You mentioned that you’ve been living under a rock for the past year since you’ve been working on Black Panther. I’m sure every project is different, but what’s the typical process you go through when writing music for film?
It is different with every film, but the first thing I always do is research the film and what I’m doing -- what the movie’s about and how I can tackle every project in a new way. For example, with Creed, I went into a gym and recorded a bunch of boxing sounds and used that in the whole score.
For Black Panther, the whole movie takes place in a fictional country in Africa called Wakanda, and reading about how this country is the most technologically advanced country in the whole world, and it was never colonized, how would music sound in a country in Africa like that? So the first thing I did after reading the script was travel to Senegal and South Africa and went on different field trips, recording some amazing musicians.
All of the music in Africa is created for different reasons. Drum beats and rhythms are created for different things -- like, this is something you’d only play at a funeral, so how do you use that so you can use the sounds in a culturally appropriate way in the film as well?
It’s really cool to hear that you took the time to do the research and even traveled for the project. That’s impressive.
It was such a fantastic project to be a part of. So that was kind of the skeleton of the score, but then the big challenge was, how do you infuse the African music with a 150-piece orchestra to make it sound more cinematic -- it’s still a Marvel superhero movie -- and still have it feel African?
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I’m pretty sure Coates is a better writer then both of them and I don’t know who Joe Robert Cole is.