Interview With John R. Graham (Composer of KingsGlaive: Final Fantasy XV)
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We interviewed composer John R. Graham who recent project is Final Fantasy XV film. We talk about this music beginnings, the soundtrack and more. For information on John you can visit his website http://www.johngrahammusic.com/
Otakus & Geeks: Let’s start from the beginning. When did you fall in love with music and realize you wanted to be a musician?
John R. Graham: I can’t remember when I didn’t love music; when I was about ten years old and mowing grass I used to try to make it up, but I didn’t have the ability to write anything down. My parents were professors, so we were raised to revere the arts – poetry, art, architecture, music, literature – all of it really. But music wasn’t a focus of theirs. When I was 14 we got a proper stereo, and along with it materialized three records of symphonies that I just about wore out. One of them, Beethoven’s 3d, the Eroica, transfixed me – I mean, the whole thing but especially the horn trio just absolutely froze me. I’d never heard anything so amazing and that was it.
Otakus & Geeks: Who are some of your musical influences?
John R. Graham: I like pretty much everything, from Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus” to Beethoven to the Sex Pistols to M83 and zigur rós. I love the subtlety and power of the orchestra but I also love distorted walls of electric guitars. These days it feels as though life is coming at people so fast that in a single day, sometimes a single evening, they deal with everything from the very precious and even sacred to the squalid and perverse.
There once was a filter on news and on “decent conversation,” but now it’s all there in people’s living rooms. So I think eclecticism and even a certain chaos in music goes with that. It’s the life people are living now so if you want to write in a way that’s relevant to that you have to embrace it all.
Otakus & Geeks: Your recent project is the film Kingsglaive Final Fantasy? How did you get onboard with the project?
John R. Graham: I’d done a couple of projects for Square Enix and they had said they were happy with the results. I knew the movie was coming and let them know I was interested, but I was totally shocked – in a good way! – when they invited me to score it.
But I was ready. I’ve had the luck to have worked on a string of projects over the years that prepared me for the onslaught of over an hour and a half of large-scale orchestral music. I was lucky enough to start writing for movies before samples were good enough, so I began with live instruments from the start. I also had the good fortune to orchestrate and write a bit for Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons when they were still using live orchestras, had more work on films and on movie trailers scored live later on, so I was very comfortable working with the big-scale sound that Kingsglaive clearly needed.
Otakus & Geeks: The soundtrack as a lot of intense, heart pounding themes that really does great complimenting and setting the tone of the film. Can you tell us a little bit of the process of composing this score?
John R. Graham: When you’re facing that much music and picture edits, plus all the coordination issues on a big project – that’s heart pounding too! The risk in that situation is that you start writing and applying right away without giving yourself a chance to really think and respond. So I always try not to do that. I throw out my training and experience at the start and try to just react and respond and “record” my ideas as I watch the movie. I write down ideas, play a few drums or beat stuff out on the low strings or brass or something – work at the piano some or even the guitar. The idea is to try to stay in a reactive / responsive mode so that you write the music the movie is asking for, rather than applying what you have done somewhere else or in the past to it.
Kingsglaive has a lot of contrasts in it – technology and magic, selfishness and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal (though even some of the betrayals are motivated by a form of loyalty). Plus there is great contrast in the animation, in the lighting and shading of the film. So I began to use a harmonic structure that responds to that. It naturally alternates between major and minor, between more positive and more sombre feelings. And that harmonic structure is reflected in the melodies, really all through the score.
Otakus & Geeks: Is there any track from the album that is your personal favorite?
John R. Graham: I love the track, “Diamond Weapon (track three)” when the Kingsglaive think that the battle is mostly won and these huge monster weapons show up. It’s big, it’s loud, it’s elemental – nothing subtle about that opening! And I guess the other moment I love, for different reasons, is when Nyx, the hero, faces off against one of his greatest adversaries in, “At Struggle’s End.” There you’re hearing the culmination of so many ideas in the story and in the score. The coolest thing about a sequence like that is that it also represents such a collaboration; yes, I did my utmost to bring scale, power and a bit of majesty to that scene, but so did the actors, the animators, the costumers, and the people who conceived of that battle as it takes place.
There are a lot of moments that I really like, not least because we had such fantastic players in Nashville (led by Alan Umstead), in Los Angeles, and also in Japan. They really add emotion and the humanity to the movie, along with the actors, the artists and all the other contributors.
Otakus & Geeks: Which song was the most challenging to compose?
John R. Graham: The ones I wrote first – they take the longest because you’re still building out ideas and trying to avoid getting overly technical and analytical. You have to stay with gut-level and ignore the deadline breathing down your neck or you can lose the human response that the music has to have to convey that side of the story. So, to use a metaphor, you put a dab here in this corner, you paint in one of the outlines of a figure, and maybe a piece of the background, then rub out the first thing you did or even start over.
It’s important to stay really honest and authentic emotionally, because audiences are really good at sniffing out insincerity in music, whether or not they’ve had musical training. Once you get past that initial phase you can use your training to analyse what you have done and start to move faster, but you have to postpone that second stage longer than is comfortable if you want to do your best work.
Otakus & Geeks: How can fans keep updated on your next work?
John R. Graham: I’ve got some more stuff coming out but nothing announced, so I can’t expand on that; I love writing and will continue to work in games, television, trailers, movies – really anyplace that invites that combination of intuition and complexity that you hear in the Kingsglaive score.
