Words by Sean Wilson

Disney-Pixar's new movie Luca is now available to stream on Disney+ The celebrated animation studio returns with an endearing and intimate story set on the Italian Riviera, one that mixes recognisable reality and fantasy. Room and Wonder actor Jacob Tremblay voices the eponymous Luca, a sea monster who goes incognito as a young boy on land, against the wishes of his fearful parents. Luckily, he has a garrulous and loyal new friend Alberto (IT's Jack Dylan Grazer), with whom he can share his adventures.

Directed by Enrico Casarosa, who helmed the Oscar-nominated Pixar short film La Luna, Luca draws on the skills of composer Dan Romer, who infuses his music with the irresistible idioms of Italy itself. We sat down with Dan to discuss his scoring process, as he sought to capture the luscious, sun-drenched spirit of this singular nation while also staying true to his own musical voice. 

It's lovely to be able to talk to you about such a good-natured Disney-Pixar project. It's clearly drenched in an Italian atmosphere, which I personally can't get enough of. How did you get involved in Luca in the first place?

It was twofold. The film's executive music producer, Tom MacDougall, is someone whom I'd met when I first got to L.A., right after scoring Beasts of the Southern Wild. He said that he loved the score. Enrico Casarosa, the film's director, started talking about the Beasts of the Southern Wild score as well. He was seeking more of an indie, homemade feel to the Luca score. They were both thinking about me as the composer. I went out and met with them and looked at the storyboards. I was in love immediately.

Did the Beasts of the Southern Wild score open a lot of doors for you?

Yeah, well, it was the first feature that I'd ever scored. It was definitely the thing that got me scoring features and TV shows. 

How imperative is the nature of collaboration on a project such as Luca?

It depends on the project exactly how collaborative we want to get. With Pixar, it's very collaborative. There's a lot of back and forth. We did a review every week or two whereby we'd listen to all the cues and talk through them. We did very detailed spotting sessions for everything. Enrico really laid out how he wanted the music to function, theme-wise, and emotionally. Luca was certainly a very collaborative process.

You mentioned spotting. Are there different principles in terms of spotting an animated feature, as opposed to a live-action one?

It's very similar. I started scoring to picture with storyboards, but there was dialogue in place. It wasn't just 30 seconds of one image. There were a lot of moving pictures happening. It ended up being a similar process to scoring a live-action film. That said, there was more change of the music in this film than any other I've worked on. The cues are generally shorter. There's not a ton of cues that are over two minutes. In this kind of film, there's more of a sense of moving from emotion to emotion, as opposed to letting one particular emotion sit there for five minutes straight.

Is it a challenge to score the underlying emotion in an animated movie, as opposed to the surface-level cue points like the physical action of the characters?

The basic concept of scoring what the main character is feeling holds true. At any moment, your roadmap is, 'What is this character thinking? What are they feeling?'

The bedrock principle of film scoring is to always be thinking about what your main character is feeling. You must always be trying to give the audience more information about the character's deeper feelings. If you're scoring from the point of view of the audience, instead of the point of view of the character, something just ends up feeling off about it. 

The character of Luca goes through a lovely emotional odyssey. How did that inform the themes of the score?

We have a bunch of steady themes throughout the movie that don't change a lot, melodically, but they do change a lot in arrangement, orchestration, tempo, and harmony. The main theme goes from romantic and dreamy, a sense of what could be, to taking some pretty dark turns harmonically. It shows tension, but it's still the same melody. 

Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I composed with Benh Zeitlin, was music that we made from our hearts. Enrico told me from the start that he wanted the music to sound like my music. 'I want your style of music,' is what he said. I made him a bunch of demos and he came back saying, 'I love these chords, I love these melodies, but could you make it a bit more Italian?' So I went on a deep dive into Italian pop music and folk music and scored the music. Enrico made me a big playlist of Italian rock and roll, and a big playlist of Italian scores that he loved. I have some collaborators who are from Italy who also made me playlists. 

Whenever I do a film that's referencing a region, I like to completely immerse myself in that music while I'm writing the score. For example, when I was working on The Little Hours, which is a film that takes place in Italy in the 1400s, I was listening to nothing but medieval music. For Luca, I wanted Italian-sounding harmonies to almost become second nature. I then wrote a bunch of new demos and Enrico said, 'Too Italian. Let's split the difference.' Essentially, he was saying that now I had gone in both directions, he wanted my sound but with Italian instrumentation. He wanted me to use more accordion and mandolin than usual, more clarinet and more nylon-string guitar. Italian folk production  – that's where we ended up.

Did you have to research locality when it came to Beasts of No Nation? That's a harrowing film and I think the score does an admirable job of remaining discreet.

