Talking With Composer David Metzger About Wish and Once Upon a Studio

Cinelinx’s resident musicologist recently had a conversation with composer David Metzger about Wish and Once Upon a Studio.

Just last week I had the privilege of speaking with David Metzger about his work on the recently released Wish and the celebratory short Once Upon a Studio. Over a long career as a composer, arranger, and orchestrator, Metzger’s credits include composing the scores for Wish, Once Upon a Studio, Brother Bear 2 and Tarzan 2. He is also a highly regarded song arranger and orchestrater, having crafted the songs for many films, including the Academy Award winning Frozen, Tarzan, Frozen 2, Moana, Wish, and Spirited.

Along with having worked on 11 of the 62 Disney Animated films ever produced, Dave has also worked for studios as diverse as Apple Original Films, Marvel, Sony, DreamWorks, Paramount, and Warner Brothers.

Wish is Disney’s 62nd animated feature film, following the young Asha through her adventure in the Kingdom of Rosas, where wishes literally come true. When Asha’s wish brings a wishing star to earth, she has to flee from King Magnifico, who wants the power of the wishing star for himself. Once Upon a Studio is a special animated/live-action short that celebrated the centennial of the Disney studio and features cameos from almost every animated Disney character ever created.

I hope you enjoy our conversation about Wish and Once Upon a Studio!

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I want to start by talking about Wish. Did you work on both the score and songs for Wish?

That’s correct. I compose the score, and then arranged and orchestrated the songs.

At what point were you brought in to work on Wish?

Yeah, I was hired, it would have been a year ago, September. So 14 months ago, I suppose. And then, [with] the songs being so critical to the story arc, those get done first. So the first eight months or so I worked on the songs only. When they were completed, I switched over to the score. I had about six weeks to compose the score. Then we went to record the score, and do all the mixing and all that kind of stuff.

What kind of discussions were had about what kind of sound they wanted? 

So all along our discussions were about making a nod to the history of Disney animation. Making sure that it sounds like a classic Disney film score, but also to have modern elements in it. And especially to be able to tie in with the songs by Julia [Michaels] and Ben [Rice] that are pretty pop sounding, and very modern sounding. The challenge was, how do I do that? How do I make it sound like a classic Disney score, but also have more contemporary elements, and then throw in the whole cultural kind of things too, or, time and place of where the story is taking place.

It was a pretty fun challenge. But all along, that was the goal. Part of that too, was honestly how we recorded the score. And it even came down to what choice of room I recorded the orchestra in and the choice of how much reverb to use or not, because the older scores don’t really use as much reverb and more modern scores will be kind of bathed in reverb. So I took a lot of those [things] into consideration.

You said you’re paying homage to the past, an example would be…?

So there’s a group of friends of Asha’s, and they might tie into Snow White characters. So I then went back and I worked on so many Disney films and Disney projects over my career, I happened to have a lot of copies of the original scores. So I went back and looked at the old Snow White scores and got a sense of what kind of instrumentation might be appropriate. And what kind of colors would be used to tie in, to harken back to the different characters and so that’d be one example.

For those who might not know when they read this, how different is it working as the composer as opposed to just working on the songs for a film?

It’s huge. And I don’t know if you know anything about my history, but I’ve always been known as a song arranger and orchestrator, or a score orchestrator, even though I’ve done a lot of additional music composition. In my career, I never had the opportunity to have a major film. So this is my first major film as a composer, which was just an absolute thrill because it came out of nowhere. I don’t have an agent, and I wasn’t lobbying for anything, I just got called to see if I’d want to be the composer on Wish.

For me, it’s the new experience of being the composer of record, and it’s just the chance to write all the themes, decide on the character motifs, and what kind of a color, everything being in my choice, as opposed to, I’m doing this, but it also has to [work for] whoever the composer or the songwriter [is] when I’m arranging songs. I always want to bring them into the discussion of, is this what you’re looking for? I’ve been very fortunate to work with some amazing songwriters. It’s usually been a wonderful collaborative experience, but those are the main differences, hopefully that makes sense.

I’ve really wanted to ask about the music for King Magnifico. I haven’t seen the movie, but I did see the sneak peek they released of his big song. And I’ve been wanting to ask about what inspired his music and that song, because they gave away that he’s the big villain of the story, but it’s not what I was expecting for a villain song. 

I think that comes down to the choice of having Julia Michaels and Ben Rice be the song composers, they put a different spin than you might have expected in a more Broadway based song. Partly what my job was, then as the arranger was to give it a cinematic scope, and to bring it somewhat into the Disney canon, but still let it live as its own unique, fantastic song.

