Young cub Mufasa in Mufasa: The Lion King.Credit: Disney
Lin-Manuel Miranda is the guy who wrote the Broadway show Hamilton, and the soundtracks for the animated films Moana, Vivo and Encanto, and the coming live-action Lion King prequel, Mufasa: The Lion King. Robert Lopez co-created The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q, and, with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the songs for the Disney films Frozen, Frozen II and Coco.
That bit, you likely know. The bit you may not know is that when both Miranda and Richard Lopez were kids – enrolled at Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side – they had the same sixth-grade music teacher, Barbara Ames. So the question isn’t how did these guys become the most influential composers of 21st-century stage and cinema, but just what was Miss Ames putting in the cordial in that classroom?
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer of Hamiton, Encanto and, now, Mufasa: The Lion King.Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision
When I sit down with Miranda to discuss his musical career and work on Mufasa: The Lion King, Miss Ames seems like an unexpected, almost off-piste place to start. And yet, I say to him, she really feels like the beginning of the story. Miranda’s eyes are glowing in response, his enthusiasm for his former music teacher is as all-consuming now as it was, no doubt, back in grade six.
“Barbara Ames was one of the biggest sources of love in elementary school,” Miranda says. “You would go to music class, you knew you were going to sing for 30 minutes. She had a poster of Into the Woods on the side of her upright piano, she taught at her piano and she would have us all sing.”
Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) and Taka (voiced by Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in Disney’s live-action Mufasa: The Lion King. Credit:
Significantly, Miranda adds, Miss Ames and the pair’s teacher, Mr Sherman, would collaborate on a sixth-grade play every year. “And if she had more kids than parts, she would write parts, and she would write songs for those parts,” Miranda says, laughing.
“She wildly flouted the rules of licensing for these musicals,” Miranda adds. “The notion of access to creating these moments was there because Miss Ames would just make up songs for the other characters so that everyone would have a part. She did a production of Chorus Line where there were 32 kids on the line, and they all had their moment.”
When Miranda came to do the sixth-grade play, “they had run out of age-appropriate musicals, so we did these 20-minute versions of the previous six years, and it was a lethal dosage of musical theatre”. “I got to be in Fiddler on the Roof, West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, a mash-up of The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz, Oklahoma and Peter Pan. The rush of doing that for most of sixth grade is the high I’m still chasing as a 44-year-old man.”
Lin-Manuel Miranda was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the 2016 film Moana.Credit:
We move on. To William Shakespeare, and his observation, in the comedy masterpiece Much Ado About Nothing, that: “Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” The question he was asking – about the intangible but stunning power of music itself – weighs on the minds of many composers, Miranda says.
“That’s the heart of the whole thing, right?” Miranda says, quoting his good friend, 97-year-old American composer John Kander, who wrote Cabaret and Chicago, who once told him: “I’ve made a living making music, and I’ve never been able to hold it, or touch it, or taste it, or feel it. And yet, my hands go to the piano, and if I know what we’re writing, my hands know what to do.”
Says Miranda: “I find that extraordinary. My hands aren’t as skilled as John Kander’s, very few are. But I think there’s something about the fact that both hemispheres of your brain light up when you listen to music. That it sticks in the short term and in the long term that Alzheimer’s patients can still sing songs from when they were children.
“There’s something about it that goes deeper than anything else in our lives, about that collection of organised sound, whether it comes from a bossa nova or sheep’s guts,” Miranda adds. “It’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary to get to make it up for a living. I’m very grateful to get to put my hands on a piano for a living.”
The peculiarity of film music is that, like pop music, it is composed of an infinite collection of emotional triggers. There are notes in Giorgio Moroder’s soundtrack for Scarface that intentionally unsettle the emotions. The Picnic at Hanging Rock score is intentionally undercut with the slowed-down sound of an earthquake, designed to subconsciously trigger the viewer’s fight or flight response.
The way we were … how the stars of The Lion King looked in the original 1994 film.Credit: Disney
Among Angelo Badalamenti’s compositions for Twin Peaks, Laura’s Theme is designed to make you feel sad, and then to slowly restore your emotions through a twist and turn of flat notes to sharps, then to intentionally build to a crescendo, and finally to rip your heart out as the sequence of notes peaks.
That sense of weaponisation in music – the idea that it is deployed in films as a deliberate force upon the viewer – is conscious and not conscious, Miranda says. “You are your own first audience, and you have to make yourself feel something before you can expect anyone else to feel anything. And it not only has to feel true, it has to feel true to that character at that moment, and it needs to be the right words on the right music at that moment.”
In Mufasa, the track featured in the film and trailer – I Always Wanted a Brother – “was this four-chord groove [with] a melody that felt like it came from another plane”.
