For the kaiju, he wanted to stay more on the traditional side, to pay homage to the Godzilla-type theme, so we used big trombone sections. He always referred to his Jaeger pilots as not really military people, but more like modern cowboys, more rock-n-roll, so he wanted their theme to be twangy, with more guitars. He wanted it to be a nice adventure film he said, 'I definitely want to be able to hum my theme.' He knew he wanted guitars. Guillermo had a great vision of what he wanted for the film straight from the beginning. Do you have a game plan from the beginning? What was your goal with this particular score?ĭjawadi: We started out with broad-stroke discussions. Wired: After your work on films like Iron Man and shows like Game of Thrones, you obviously must be pretty used to these huge productions by now. I wanted to be really big, to go all out for this, so we kept it big from the beginning.

In each section alone, we had more players than the average-sized orchestra.

Wired: How big did your orchestra actually end up being?ĭjawadi: It was over 100 players, and we had a big Russian choir, lots of extra percussion. When Wired called him last week at his studio at Remote Control Productions – the Santa Monica, California company founded by scoring legend Hans Zimmer, who's mentored Djawadi for over a decade – he said that when he saw Pacific Rim in theaters he could swear it was even more impressive than he remembered.

Under the direction of the film's director Guillermo del Toro and with help from former collaborators like Tom Morello (whose signature guitar work defines the film's title track) and the RZA (who contributed his songwriting and production skills to a bonus track), Djawadi has crafted a behemoth, 100-plus-minute score that ought to convince even the biggest skeptics and genre purists that this is an apocalypse worth getting jacked up for. Now he's brought his brand of utter badassery to the kaiju-on-mecha saga Pacific Rim. As the composer for movies like Iron Man and Blade: Trinity and TV shows like Game of Thrones, he's created a songbook filled with everything from ominous doom-and-gloom tones to fist-pumping musical adrenaline. Ramin Djawadi's got a knack for sonic boom.

Pacific rim movie soundtrack