Award-winning composer Michael Giacchino reveals more information on the development of the score for Rogue One in this latest article posted over on Variety.
For more on Giacchino and the film’s amazing score, check out the previous articles we reported on here and here.
He flew home from the final “Strange” sessions in London on a Friday and started writing “Rogue One” on Monday. He would have just four and a half weeks to compose more than two hours of music for the first standalone “Star Wars” film, a prequel to the original 1977 adventure.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make. But, Giacchino confesses, “When I was 9, I saw ‘Star Wars’ and it set me on a path to where I am today. There was this need inside of me to make sure that this film felt like what I loved as a kid, as a fan, somebody who grew up playing with the action figures.”
In fact, he still has those action figures and brought them with him to the recording sessions at Sony that first week of November. It was only then, when his 110-piece orchestra launched into John Williams’ original “Star Wars” theme, that he began to have second thoughts: “Why did I say yes to this? What was I thinking?”
Yet, while he acknowledges that no one can top Williams, Giacchino felt up to the task. “There were all these new characters, so they needed new themes. But I wanted it to feel like ‘Star Wars.’ It’s a very specific style of orchestration and composing, grounded in Ravel, Prokofiev, Holst – in the same way that George (Lucas), when he was making ‘Star Wars,’ looked to ‘Flash Gordon’ and all those serials that inspired him when he was growing up.”
Despite fleeting references to original Williams themes, “98 percent of the score is all new,” Giacchino says, including themes for Jyn (Felicity Jones), Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), the Guardians of the Whills (Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen) and, especially, a “hope” theme for the Rebel Alliance – whose final appearance includes a 80-voice choir.
It’s a war movie, Giacchino points out. A veteran of war music for video games like “Medal of Honor” and “Call of Duty,” he says, “I’ve always wanted to do a World War II film, and I feel like I just had my chance.”
Unlike those previous projects, however, this score didn’t need to be filled with bravado, he adds. There is a heartrending moment near the end of the film that needed “a sense of hope and a sense of loss. I wanted it to feel like a church hymn. It’s about sacrifice, and I didn’t want it to be completely maudlin; I wanted it to feel balanced, for what (the rebels) accomplished.”
