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Sep 23, 2016 By Jason Wilson Web Exclusive

Two very different films, Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven and Terrence Malick’s new documentary The Voyage of Time, have one direct through line joining them together. Simon Franglen composed music for both.

The films debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival between September 8-18 with two versions of the Malick documentary, one a 45 minute IMAX experience, and the other a feature-length 90 minutes exploring creation and destruction through birth and death and humanity’s place on Earth. The Magnificent Seven is a cowboy romp, and a familiar story brought back to the silver screen.

“They are two diametrically opposed films,” Franglen said when I sat down with him during the festival. “Magnificent 7 is meant to be a popcorn movie. Cowboy films were the superhero films of, well at least, my youth before we had robots and CGI. This goes back to that. These are proper heroes. These guys are mad, bad and dangerous to know and gradually they become heroes. It knows what it is. It’s meant to be a crowd pleaser. It’s meant to be enjoyable.

“It’s meant to put a smile on your face because you’ve enjoyed the ride.”

As important a job as composing his first film score was, Franglen would have preferred it didn’t come to pass the way it did. His friend, and regular collaborator, James Horner passed away in June, 2015 as he was working on the score for the film. He had completed an initial theme for the score that Franglen later delivered to director Antoine Fuqua.

“I flew to Louisiana to give Antoine this gift from James,” he said. “Antoine said to me, ‘I’d like you to do the score,’ which was a big call.”

Franglen explained that MGM, the studio behind the duster, could have perceived the decision as a risk as he had never been the primary composer on a film. He has worked with synthesizers and synclaviers while programming music for films like Se7en, Crash (Cronenberg), and Contact while working as arranger and score producer for the two most recent James Bond films among others.

“To me it wasn’t a risk because that’s what we do. I’ve done multi-million dollar films and handled budgets, but to them I can obviously understand that,” he said. “I’ve been a secret weapon in Hollywood for many years and everybody knows me but that puts a box by me. They had to, in their heads, say, ‘oh, he’s in that box now,’ and that’s fine.”

One of the things he wanted from The Magnificent Seven’s score was for it to have an epic, cinematic scope. It needed to be large and it needed to fill the room. This meant recording the large orchestra together to make it feel more of a piece.

“There’s a tendency these days to use smaller orchestras and separate everything else so the strings are recorded separately from the brass and from the percussion and so on. Because then it allows people to edit afterwards and do what they want with the music. But it doesn’t give you that widescreen sound,” he said. “When everybody plays together, there’s that blend between all the microphones and all the players; they’re interacting with one another. You get that from the performances.”

Franglen used his synthesizer background as a bit of an inspiration, but wanted to find organic ways to create the textures he could find in electronic music. The movie being set in the 19^th century, it might have felt out of place or purposely anachronistic. So he focused on using guitars and bowed instruments to recreate the crunching, forward thrusting sound he would find in synthesizers. It also needed to reflect the characters.

“They’re very much individual gunslingers. If there’s one word for how the score should be is that it has swagger, and I think that’s what I and the team wanted to give is that sense of that swagger.”

The score was completed in March of this year after only starting the proper scoring in January for a very quick turnaround.

His experience with Terrence Malick was very different. Franglen was approached to write some music after Malick heard some of Franglen’s more experimental work. In addition to being a film composer, Franglen has produced records and played music for many years. He was asked to write a series of four or five-minute long suites of music with a collection of strings, brass, woodwinds, and more. When he asked if he could see the images he was scoring against, he was denied. They wanted to see what he would create in isolation without anything influencing where he would take the music other than his own inspiration based on minimal notes and suggestions.

“They just wanted these sort of evolving textures using orchestral instruments. I would send over more stuff, and there would be tweaks and changes and the first time I actually found out how the music had been used was yesterday when I had seen the full 90 minutes.”

He noted that there are 18 times his music is used in Voyage of Time, and he’s satisfied. Similar to how some actors have been used in Malick’s films, Franglen was not sure how much of his compositions would actually make the final cut. Unlike some of those performers, he was satisfied with the end result and with his collaboration with Malick.

“It’s Terrence Malick…you say yes,” he said. “It’s important people like him exist because he obviously only makes films for himself. He’s not trying to please anyone else but himself and it’s very important for someone to be able to do that.

“Very proud to have had my moment with Malick.”

While his two experiences were widely different, they represent the various challenges and opportunities that are present in his line of work. It’s not an easy road, no matter how rewarding it can be when the work is completed and on display.

“The key thing a composer needs to have is the hide of a buffalo. Film scoring is a full contact sport. You have to expect it’s going to be rough at times. These weren’t, but I’ve definitely seen it be so.”

Franglen’s schedule is not going to lighten, either. He has several projects down the pike, most of which he was unable to discuss, but they happen to be in television and film. He is working on a lower budget, synth-heavy score for a film coming out in 2017. All he would say is that he’s very excited for it.

One project, non-film related, is an immersive he’s been commissioned to do in Shanghai, China.

“Imagine a dome about the size of the Sistine Chapel, a hemisphere,” he began. “In it are 260 loud speakers, all around you at different heights and levels with different levels where you can walk within this hemisphere. We’re using a sound system that allows me to literally place a sound hanging in air. So, you can feel it (snaps fingers in the air) here rather than feeling like it’s coming from a loudspeaker over there (points to the wall). I’ve written a suite commissioned for the Shanghai Tower…it has four interlocking orchestras plus a 48 voice choir for a 20 minute suite of music based on a day in Shanghai.”

Shanghai is exciting because it offers a wide variety of tones as a city, which means the music inspired by it should be varied and dynamic. It offers a blend of past, present, and future that lends itself to music very well.

“Shanghai, for me, is a town in another century compared to the rest of the world.”

Whether it’s film, television, immersive displays atop the Shanghai Tower, or elsewhere, Franglen’s touches resonate. With his exposure from The Magnificent Seven and Voyage of Time, his adaptability is on display and perhaps he won’t be a secret weapon much longer.

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The Magnificent Seven is now in theaters. You can learn more about Simon Franglen’s past (and upcoming) credits on his website.