Star Wars: Rogue One's new composer wrote its score in just over a month

Michael Giacchino has revealed he had just four and a half weeks to write the score for ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’, after taking over from Alexandre Desplat.

The eight-time Oscar-nominee has discussed the pressure of this tight time-frame in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

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“We were literally planning a vacation when I got the call asking if I could come and talk to [LucasFilm] about it,” he said. “At the time, it left me with literally four and a half weeks to write.”

Asked whether that’s enough time to compose a score for one of the year’s biggest films, Giacchino replied bluntly: “It’s not really. But you work with the time you have.

“I’m not a person that has a bunch of other composers working for me, so it’s just me sitting up here in this room doing it. But I’m pretty good at focusing and getting down to business.

“I saw the film and I really, really, really enjoyed it, so there was no lack of ideas or inspiration, that’s for sure. The only worry the whole time for me was just the schedule. But I mapped it out and I thought, okay, if I do this much a day and I get this done that will leave me time to go back and improve if I need to before having to orchestrate.”

‘The King’s Speech’ and ‘Harry Potter’ composer Desplat reportedly left the project after the summer’s extensive reshoots. He departed in September and quickly joined Luc Beeson’s sci-fi adventure ‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’.

Asked about working under the pressure, Giacchino – known for his work on the ‘Star Trek’ series, Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’ and most-recently ‘Doctor Strange’ – was upbeat.

“Aside from [the time frame] it was really fun to do. It was really fun to come in every morning and just look up at the screen and see Stormtroopers running around.

“I thought, ‘This is pretty cool actually…’ Part of me was stressing out about the timeline. But the other part of me was just like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever! This is so much fun!'”

Asked about the completed score, Giacchino named the theme for Felecity Jones’ lead character Jyn Erso as his favourite. “I really enjoyed working with Jyn’s theme, and tying that into the movie, and having it slowly develop. And it’s sort of a very emotional sweeping thing, which was really nice to do.”

You can read the complete article on Entertainment Weekly.