing called the Synclavier, which was the world’s biggest music computer at the time. And the distributors recommended me to Trevor Horn, who was the biggest record producer at the time. So I went and met Trevor, started working for him, and I was his key Synclavier programmer for a while. From there, I went freelance, and an American engineer saw me and said, “You should come to America.” So, I came to America, I became a session musician, then I became a record producer, and then I started becoming an arranger in films, and the first thing I did was the soundtrack to Dances with Wolves. And it went on from there.
TN
That’s great. So, I know you’ve worked in film, and film is where you primarily like to live, but you have a lot of record-producing credits as well, right?
SF
I believe across all music, I have 400 albums. Now, A lot of those are sort of, like, greatest hits as well, so… but there’s probably… 150 to 200 albums that I’ve worked on over the years, and singles and stuff like that. Yeah, I did lots and lots of records.
TN
Yeah, so even with diving into records and doing that side of it, film just remained. That was it. That was where the passion was.
SF
Yes, and I think the thing about it was, records have changed over the last few years. They have to, you know. It’s… pop music is meant to evolve. And I looked at the records that have been made, and started to be made about 10, 15 years ago, and they no longer interested me the way that they had before. I found there was a bit too much of this, sort of… everything was getting focused in on a particular style. It was feeling a bit regimented. And I felt like… the thing about film music is there are no rules. There’s no rule about what tempo I’m at, there’s no rule about what time signature I’m in, no rules about what instruments I might use, or voices, or anything. All of those things are down to what the film tells you, and every film is different. And so you get a different set of challenges with every movie. And that was exciting, in the way that I found that records were becoming more and more the sort of same variations of things, and that was interesting me less, and I’m better off leaving that to… Andrew and, you know, Andrew White and Mark Ronson. We worked on the single for this film. I took an active choice not to be involved in the production of this. I decided it was time to let other people handle that.
TN
It’s interesting, you talk about how much more freedom and how much more… maybe control is the wrong word, but how much more you can put into a film score. You worked on Se7en, right? You worked on the score for Se7en. There’s a ton of stuff you can praise about Se7en, but so much of what made it what it was, I feel like, is the atmospheric music, is the score that goes underneath and really drives how the audience is feeling. Where did you go to kind of get that? Because that’s a… that’s a dirty… It’s kind of a dirty, nasty movie, right?
SF
Well, Howard Shaw was the composer, and I was working for him. I was the guy who was in charge of the dirty, nasty side of things. So what Howard asked me to do was to make a score that he… we wanted you to feel that unease at all times, and I’ll give an example – what I found was that I took the sound of squealing brakes and I sampled them across the keyboard. And I played all the violin parts with squealing breaks, so that you have a real orchestra playing violins, but the violins are also being supported by squealing breaks the whole time. And it just gives you this… sound… It’s almost like… if I could have used a blackboard, fingers across a blackboard, I would have done it as well, but it’s those vibes. I did things like putting the orchestra through a fuzz box to give that distortion edge on some of the sounds. We processed the orchestra so that it never felt normal. and that everything was just off. That was an important part of this; you look at the way that Fincher had shot it, and it’s still an absolute masterpiece. I’m very proud to have worked on it, and… it’s the only film I’ve worked on where I used to bring it home with me in my head, where I couldn’t shake it. It gave me bad dreams for a while, because there’s a version of the film that is not in the final cut that was a lot worse than what we see.
TN
So you go through, and you probably compose, or produce music for, what, 7, 8 hours of what might be the film, and then it gets cut down in the editing room, and you kind of adapt from there?
SF
Usually, by the time we’ve gotten to the compositional stage, it’s shorter. I mean, there are times when it’s, like, 4 hours long, or something like that. The first time I came on to Titanic, James Horner was composing- and that was the first time I worked with James Horner- Titanic was 5 hours, the first cut I saw. But there had been much longer versions of that. Then, on Avatar 3… the first versions I started working on for Fire and Ash were probably closer to 4 hours. And then… It’s like a concertina, it sort of goes in and out. There are bits that disappear, it gets shorter, and then there are bits that come back. Or there are things where you’re shuffling the cards. And so, a piece that is over here suddenly ends up over there.