I think, without giving spoilers away, Magnifico has this really interesting story arc as a character. I think that as the film goes on, he gets more and more interesting. And then as the score composer that opened up this whole fantastic world, I get to write music that follows his arc. I think he was actually the most fun character for me to get a chance to write for in the score side of things because I really could pull out all the stops, as it were, and just make him as much of a character as he could possibly be.

This might be too much of a spoiler filled question to ask, but is he a villain in the classic Disney sense?

I’m not sure I can really fairly answer. But let’s just say he’s a villain. With a capital V.

With Chris Pine pine playing him, could there be any doubt?

Ariana [DeBose] and Chris [Pine], I mean, their acting was amazing. I mean, the whole cast was amazing. But those two in particular just, when you see the film, I think people will be delighted with their characterizations.

I wanted to ask about one of Asha’s big songs. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s the one where she’s making the wish. 

The song is called “This Wish”, and honestly [it is] just absolutely lovely. To me it was the chance to bring back a whole bunch of of classic Disney but mixed with this brand new take on songwriting that Julia [Michaels] and Ben [Rice] brought to it. And it really fills that role of the “I Want song,” it’s all Asha’s dreams and wishes.

For the overall music, what styles influenced the music and the songs, particularly for Rosas? 

One of the things when I first was brought on to the film, we had the discussions of what region does the story take place [in], and it’s this mythical island out in the Mediterranean off the Spanish coast. But also people come from all over to this kingdom. So there are people from Spain, there are people from North Africa. I really was searching for the lexicon of the film, what it was going to be.

I knew I wanted to use North African percussion. So I have darabukas. And I have reeds in there, and I use the oud in the score and the songs. I use a lot of flamenco, nylon, Spanish string guitar, throughout the whole score and the songs. One of the things I did right away was I started listening to flamenco music around the clock for whenever I had any free time for a month. I just really immersed myself in it.

It’s a very complicated music. I hadn’t really fully appreciated that until I dove in, but they have these strict rhythmic rules that you follow. I really had to learn that just to be proper and be honored the style of music and in “Welcome to Rosas”, there’s a lot of guitars. We actually had three guitar players playing nylon string guitars at the same time while we were recording. So you have this really kind of beautiful interplay amongst the players. And it creates this bed of guitars that I think really evoke the locale of the film, and also give a really happy and joyful bed to the song itself.

When you’re composing, do you have animation to work against? Or is it just storyboards at that point?

Right. So again, I was the arranger and orchestrator of the songs, I wasn’t composing the songs. Julia [Michaels] and Ben [Rice] did those songs the very first thing as part of the story development. So Julia and Ben wrote the songs without any visuals at all other than the pictures of what Asha was going to look like, and they saw pictures of Rosas, what the architecture was going to be. That was their inspiration. So they were writing in the blind as far as no picture at all.

But then when it comes to score composing, which is what I did, I couldn’t even start the score until the film was pretty well locked. At that point, I had, not completed animation, but pretty solid animation. I don’t recall writing to any storyboards at all for the score. So it was all pretty well timed out. And I was very thankful for that, because then I didn’t have to chase a lot of edits. Once I wrote the score, there was maybe two points, throughout the whole film, 68 minutes of music that I composed, there were two little points that I had to trim a couple of bars out of. So I was very appreciative and thankful for that.

When you did dive into the score, what was your starting point? 

You’ve probably seen, in the whole publicity up to this point, there are these globes representing people’s wishes in the kingdom. One of the first things I tackled was, how am I going to deal with those globes? Because they, I wasn’t quite sure at first if I wanted to have something that was specific for the globes, or if I wanted to have something that was really just about wishes.

I ended up then deciding that I would sort of combine those two ideas and have a theme that dealt with the wishes embodied by the globes. And so that was the first thing I really sat down and worked with. It also was one of the first segments that was ready for me to start out with right away, that the directors, when we were talking about it, we discussed what would be a good place to start.

How did working on Wish compare to all the past projects you’ve worked on?

Yeah, I have to say, it’s sort of like, everybody’s life, right? We’re always learning, we’re always getting new experiences. And hopefully, we’re able to get better from those experiences, or by learning new things you look at, you should look at something in not just one way, but in multiple ways. I’d say my whole career, which is, I’ve been in this business for 30-something years, writing and working on films and that whole journey led to Wish. I honestly feel that when I first started out working in the business, I really didn’t quite know how amazing the musicians were. And so I always probably wrote a little safer than I should have or needed to.

But as I went down my path, I realized that holy cow, these people, these musicians are the best in the world. And they can play anything that you write. So by the time I got to Wish, I knew I could really challenge them. I just didn’t have to have them playing whole notes, they could be playing these incredibly complicated passages. I think that was one of the things I really learned along the way. It was freeing for me too, that I realized I didn’t have to just be writing to be safe, I could actually open up and expand my musical experiences. I think by challenging the musicians in the orchestra with hard music, they actually rise to that. It makes their performance better. And they dig in more because it’s more fun for them to play. If I really had one thing I think that I’ve learned along the way  that would be what really paid off at the very end here.