That movie never gives a name of a country or a year. Cary Joji Fukunaga, the director, and I talked about what kind of a sound we wanted. First of all, we tried a more orchestral score. Cary then said that it felt too European. It felt like European commentary on something. He didn't want us to be able to pinpoint a sense of time or location in the music. We then decided to use synths and samples that didn't feel like they belonged to any era or location. They just existed; they weren't evocative of any particular people. 

What you've just said reinforces the adaptability of film music and film composers from project to project. Do you enjoy reinventing your sound across different stories? 

I love it. In fact, I love limitations so much. If a director asked me to do a score with just drums, and flutes of all different pitches, I'd be like, 'Oh my God, yes'. I often place limitations on myself, on purpose. On Maniac, I had a no-piano rule. That instrument is one of my favourites, and I use it on tons of things, but it's so commonly used. I thought it would be an interesting thing to stay away from it completely and try to use sounds that really only played one note at a time. I thought it would be interesting if everything in the score was a monophonic instrument, to reflect the technology that we see in the show in this alternate dimension. 

When you're writing music, you're trying to create a cinematic experience for the viewer. A score that has limitations can, in many cases, give you that feeling. With Luca, I told myself not to use synthetic elements. Let's do 100% orchestra and Italian folk instruments. There were moments where synths and samples might have been a really useful thing, but I wanted to get those sounds out of organic instruments instead.

Of course, there's such an extraordinary lineage of Disney scores, and now Luca is part of that canon. Do you have memories of a particular Disney film or soundtrack that made an impression on you during your formative years?

Musically speaking, the Disney films I gravitated towards are The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas. I was in a rock band during college and we had a cassette player with very few cassettes. The Pocahontas cassette was on all the time when we were in the car. We'd all have this big sing-along to Savages, Colours of the Wind and so forth. 

How did you get into film scoring in the first place? 

I went to LaGuardia School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts. I went there as a vocal major. I was singing opera. I just wanted to be a rock singer, but you had to sing opera if you wanted to be a vocal major. I went to my music teacher and said that I'd been studying music theory on my own since I was maybe 10. I said to my teacher that I feel like I want more music theory than what's being taught in the classes. He said that he could point me more towards classical harmony, or more towards jazz harmony. I chose classical, and ultimately that taught me how to write four-part harmony, essentially a string quartet or a four-part string orchestra. Anything that had four parts. 

I was really studying that but I was also learning how to use a four-track recorder and then I got to college where I studied pop music production. I started playing in lots of bands and I had my own band. When I got out of college, eventually my band broke up and I started producing other artists. One of the things I did for a lot of these artists was write string quartets. I was doing a ton of string writing for other artists, plus a lot of mixing and producing. 

In the meantime an old friend of mine, Ray Tintori, asked me, at the end of college, to score his short film called 'Death to the Tinman'. It went to Sundance. I made that music with Benh Zeitlin because I told Ray that I didn't know how to make film music. He then recommended Benh Zeitlin because, Ray said, 'He doesn't know how to make normal music or play instruments, but he knows how film music works'. He then put the two of us together to score the film. Benh and I later worked together on his own short film. He knew that I was doing these string quartets, and he asked me to work with him on the music for 'Glory at Sea'. From that, he got funding to make Beasts of the Southern Wild. Benh asked me to score it with him, and that became my first feature. 

Once Beasts of the Southern Wild happened, I realised I loved the process of making this music, and I decided to point myself more in that direction. A lot of the time, when young people ask me what my advice is for their career, I'll say, 'Don't try to become a composer specifically, but learn how to write songs, how to sing, mix, master, write for strings, edit audio, play, and arrange for, as many instruments as you can'. Following all that, you can fit into any project you want. You could mix something successfully for, say, a punk band, and they could then ask you to arrange horns for their next record. Someone then hears those horn arrangements and wants them on their film. All of this stuff is following a thread of projects you think are cool, and then, eventually, hopefully, you'll end up in a happy place.

You recently scored the Peter Pan movie, Peter and Wendy, for Benh Zeitlin. There are interesting comparisons to be drawn with Luca in that both stories draw on the idea of youth and childhood innocence.

I definitely have done a few things now that centre around childhood adventures. I think that creates a lot of opportunities to be unbridled and gleeful. It's really fun. Benh and I talked about the way that kids see things as huge adventures, in a way that adults don't necessarily. If I was walking through a park, I'd appreciate it as something nice, but a child would feel like they're traversing an unknown alien planet. They can have such heightened emotions that we grown-ups may have forgotten. Or maybe we haven't forgotten? Hopefully, we can still feel that way.