And that’s a constant battle, with trying to make sure that your music – it’s becoming like somebody chopping up spaghetti, and you have to then try and put the spaghetti back together again after it’s been chopped up. That’s part of the skill of composition and of the process of making film music. Constantly, you’re moving… everything is moving around, and what you thought you’d written now becomes something completely different, you know? It’s that thing where if you go… Man goes through door, Man shoots other man, man runs out of door, man gets in car. And you’ve written your music that way. Then, they edit it. Man gets into car. Finds body on the floor, flashback to man going through door, man shoots other man, right? And now you have a completely different thing, and now your music has ended up… everything you did to build to the man getting in the car is completely wrong. Getting in the car is now the first thing, not the last thing so you have to then decide, how do you build your temper, so you then rewrite it. And that’s a normal part of film composing.
TN
Do you ever find yourself getting overly attached to a certain piece of music that then maybe corresponds with a scene that gets cut, and you’re like, well, this piece was too good, I need to find a spot to fit this back in somewhere?
SF
Sometimes, but I’m pretty good at setting my children free. You have to just accept that. The film… You know – your music is just stuff for the spaghetti machine. And then, how the spaghetti gets remade is up to the director and to the film.
TN
So, we’ll hit Avatar. Your role in composition and producing for Avatar has expanded over the entries, yeah? What brought you on initially?
SF
James Horner. We had bumped into each other a couple of times after Titanic. I’d gone off, and I’d just gone back to record producing and stuff like that. I’d moved to England because there were some family issues, so I needed to go and… and so… I’d bumped into him with Abbey Road or something like that a couple of times. And I was in LA producing Tony Braxton, and he phones me up and says, “Hey, I know you don’t do this anymore, but please come and have a look at a film.” And he asked me to look at 5 minutes of Avatar 1, and said, “Would you be interested in working on this?” I looked, and it was astounding. It really was. Absolutely astounding. So, I agreed, and I spent what ended up being the whole of 2009 working with Horner on that. And we came up with an arrangement, which was that he did all the thematic stuff and the big orchestra stuff. Mine was the electronic sound, the rhythmic side, the sort of feel of the film, the music. So when Jake does the big thing where he puts his arms out, and all the wood sprites fall on him, that was the sort of texture where I would build the wood sprites falling on Jake, when he looks around, and there’s the glowing forest, or if there are the rhythms. And so I got immersed in that, and Horner and I decided that we really enjoyed working together a lot. And we had a very, very good team; we enjoyed that whole collaborative process together. Then we continued to do other films together, and I was continuing to do this thing where I’d move now, we’d evolved my range… my role to be score producer, I think is the technical, where he would write the themes, and I would produce the scores. And then, tragically, he died in 2015 in a plane crash. And I was working on, among other things, the theme park for Avatar in Disney World, Florida. And I was doing the music for that.
Then Jim and Jon… so Jim Cameron, Jon Landau, the producer of the film, sort of asked me to just finish that off, and at the end of 2017, they asked me to read the scripts to Avatar 2, 3, 4, and 5. And because they were fully… at that point, there were 4 scripts for the next 4 sequels. And he, said to me – you know – we talked about it, I started writing some of the music that needed to be on screen in 2018. Things like, Neytiri sings the song chord, there’s a song she sings in the film, somebody has to write the song, somebody has to write the lyrics, and so on, so I did all of those bits of on-screen stuff. And then they asked me to do the scores, so that’s been, a significant part of the last few years. In 2022, I did Avatar 2. And then, for the last two and a half years, I’ve been working on Avatar 3, which has been just a monumental task.
