The tonality of the flute almost has a mystic element to me.
Ramin Djawadi
I don't listen to film music at all. I don't want to be influenced.
After high school, I moved to the U.S. and studied music in Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.
Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it's more powerful to leave you with nothing.
What's so cool about 'Light of the Seven' - and what I love about 'Game of Thrones' - is you never know what's going to happen.
With 'Iron Man,' I have to give Jon Favreau great credit for the score because he always said, from the beginning, 'Tony Stark is a rock n' roll guy.'
I actually enjoy the fantasy world quite a bit. You have no boundaries.
I like to have recognizable themes and sounds that really connect to the project and that you can identify with that particular project. My goal is always, 'When that theme comes on - even if you're not in the room - you hear it and say, 'Oh my show is starting, I gotta watch.'
I'm one of those artists who, if you'd let me tweak, would probably keep going and going, so it comes to the point where sometimes you just have to let go and make the decision, 'Okay, that's it.'
Find your own style, whatever it is. Whatever is inside you, bring that out. I think that's when you have something unique.
For me, always, the big inspiration really comes from talking with my creators, my showrunners and my producers, and seeing what is their vision for their project.
I myself am a huge Radiohead fan.
When I work on a movie, I look at the script or watch the film, and I talk to my director or producers and make a plan: this is our main character; we need a theme for this plot. We need a love theme.
'Game of Thrones' offers such a wide range of instruments that I use and stylistically for what I'm doing, but 'Westworld' is the same.
I guess with any type of music or any art, there's always an evolution.
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.
It's always daunting to start from scratch, but it's exactly what I love about my job.
I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.
I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.
I'll say, 'I really like Daenerys,' and then I go, 'Wait, but I like the Stark theme, too, and I like the Lannister theme.' I keep jumping around. But I think that's kind of the beauty of 'Game of Thrones,' that there's so many different ones, and they're all kind of different, and they do different things.
That's what I like: to kind of get up and start working right away in the morning.
I always like to tweak things and push things forward.
We knew we wanted to have our own tone for the show. And then the big instrument that actually we came up with was the cello. It has a big range. It can play really low. It can play high. And it has a dark sound, and 'Game Of Thrones' is obviously - it's a dark show, and the cello became the featured instrument.
I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.
I feel choir just has a great sense of power when used with an orchestra, or even by itself.
My dream that I followed and that I'm living now is that I actually always wanted to go to music college, play in a band, do a world tour, and then eventually get into film music.
I love to do animation movies, and those might be some scores that are lesser known, unless you really kind of dig through my work and see.
I would sit at the organ and just start making up things by myself - I was maybe 7 years old, which was too young to even know how to notate music. So I never wrote anything down, but when I'd make things up, I'd memorize them.
Most of the time, I'll be conducting the orchestra, but there will be some pieces that I'll be playing an instrument as well, just because I love playing. There's pieces where I want to grab an instrument and play with the rest of the group, like 'The Light of the Seven,' for example; I would love to play the piano for that.
With 'Westworld,' the player piano plays a very important role.
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.
I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would - came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just - I'll just sing into my phone.
Absolutely, I'm living my dream. Yeah. My wife always jokes, says I'm a big kid, you know, playing in the studio and coming up with melodies and sounds. And, you know, I wouldn't know any other way because I just have music in my head all the time, and I just love it.
I used to love American Westerns, growing up in Germany.
Deep down, classical Romantic music is what I love: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, the Romantics.
At the beginning of each project, I like to create a palette of sound for that particular project.
Performing was always something that I actually used to do before I settled in the studio as a composer.
There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.
What I like about 'Game of Thrones' is that there's such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.
What's so great with 'Game of Thrones' is that there are so many characters and they're so many locations and that it's just very inspiring.
There's so many great themes from the '80s: 'Magnum,' 'Miami Vice.'
When I write music, these colors pop out of me. It's hard to describe, but basically when I write music, I paint, and I add colors, and I add notes.
Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that - that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.
When you know you have great support from the studio, that's a great feeling, and when it's the creative support, that's great.
I'm actually really good at keeping secrets.
'Game of Thrones' is one of the most groundbreaking series on TV. The fact that I get to make music every day is such a privilege, and I'm incredibly grateful to be doing so with an amazing show such as this.
I'm a very visual person when it comes to writing music. I like to see something besides just a script, even if it's just a storyboard or pictures from the set.
I can almost see the music. It comes in the form of colors - colors jump out at me, and that translates into notes. They come fully formed: the orchestration parts, not just the melodies. Even though they're not always the right ones to use, the initial idea comes like that.
I might even go for walks, just kind of come up with ideas in my head and then even sleep over it. And, yeah, the next day, when I wake up in the morning, I feel like that's when the ideas come, because you kind of wake up fresh and clean. You're not influenced from music on the radio or any other source.
I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there's a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.
