After high school, I moved to the U.S. and studied music in Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.
— Ramin Djawadi
I always like to think of music as if you were to turn the picture off, actually. Just by listening to the piece of music, there's a story there and a connection to the characters and the plots and all of that.
That's what I like: to kind of get up and start working right away in the morning.
I would sit at the organ and just start making up things by myself - I was maybe 7 years old, which was too young to even know how to notate music. So I never wrote anything down, but when I'd make things up, I'd memorize them.
I'm actually really good at keeping secrets.
I'm one of those artists who, if you'd let me tweak, would probably keep going and going, so it comes to the point where sometimes you just have to let go and make the decision, 'Okay, that's it.'
With 'Iron Man,' I have to give Jon Favreau great credit for the score because he always said, from the beginning, 'Tony Stark is a rock n' roll guy.'
'Game of Thrones' offers such a wide range of instruments that I use and stylistically for what I'm doing, but 'Westworld' is the same.
I myself am a huge Radiohead fan.
I love to do animation movies, and those might be some scores that are lesser known, unless you really kind of dig through my work and see.
I don't listen to film music at all. I don't want to be influenced.
I used to love American Westerns, growing up in Germany.
I used to just scribble things on a piece of paper whenever an idea would - came to mind. Now with cell phones. It definitely has gotten a lot easier because I can just take it out and just - I'll just sing into my phone.
First, I started to play the organ. I did that until I was 11. From the age of 11 to 13, I gave up music entirely. And then at 13, I picked up the guitar, and after one and a half years, I started practicing intensively. I began playing in rock bands, and it was there that I discovered that the music I liked to write was always instrumental.
Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it's more powerful to leave you with nothing.
I always like to tweak things and push things forward.
I'm a very visual person when it comes to writing music. I like to see something besides just a script, even if it's just a storyboard or pictures from the set.
When you know you have great support from the studio, that's a great feeling, and when it's the creative support, that's great.
When I write music, these colors pop out of me. It's hard to describe, but basically when I write music, I paint, and I add colors, and I add notes.
What's so great with 'Game of Thrones' is that there are so many characters and they're so many locations and that it's just very inspiring.
With 'Westworld,' the player piano plays a very important role.
I like to have recognizable themes and sounds that really connect to the project and that you can identify with that particular project. My goal is always, 'When that theme comes on - even if you're not in the room - you hear it and say, 'Oh my show is starting, I gotta watch.'
Performing was always something that I actually used to do before I settled in the studio as a composer.
At the beginning of each project, I like to create a palette of sound for that particular project.
We knew we wanted to have our own tone for the show. And then the big instrument that actually we came up with was the cello. It has a big range. It can play really low. It can play high. And it has a dark sound, and 'Game Of Thrones' is obviously - it's a dark show, and the cello became the featured instrument.
I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.
I began making music at the age of four. According to my mother, once I just sat down at the piano and played back a tune by ear. My parents were watching and said to each other, 'Maybe we should give him music lessons.'
I might even go for walks, just kind of come up with ideas in my head and then even sleep over it. And, yeah, the next day, when I wake up in the morning, I feel like that's when the ideas come, because you kind of wake up fresh and clean. You're not influenced from music on the radio or any other source.
I can almost see the music. It comes in the form of colors - colors jump out at me, and that translates into notes. They come fully formed: the orchestration parts, not just the melodies. Even though they're not always the right ones to use, the initial idea comes like that.
'Game of Thrones' is one of the most groundbreaking series on TV. The fact that I get to make music every day is such a privilege, and I'm incredibly grateful to be doing so with an amazing show such as this.
Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that - that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.
There's so many great themes from the '80s: 'Magnum,' 'Miami Vice.'
What I like about 'Game of Thrones' is that there's such a wide range. We have everything from very small, just solo instrument pieces, just the solo violin or solo cello, and then we go all the way to these bigger action moments.
There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.
I guess with any type of music or any art, there's always an evolution.
I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.
Deep down, classical Romantic music is what I love: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, the Romantics.
Absolutely, I'm living my dream. Yeah. My wife always jokes, says I'm a big kid, you know, playing in the studio and coming up with melodies and sounds. And, you know, I wouldn't know any other way because I just have music in my head all the time, and I just love it.