TN
Oh yeah, I’m sure, not only is the rate of the films obviously increased from the initial one, but the scale of each one, and the magnitude, and what’s being packed into each movie seems like, you know, it grows exponentially in between entries.
SF
Yes, it is, yes, it has.
TN
Yeah, so…You didn’t know it was gonna be a multi-decade project when you signed on for the first Avatar.
SF
No, we… I was told, could I reserve 2013 for Avatar 2?
TN
And now here we are in 2026.
SF
Yeah. So, Avatar 2 was when James Horner was alive, he was told, maybe we’ll do Avatar 2 in 2013, which is 4 years away from Avatar 1. That then got delayed. Drastically. We released Avatar 2 in 2022. So we’re now, now I’ve got technically on the books, now, we haven’t confirmed that 4 and 5 are gonna get made. But I think at $1.4 billion in the box office so far, I think there’s a chance.
TN
I think it’s probably a pretty safe bet, yeah.
SF
But, that technically is meant to be 2029. And 2031. As well. And so, there’s those. And I’m gonna get to do some other movies as well in the next couple of years, I hope.
TN
How collaborative is James Cameron with the music on Avatar? Because I know he has a lot of control over all of his movies, obviously, but this is his world, his story, his baby. How much give and take is there with the scoring for these?
SF
There are only two people I have to please. I have to please myself. And then I have to please Jim. And it’s as simple as that. It makes life incredibly simple, because, if you can imagine, for most movies, what happens is, yes, you’ve got the director, and you’re trying to please the director, and you’re trying to get the best music for the film for the director, and sometimes directors may not be… Musically sophisticated in the way that they want, you know, that you think that they’re not actually improving the film with their musical choices. Jim is the opposite. I think he has a phenomenal sense of what music should do in his film, and I’ve…invariably found that when he suggests things or moves stuff that I’ve written to somewhere else, that the film… the music gets better. That’s not always the case. But if you work on a normal film, first of all, you’ve got to deal with the director. Secondly, then the producers get involved, because they all want to have an opinion. Then you discover that maybe the executive producers and the executive producer’s daughter or son, who’s had a great idea, saw something in the theater the other day. “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did this?” And I’m not kidding, this happens all the time. And then the film company comes in and says, “No, actually, you know how the director wants you to use a 5,000-piece orchestra with 300 singers from Mars? You’ve actually got the money for a kazoo and 3 banjos.” And you have to sort of balance all of those things out. Avatar, I have Jim. And… what do you say to a man who’s made 3 of the 4 top films of all time? Other than yes. And I don’t mean that, because he is very, very collaborative, in that… if I show him something, I… you know, we have a thing called a temp score, which is where he shows me his intentions. But the great thing about Jim is he says, “This is what I’m intending, not what I exactly want.” And so he will show me this and say, “I’d like it to feel like this.” Then my job is to make it… take it from what he feels to making it that the film owns the piece of music, that now I’ve written something specific to this film, not a copy of something else. And he’s great about that. The other thing is, often I will say, “Yeah, your temp is wrong, let me show you something else.” And on [Avatar] with the sound of the Ash, when the Ash first attack, his temp was completely different. I showed him something completely different to what he had, with these things called Morin khuurs, these Mongolian instruments, and so on. The moment I showed it to him, he went, “Yeah, that’s it.” You know, and so he’s very open to a better idea if the idea is better. And, so that works great. And we talk… For hours and hours and hours and hours about the music. And the other great thing about Jim is that when you are discussing something with Jim, you get 100% of his attention. The phone never rings, nobody interrupts. You know, we will take a break for lunch or dinner, but I remember our first spotting session, which is where we go through and choose the music for the film. For Avatar 3, the first spotting session was 3 days. No interruptions. And the phone never rang in 3 days. And that’s something that nobody else is able to do.
