Chief of War composer James Everingham interview: On collaborating with Hans Zimmer and tapping into indigenous Hawaiian music

British movie composer James Everingham remembers the very first thing he reached for when he felt not sure a couple of cue for Chief of War. “The touchstone was all the time conventional Hawaiian music,” he says. “The rhythms, the best way we used vocals, the best way the melodies have been formed… that was our start line and one thing we returned to repeatedly.”

The Apple TV collection, co-scored with Hans Zimmer, referred to as for music with cinematic sweep and cultural immersion. Across 9 episodes, Jason Momoa’s Ka‘iana travels from island politics to ocean battles to non-public reckonings. “You’ve acquired Jason Momoa because the lead, and it isn’t simply set in Hawaii,” James explains. “You’ve acquired the politics of the chiefs, these large battles, romance — so many components that must be scored in a cinematic method, as a result of that is finally leisure. But Hawaiian musical tradition needed to be on the core of the whole lot we wrote.”

Part of that meant figuring out when to guide and when to step again. Much of Chief of War is carried out in Ōlelo Hawai‘i, the island’s critically endangered indigenous language, whose cadence and melody typically really feel inherently musical. “If you place conventional Hawaiian music — sung in ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i — over dialogue in that language, it may be fairly difficult,” James explains. Scene by scene, the workforce would determine whether or not to let Hawaiian vocals drive the rating or to maintain them atmospheric, permitting the dialogue to breathe. That may imply percussion, lyricless vocals, or the Hawaiian nostril flute rather than sung lyrics.

Key to this was collaboration with Grammy-nominated Hawaiian singer Kamaka Iwa Kanakaole, who wrote lyrics that integrated the occasions unfolding on display. “Instead of simply the vowels you normally would possibly get in cinematic vocals, you may make out this actual emotion in her voice, and it’s inherently tied to what’s occurring,” James says.

In his toolkit of sounds have been devices few outdoors Hawaii have heard: the oeoe (pronounced “oi oi”), a hollowed-out gourd swung overhead to create a ghostly whistle; the pahu, a shark-skin drum; the puniu, a smaller knee-strapped drum utilized in hula; the kaʻekeʻeke, a bamboo idiophone with a tonal thud. Notably absent was the ukulele. “The ukulele will not be from the Kingdom of Hawaii. It got here later with the annexation. We tried to keep away from the tropes,” he says.

If Chief of War broadened James’ musical vocabulary, it additionally reshaped his inventive course of. “I needed to make a really aware effort to maintain issues free sufficient that once I go to Hawaii, once I meet these unimaginable artists, there’s area for that to come back into the music,” he says. “Some individuals who know much more than I do about conventional Hawaiian music are going to place their stamp on it and take it to a complete different degree.”

That model of openness suits properly alongside Hans Zimmer. The two have labored collectively on a number of tasks, however James nonetheless notes moments that remind him why Zimmer is, properly… Hans Zimmer. “He’s so nice at understanding the core of the story, placing apart all of the flashy issues that could be on display and actually diving into the core themes and the id of no matter venture it could be,” he says. “For Chief of War, there are these themes of id, belonging and cultural significance. And Hans is great at dialling into that.”

Zimmer additionally pushed him to step outdoors his consolation zone. “Sometimes if you’re co-scoring a venture with somebody, it’s straightforward to gravitate in direction of the scenes that come naturally,” James says. “Something I discovered stunning is definitely the worth in doing one thing that doesn’t come naturally… possibly figuring that out yields a extra sudden consequence.”

Their work on Chief of War comes after a curious overlap of their histories with one of many world’s nice devices. In 2020, with the Royal Albert Hall shuttered for the primary time in additional than a century, James led a small workforce to seize the voice of its 9,999-pipe organ for a digital instrument library. “It was actually a once-in-a-lifetime alternative,” he says. “For the primary time because it opened within the 1800s, it was empty and out there.” Microphones have been positioned throughout the empty auditorium, a binaural pair within the Royal Box to catch the air and resonance because it swelled via the area.

Around that very same quiet stretch of months, organist Anna Lapwood was additionally taking part in it beneath particular entry, respiratory new life into the instrument most frequently heard at packed galas. There could be a wierd poetry in figuring out Zimmer’s rating for Interstellar, so outlined by its personal cathedral organ, by no means discovered its option to the Royal Albert Hall. “You most likely need to put it all the way down to entry. It’s booked out each single day for main performances,” he says. And but right here was James, digitising a sound that Zimmer himself might need as soon as chosen to craft probably the most iconic unique scores of the twenty first century, had timing and fortune aligned.

James says that his path to tasks like these wasn’t born of a single cinematic epiphany. “Lots of people have that second with John Williams,” he says. “For me, it was the classical music I used to be uncovered to as a baby — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler. Rachmaninoff was simply continuously taking part in in the home.” At seventeen, he recorded his first feature-length rating at Abbey Road Studios. Within a couple of years, he was scoring Amazon’s Grand Prix Driver and dealing with artists like AURORA on the BBC’s Frozen Planet II.

Now based mostly in Los Angeles, James has constructed a portfolio spanning tv, documentaries, and industrial work, alongside producing pattern libraries like Woodchester Piano and Fractured Strings. His newest characteristic work was on Paul Schrader’s 2024 documentary The Blue Angels, a chronicle of the United States Navy’s flight demonstration squadron — the identical outfit that famously impressed the fighter-pilot swagger of Top Gun. It’s a neat accident that Zimmer additionally helped rating Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 unique.

F1 director Joseph Kosinski directed Maverick, and James cites him as a dream collaborator for his skill to keep up high-entertainment worth with grounded realism. He additionally names Scott, who directed the unique Top Gun, as a formative affect. “Many administrators are influenced by him,” James says, “and possibly sooner or later that legacy will reside on in another person I get to work with.”

For now, James stands as a convergence of those many serendipitous threads. Chief of War appears to have distilled one thing important concerning the work he needs to maintain doing. “Loads of the time, movie music is a puzzle,” he says. “It’s a steady discovery of what the musical world is for the venture… and ideally one thing that hasn’t actually been heard earlier than.”

Chief of War is at present streaming on Apple TV