Is there anything you hope people notice when they see Wish?

I think the biggest thing I hope people do is just enjoy it and I hope that the film brings joy to people and contributes to making the world a better place. I mean, as kind of corny as that might sound but that’s really been my whole career. Honestly, I try to look at things in a positive way and hope to make people happy and bring joy to the world. And so I really hope that people get that out of the film. I hope that it contributes to the continuing of the Disney canon, because it’s meant a lot to me and my family and to my kids, and I just hope that it will be a wonderful next chapter in Disney.

For the star [in Wish], does the music speaks for the star because I don’t think the star talks that I’ve seen thus far in previews.

I think you might be right about that. Star is actually an extremely emotive character, I guess the animation on it, when you get a chance to see it, I hope you’ll be blown away because I think it’s amazing what they can do with the facial expressions of that Star. And so musically, I did my best to try to support what Star was responding to in the moment. I didn’t intend to speak for Star musically. It’s that I’m there to hopefully support what Star is doing and feeling.

I also wanted to ask about Once Upon a Studio. Just in general, how was it getting to do that? 

Getting called to do Wish and Once Upon a Studio happened at the same time. I got the call at the same time. I’ve had this career of always wanting to be the composer and never having the opportunity, right? I thought it was never going to happen. And then to have both of those things happen at the same time. It was really the dream come true, the wish granted [and] all that. So, Once Upon a Studio was actually, I worked on the songs for Wish for the first couple of months. And then I switched over for about a month on writing Once Upon a Studio and then I flipped back to Wish. So it was in the middle of all of the Wish stuff going on.

What a dream come true, getting a chance to get both that score and the chance to write in all the styles that I’ve studied for my lifetime, I felt like it all led to that, because all those Disney scores that I talked about earlier that I have, I was able to go back and I studied what did they do in Snow White in 1937, to make that sound, and what were the tendencies, the melodic tendencies, for Pinocchio, that I could glean from that to really pay true honor to that legacy of film music. I went through Cinderella and I went through Peter Pan, and it was a chance to do a little bit of Aladdin and ending up with getting a chance to arrange “When You Wish Upon a Star” sung by all those characters, but still to do it in the way that it was done in Pinocchio, but with a little bit of a modern spin to it, too. It was just incredible joy and a complete honor to be the composer and arranger for that score.

I feel like there were so many cameos. How on Earth was it picked which musical pieces to incorporate? Because there’s hundreds of characters!

I had a conversation with, with Trent [Correy] and Dan [Abraham], the directors of the film, of what were they most interested in, and what did they really want to get out of the music, before I even started writing a note. And then I just sat down with the picture, and it was mostly done. I think I probably had two areas that I had to make some adjustments for timing, that things got trimmed a little bit, but I just sat down and I wrote. I took a week of where I just wrote and it was quite complicated as you might imagine, just to get the tempos lined up because it jumps back and forth so much. It was a lot of math just to get it to have a good flow. I wrote what I thought seemed to be the right thing. And then we played it back for Dan [Abraham] and Trent [Correy]. I can’t speak for them. But it seemed like they really appreciated what I did.

The end of that playback session was just something because I felt like I really accomplished what their dreams were for that short. I had a couple of little adjustments, there always are a few notes, you know, but I went back and addressed those and then went in and recorded that with live musicians, and we recorded Los Angeles. I have so many friends there in that orchestra, that having them there to be a part of that orchestra when it was my first that we did before Wish, that was my first thing as the composer and that was a very emotional day for me. To be there at the session and seeing all of my friends for 40 years out there in the orchestra, it was a wonderful experience.

One other thing I wanted to ask about is, I think the whole emotional point was when Mickey talks to the picture of Walt Disney. And you can hear “Feed the Birds.” With that being his favorite song of all the songs that were done in his lifetime, was that always going to show up? 

By the time that I was brought onto it, that was already a well established moment in the film. And so I knew that was going to be the thing, but what you might not know, and I’m pretty sure it’s out there, so I’m not saying anything that’s not known, but the piano player, the person who played the piano, that’s Richard Sherman, who wrote the song.

We recorded it in Walt’s office, on the piano that the Sherman Brothers pitched all of their songs, for Mary Poppins, to Walt [Disney]. So there’s even another a deeper emotional level to that segment, and then what I did is I took Richard’s playing, and then added the strings, that are surrounding the piano, to his performance. So that’s what that’s all about.

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I want to thank David Metzger for taking the time to speak with me about Wish and Once Upon a Studio. Wish is currently playing in theaters and Once Upon a Studio is available on Disney+.