TN
So, when you’re talking about making the music, and you’re talking about collaborating on it, with the Avatar movies, the score feels like it is almost its own character. Some films, it underlays; some films, it’s just kind of background; but in Avatar, it feels like it plays as integral a role to the story as anything that you see. Do you find yourself trying to bounce in and out of different characters for different spots of the score? How does that work for you?
SF
Very much so. Jim wanted a thematic score. And part of that is that he wanted me to provide things that we associate with characters or places, so that he felt that if I have themes for the family, you know, like Heroic Jake, we’ve got Lo’ak, we’ve got Varang, our new, Warrior Queen, we’ve got the Ash, we’ve got the RDA, who are the baddies, because we didn’t have, for instance, an Imperial March sort of thing. And now we have. We’ve got a Quaritch theme, we’ve got an Eywa theme, we’ve got a Kiri theme, we’ve got all these things that come up. And part of that is because he feels it gives you that resonance with characters and so on. And he wants that emotional connection that those, like an epic sweeping film score with themes, is something that he’s grown up with, that he loves as the idea. And for this sort of film. if I can help you navigate some of the big action scenes by using themes, then I will.
TN
I think you nailed it. I watched the movie over this past weekend. I watched Avatar when it came out in the theaters. I was actually working at a movie theater when it came out, so I think I saw it probably 32 times, because everybody wanted to come see it with me. But I really felt it in this new one, how much the music meant to what was happening, and how well it indicated to the audience, you know, “This is what you’re supposed to feel, this is what’s happening, this is how you should approach it.” And you created instruments for this movie, right?
SF
Yeah. So, the wind traders are, we see the wind traders, they sail these 800-foot-tall flying galleons. And on one of the scenes, and we have it in the film, there’s about 30 seconds of it in the film; it was originally 3 minutes. They’re having a thing called the Wind Trader’s Jig, which is a dance on the galleon. And they’re dancing, they’re singing, and so on, but they’re also playing instruments. They can’t play… I can’t give them, say, guitars and banjos. They’re 10 feet tall. They have 3 fingers and one thumb. They’re from a different planet. They’ve got to play different instruments. And so I had to design instruments that the wind traders would play. So I looked around, you know, I looked for analogues on Earth to things, and I found some variations that I then, you know, I looked at various strings, instruments, because I needed something strong for this, and I needed some drums. And the string instruments, I wanted them to reflect the fact that they use rigging, their ships are full of ropes and so on. And I’d seen across a lot of societies, you see this thing where their instruments reflect the society. It’s not uncommon. And so I did a thing where I made a rope, like, a rigging, where they had a string instrument that would hang over their shoulder, then they would play like this with strings and go through this like this. And so on. And there was another one which was using a various, sort of, like, a slide, almost like a Berimbau-type instrument. And I designed them, roughly sketched them out, gave them to the art department, who then made beautiful 3D renders, because we need to have a 3D render that we can have in the film, because obviously, as the camera’s moving around, you can’t just have a flat instrument. The instrument’s got to actually exist in 3D. But if it exists in 3D, then an actor has to play it, because we don’t animate in Avatar, we only capture performances. So, there were musicians and actors on stage who needed to be able to play these instruments. So the prop master, Brad Elliott, then printed them out, and they’re beautiful. And we have 3D printed instruments that we then used in the film, and the sound of them is in the soundtrack.
TN
That’s awesome. That’s such a neat thing to have your name on, too. Like, “I worked on this movie, and we created an instrument for the movie, and now it can carry on in the future.” Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. That’s really all I’ve got. This has been super enlightening about a bit of the process and everything to do with Avatar and your career. I think it’s been really cool, and I really look forward to seeing Avatar 4 and what comes to light with that.
SF
Well, Avatar 4 is very different. It really… Avatar 2 and 3 were a pair, an A and a B. They were a continuation of the same story. 4 goes into whole different places.
You can watch the full video interview with Simon, here.
Interview with Avatar: Fire and Ash composer Simon Franglen
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