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Movies & TV

15th Sep 2022

WATCH: Andor creator on bringing together Star Wars and Succession

Rory Cashin

“It is something we take wildly seriously.”

When you think of recognisable music from recent movies or TV shows, without a doubt one of the first things that comes to mind is that powerful opening theme for Succession.

That twinkling-but-somehow-intimidating piano sets off the goosebumps every single time, and was a powerful enough to provide the foundation for an incredible remixed track by Pusha T.

Composed by Nicholas Britell – it was his first time writing music for television – it remains one of the best and immediately identifiable pieces of music from media within the last few years.

Why do we bring this up? Well, it turns out that Britell is also the man behind the music for brand new Star Wars series Andor.

In the run-up to the release of the new show, JOE chatted to Tony Gilroy, the creator and head writer for Andor, to discuss all of the major talking points behind the new show.

Over the course of the chat, we asked Gilroy about his thoughts of Rogue One (which he also wrote) now being considered the best of the “new” Star Wars movies, and his memories now that we’ve reached the 25th anniversary of The Devil’s Advocate (which, yes, he also wrote).

But, of course, we had to chat to him about working with Nicholas Britell on the score for Andor, essentially bringing together the worlds of Star Wars and Succession.

Gilroy told us the following:

“There are a couple of things that I care about very deeply. I care about tempo, as in tempo of scenes and tempo of cutting and tempo of music, but I also really care about sound.

“And Nick [Britell] and I started [working on this] two years ago, on a very, very important piece of diegetic music that will be live at the very end [of the season]. And it is a big, huge, eight-minute piece of music. And we had to that first, and that is how we started!

“We didn’t know each other, but we had a mutual respect, and we just fell in love right at the beginning! We built this really crazy thing, that I don’t really want to talk about it, because it is a spoiler for what it is, but we built this monstrous thing and then we were like ‘Okay’… and then we sort of didn’t see each for eight, ten months.

“Then I came back and I dropped the show and said ‘Okay, well now we need seven hours of music!’, and it has been a major hump for both of us. But I’ve never had a better… the whole post-production with Nick, and our sound department – my brother John Gilroy is on it, and Dave Accord, and Margit Pfeiffer – the people on sound at Skywalker Sound… it is something we take wildly seriously.”

The first three episodes of Andor will be available to watch on Disney+ on Wednesday, 21 September, with the remainder of the series arriving weekly after that.

Clip via Star Wars