“So, sometimes it’s in surprising yourself that you find it. What I am conscious of, as I’m writing it, [is that] I can bring that back around later, to devastating effect. I’m not going to worry about it now, but I know it can turn.”
Before he wrote a note of Moana, Miranda says, he immersed himself in music from the Pacific Islands and those traditions, “same as with Colombia with Encanto, which shared its DNA with the Puerto Rican music I grew up with”.
Lin-Manuel Miranda (centre) struck global gold with his historical musical, Hamilton.Credit:
With his smash-hit musical Hamilton, in contrast, and leaning into the Sondheim quote “content dictates form”, Miranda says his inspiration was the idea that every time American founding father Alexander Hamilton puts pen to paper his life changes. “Every time he opens his mouth, he’s going to change his circumstances and his destiny, and that’s a terrific engine for a musical,” Miranda says.
Mufasa: The Lion King was something different again. It was already a successful animated musical and Broadway show – with music written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and a score composed by Hans Zimmer – when Miranda was asked by director Barry Jenkins to write the soundtrack to the prequel. In that sense, Miranda says, “[For Mufasa] I’m in service of Barry Jenkins, and this musical language that has already been really wonderfully established.”
The Lion King made a hugely successful switch to the stage. Credit:
As for The Lion King itself, it’s an unusually complex story when you consider Disney packaged it as a kid’s movie: after the power-hungry lion Scar murders his brother Mufasa, Mufasa’s son Simba escapes but later returns to become king of the Pride Lands. “There’s literally a 12-minute stretch where a child essentially witnesses their uncle murder their father, and then walks up to their father’s prone body,” Jenkins says.
“It’s like we have very selective memories. We have very convenient memories of what is light [in touch] and what is not light. What I love about that, though, is somehow Disney was able to perform this magic trick where parents would take their kids to see this film. That scene is intense. You know it’s intense. And yet somehow everyone embraces that intensity because it’s real.”
The cast of Mufasa: The Lion King (from left): Kelvin Harrison jnr, Tiffany Boone, Aaron Pierre, Anika Noni Rose, Billy Eichner, Seth Rogan, and director Barry Jenkins at a photo call in London.Credit: AP
At the same time, Jenkins says, the film’s story was never over-sensationalised. “And you sometimes go, [the kids] are not going to watch that again, are they? And there they are, day after day, you put in the VHS, and they’re watching it, and they’re learning to process this emotion,” he says.
“It’s one of the really wonderful things that Disney, especially in that era, was able to sort of pull off, which is, bring us your children, and we’re going to entertain them, and they’re going to have a very fun time,” Jenkins says. “But we’re also going to speak to some very important things about human nature and human life.”
Mufasa: The Lion King picks up the story of the 2019 remake of The Lion King, which was directed by Jon Favreau and used photorealistic animation to bring the world of the Pride Lands to life. In the new film, Rafiki the mandrill tells the origin story of the two lions – Mufasa, an orphan, and Taka, the princeling who would become known as Scar.
The film stars Aaron Pierre as the voice of Mufasa. It is a formidable role for an actor to take on, because of its central role in the Disney cinematic filmography and the intimidating fact it was originated by actor James Earl Jones – in the original 1994 film and the 2019 remake. Jones, who also voiced Darth Vader in Star Wars, died earlier this year.
“There’s a massive footprint,” Jenkins says of what Jones leaves behind. “And I do believe in artistic ghosts. Now mind you, [I decide] I’m going to de-legitimise this before, right at the start ... I said to Aaron that he needed to dislodge James Earl Jones from his mind.”
But it’s a tough ask. Elsewhere in cinema, the actors who work on Star Trek films, for example, have talked about the artistic ghost of Gene Roddenberry, the franchise’s creator, who – at least on the earlier television series and films – kept close oversight of every creative decision. Such presences are sometimes hard to move on from. Jones, equally, was a movie legend. Replacing him, even after his death, was a tough call.
“You can’t have that as a target,” Jenkins says, of how he prepared Pierre for the role. “It’s going to make something untruthful about what you’re doing because even though that [first] film comes before this one, what you’re doing [in a prequel] comes before anything in that film.
“[The original Mufasa] is a grown-ass man who has lived life, who is wise, and through experience,” Jenkins says. “You now have the task of going to live that experience and encountering all these things for the first time, collecting these lessons. Not incorporating them into your voice, into your persona. You don’t have that luxury. That was that.
“At the same time ... we know that at some point, James Earl Jones is going to be dangling off the side of a mountain. And Jeremy Irons [who voiced Scar in the original 1994 film] is going to go ahead and say, ‘Long live the king’. And I can’t see this film without thinking of that. And what my mind went to was James Earl Jones’ voice – his persona as Mufasa is going to live forever.”
Mufasa: The Lion King is released in cinemas on December 19.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.