‘Avatar’ composer reveals he invented brand new instruments for latest film

21 December 2025, 12:01 | Updated: 21 December 2025, 12:03

How Avatar 3 composer scored 'Fire and Ash'

Musicians played newly-invented instruments on the ‘Avatar’ set, composer Simon Franglen tells Classic FM.

Avatar returns to our screens for a third time with Avatar: Fire and Ash, all three hours and 17 minutes of it. And with it comes a whole new soundworld from composer Simon Franglen.

Lead arranger with James Horner on the original Avatar – one of the most successful movies ever made – and composer of Avatar: The Way of Water, Franglen is back for another verse. Franglen is behind some of pop’s most memorable sounds, producing Titanic’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ for Celine Dion and working with Whitney Houston, Quincy Jones and Toni Braxton as well as on other film scores including Dances With Wolves, Se7en, and The Magnificent Seven (2016).

But, despite such a glittering CV, his guiding principle for film remains simple. “The number one thing that I have to do when I’m working on a film score is to tell the emotional story,” he explains. Sitting at the piano, he demonstrates how a few chord changes can completely alter what we think we’re hearing: “If I’m talking to you and I start doing this and I’m going to just talk to you now, suddenly you’re actually feeling something different, right? That’s my job – to tell you how to feel.”

Read more: ‘Sinners’ composer Ludwig Göransson breaks down his movie soundtrack

In Fire and Ash, that emotional story begins in the shadow of loss. “We have a story that starts with Jake and Neytiri trying to process the death of their son in Avatar 2,” says Franglen. “So I had to think about how I emotionally give you that separation between them,” he says, explaining how he used two melodies drifting away from one another to demonstrate this disconnect.

All the characters receive their own musical identities. “There is a new theme for Kiri,” Franglen says. “If Jake and Neytiri’s music expresses separation then Kiri’s theme grows out of her unique connection to Pandora.”

To demonstrate the destructive new Ash faction in Pandora, Franglen used a bowed Mongolian instrument called the morin khuur. “I wanted it to have a rhythmic sense and urgency. They’re destroying. They’re agents of chaos.”

Another new group, the Wind Traders, bring scale and romance. “They are these Phoenician traders of old who have these astonishing 250‑metre‑tall galleons,” Franglen says. “So you get to have a big tune for that.”

Read more: 15 most epic film scores

Franglen also designed new instruments for the actors to play in order to reflect the Wind Traders’ culture. However, they have no formal names: “I technically called them the stringy things and the drummy things,” he laughs. Franglen sketched them out, gave them to the art department, who made beautiful renders, then to the prop master who made 3D‑printed Pandoran instruments, which were played on set by the musicians.

“They’re nomadic so they have to carry their instruments with them,” he says of the Wind Traders. He designed an instrument that looks like an upside-down kora, a West African instrument, to reflect the ship’s rigging. The skins of the drums were made from the same fabric they used for the sails: “That’s the level of detail we go into in Avatar.”

Music is crucial in the film’s colossal action sequences. Fire and Ash crescendoes with a vast, continuous piece that demands as much structural thinking from the composer as from the director. “You have to show the evolution of tension as well as those moments of allowing the audience off the hook,” says Franglen.

Voices, as ever in Avatar, provide a vital emotional thread. “Pretty well all of the vocals in Avatar I use Na’vi language,” Franglen says. As in The Way of Water, the sound of specific real‑world cultures is vital to the identity of Pandora’s clans.

“The Pacific Islanders became the sound of the Metkayina, the reef clan, because I wanted that longer tone,” he explains. “In Avatar 1 it’s a very clipped, sharp tone but in Avatar 2 we needed to have a slightly longer feeling.” This sound was created using the New Zealand-based Pasifika choir he recorded for Avatar 2.

Director James Cameron remains at the heart of the composition. “The music in a Jim Cameron film is Jim Cameron’s music,” says Franglen, “I’m just there to bring it on.

“But he does give me the space to experiment and to try things, and also his ability to listen and then say, ‘Actually, you know that bit you wrote back here in hour two? I want to use it in hour three.’”

This process of re‑shaping material on the hoof is constant and all part of working with the Academy Award-winning director. “This happens all the time, where he will grab something from one of the sections,” Franglen laughs, “‘I like it here.’ And you go, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ And then you look at it and go, ‘Oh yeah, it’s better.’”