“Can we forget the notes once and do a flutter effect?” Ramin Djawadi leaned over a console in the control room at the Newman Scoring Stage on the Fox Studios lot, a Sprinkles cupcake in his hand as he directed a group of musicians recording his score for The Mountain Between Us. On screens above Djawadi’s head, footage played of Idris Elba grappling in the snow in the romance-disaster film, with flutes, horns, and violins heightening the scene’s tension.
Best known for his muscular Game of Thrones scores, Djawadi is one of Hollywood’s emerging composer stars, and he's built a Hollywood fan base for his other work on such movies as Iron Man and Pacific Rim and shows like Westworld and The Strain. On this day in late July, the 43-year-old Iranian-German melodist was in the midst of his favorite part of his job, finally hearing live musicians play the themes that have danced in his head for months.
The Mountain Between Us, directed by Hany Abu-Assad and opening today, stars Elba and Kate Winslet as a pair of strangers stranded together in a snowy mountain wilderness after a plane crash. Djawadi’s musical task on the film was to underline its two key, will-they-or-won’t-they questions: Will they live? And will they screw?
“Hany wanted to make sure that we don’t lose the tension, and that romantic aspect,” Djawadi told Vanity Fair when the musicians took a break. “Riding those two lines was in every piece that we worked on. We always wanted to make sure we had a balance.”
Big-screen epic romances are increasingly rare, certainly less so than in earlier eras when movies like Doctor Zhivago, Out of Africa, and The English Patient became critical and commercial successes. The Mountain Between Us, Djawadi said, reflects a more contemporary approach to how emotion is revealed on screen. Instead of a full orchestra swelling with a love theme, Djawadi used smaller combinations of instruments, 40 at most.
“It’s very different nowadays how movies like this get scored,” Djawadi said. “We tried to make it more internal. A lot of times there’s not even dialogue saying how they feel. It’s more how they look at each other. What you see on screen, the acting is gritty and very real. . . . We’ve changed how we underline those emotions.”
Djawadi grew up in Germany and became obsessed with moving to the U.S. while watching Westerns as a child—Elmer Bernstein’s Magnificent Seven score has long been an inspiration. He attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music before taking a job at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. He’s worked steadily since setting out on his own in the mid 2000s, but his biggest breakthrough certainly was the Game of Thrones gig. He spent much of 2017 touring arenas with the Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience and conducted an orchestra in the Walt Disney Concert Hall for the HBO show’s Season 7 premiere. His next big assignment is scoring Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time for Disney.
He and his wife, music executive Jennifer Hawks— who produced the Game of Thrones tour— also are slowly introducing their nearly 4-year-old twins to the family trade. At the scoring stage that day, the twins’ voices rose nearly as high as the orchestra, and Djawadi wondered aloud which instruments he ought to start them out on. Inevitably the children have taken an interest, Djawadi said, as he often writes his themes at home, with a voice memo app on his phone. “[My wife] fully supports my getting up in the middle of the night, going to the bathroom, and singing into the phone,” Djawadi said. “I just always hear music in my head. I thought that was normal. My wife said, ‘Ramin, that’s not normal.’”
