Not long ago BBC announced a UK-based show led by an Indian character titled Virdee. Fans were most excited to find out the show’s music will be composed by Hans Zimmer renowned for his work on classics like Dune and Inception alongside James Everingham of Apollo: Missions to the Moon. Apart from such big names from Hollywood, India’s very own National award-winning composer Shashwat Sachdev is also set to join hands.
This will mark Shashwat Sachdev as the first Indian to collaborate with Hans Zimmer. The composer recently opened up about the project with Mashable India and talked about how different it is from Indian productions. He also revealed his favourite works of Zimmer and what he is looking forward to next.
Excerpts from the interview;
You are set to begin work with German film score composer Hans Zimmer for the BBC thriller series, Virdee. Can you share with us, how you became a part of the project?
For the last three years, I have been consistently collaborating with Russell Emanuel, who is the CEO of Bleeding Fingers, but also runs a record label called Extreme Music. And I’ve already done two albums with them, which were my ode to Indian folk and Indian cinematic music. Russell and his team love my work, so they introduced my work to Hans, they were excited to have me on the project because it has an Indian palette, and they needed an Indian ear or an Indian composer to work with them and I’m extremely humbled that I got the opportunity to do it.
What would you say are the biggest challenges for composing music for a show that will have an international appeal but Indian roots?
There is no challenge. I am extremely excited to be working and bringing my colour and my tonality to the show. Also, I love collaborating, and so it’s a great opportunity for me to collaborate with people that are of different cultures, people that are of different countries, of different backgrounds, and that is extremely exciting. I’m looking forward to a collaboration that is going to be extremely enriching for me. It is also going to add a lot to the future things that I’m going to be doing in India.
How has it been working with an international team; is it a different process?
I’ve been working with Extreme and Russell’s team for a while now, so it has always been extremely creative for me to work on music that is associated with them but I also feel that in big institutions that are run well and that have great leadership, it is always great for the talent to grow, it is easy for the talent to be creative. And I think Bleeding Fingers, Hans and his team are extremely easy to work with. And I am looking forward to working more with them in future.
Which of Hans Zimmer’s works is your favourite, did any of his work inspire you in any way?
I recently watched Dune 2 in IMAX and I thought that the score was extremely beautiful. There are a lot of people that I personally know, who have worked on the score and the mixing engineer for Hans is also my guru and he’s always been extremely supportive of my work, his name is Alan Meyerson. He’s one of the finest mixing engineers and score engineers in the world. So Dune 2 is something that I loved.
Talking about your rich body of work, including URI which landed you a National Award as well, do you often gravitate towards a certain kind of genre? There have been many action thrillers on the list like Attack, latest Article 370 and Tejas. What kind of film/show would you be interested in composing for next?
God has been kind to me that I have gotten a lot of opportunities in the last two, or three years to score for the action films, to score for war films. I wanted to do a trilogy of war films back to back and I got an opportunity to do that. Now I’m interested in doing period dramas and if I get an opportunity, I would love to revisit a romantic period drama, something that I’d done in Phillauri. That’s something that I’m looking to do now.
For the unversed, Virdee is based on a crime thriller by AA Dhand and is directed by Mark Tonderai. Meanwhile, the cast includes Staz Nair, Aysha Kala, Nina Singh, Kulvinder Ghir, Vikash Bhai, and Sudha Bhuchar and more. The show explores a story about identity and justice against a backdrop of suspense and intrigue.
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