Interview by Adrienne Faillace
Recorded September 6, 2023, in Santa Monica, California
Ramin Djawadi describes growing up in Duisburg, Germany, the son of an Iranian doctor and a German mother, and starting on a home organ at four. He recalls switching to guitar and a rock band as a teenager, and watching a black-and-white recording of The Magnificent Seven every day. After studying film music and guitar at Berklee, he arrived at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control in 2000 as an intern, through a friend who owned a guitar store in Cologne.
He recounts training under Klaus Badelt, volunteering to score a Pirates of the Caribbean fight overnight, and writing 45 minutes of music a week for Prison Break. With Jonathan Nolan, whom he met on Batman Begins, he scored Person of Interest and Westworld, arranging songs such as “Paint It Black” and “Enter Sandman.”
Much of the conversation centers on Game of Thrones: David Benioff and Dan Weiss’s one rule, “no flutes”; the cello as its main voice; the main title that came to him while driving; “The Rains of Castamere”; the silence after the Red Wedding; and “Light of the Seven,” the show’s first use of piano. He also discusses the concert tour, House of the Dragon, writing his Iron Man and Pacific Rim themes on guitar, and Blade: Trinity with the RZA.
Reflecting on the craft, he describes his synesthesia, seeing notes as colors, and a Middle Eastern influence he traces to his half-Iranian background. He hopes one day to write a symphony, and advises aspiring composers “to be true to yourself.”