Why recording in LA mattered to ‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ composer Simon Franglen

In describing the massive undertaking it was to compose the score for the latest Avatar installment, Avatar: Fire and Ash, film composer Simon Franglen has some statistics he likes to share.

One is that almost every minute of the three-hour, 17-minute film was scored — three hours and four minutes to be exact. Printed out, that amount of music totaled more than 1,900 pages and had to be transported in two large road cases.

Another favorite stat of Franglen’s is that the epic score, which needed to match the epic scale of the film, required the work of 210 musicians, singers and engineers in Los Angeles.

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Bucking the trend of recording overseas

Franglen is from the U.K., but L.A. has been his home for years. Meaning no disrespect to Britain, Franglen still says, “I would rather be here than anywhere else.”

That pride in his adopted home base has extended to his scoring work for Avatar, which Franglen says he and the film’s producers (director James Cameron and Jon Landau, who passed away in 2024) wanted recorded in Los Angeles, despite the fact that a lot of film scoring is increasingly moving abroad.

Franglen scored the second Avatar film, Avatar: The Way of Water, as well, and worked with Cameron previously, along with his mentor, composer James Horner, on the first Avatar and Titanic.

He also has worked as a session musician and producer with artists like Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Miley Cyrus and Celine Dion — he won a Grammy for Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic.

But even with his membership in the small club of Grammy winners, Franglen is more likely to bring up that he’s been a member of the American Federation of Musicians Local 47, the local professional musicians union, for more than three decades.

Recording the Avatar: Fire and Ash theme in Los Angeles was important to everyone on the production, Franglen says, as was bucking recent trends of scaling back film scores or using more electronic scoring than live orchestras.

“The Hollywood film score is something that we've all grown up with,” Franglen says. And it was important to him and the producers to keep the recording of the score in L.A. (the first and second Avatar scores were recorded here, as well) “because we are very much a part of not just the music community but the film community of L.A., which has been having a tough time recently, as we all know.”

“ I'm very proud of being able to keep the work here,” Franglen says. “And I think the quality of the work is shown in the score itself, which I'm exceedingly proud of.”

Avatar: Fire and Ash’s end-credits song, “Dream As One,” sung by Miley Cyrus and which Franglen co-wrote with Cyrus, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, recently was nominated for a Golden Globe. And the score for Avatar: The Way of Water earned Franglen a 2023 World Soundtrack Award.

How work for musicians in LA has declined and the ripple effects

When Franglen first came to L.A. as a session musician, he says there were seven full-time orchestras working every day. When he was working on pop records, Franglen says, the top guitarists would need to be booked three months in advance because they were so busy.

Today, Franglen says, there’s less and less work because of productions moving overseas.

The latest annual report from Film LA, the official film office for the LA region, found the number of scripted projects filmed in L.A. declined 14 percent from 2023 to 2024.

And while California expanded its Film & TV Tax Credit Program this year to help encourage productions to stay here, its effects aren’t yet known.

“The problem is [...] if you're going to film in Europe, then maybe you don't record the score in L.A.,” Franglen says. “ And eventually what happens is that if I want to hire the finest guitarist in the world, I know that he'll be available. I can probably ask him, ‘Would you be available this week or next?’ And he will say yes.”

While that can be wonderful in many ways, Franglen says, it also means less opportunities overall, including for musicians with less experience who might get a chance at a bigger gig if all the top musicians were as busy as they used to be.

“I'm seeing a lot of the faces that I know from when I was a session musician in my orchestra," Franglen says. "That's great. I'm very, very pleased to see them. But it also means that the turnover has not been as extensive as what one would've expected, and that turnover is important.”

More new players coming in, Franglen says, helps ensure that recording work for movies like Avatar — and smaller scale films too — can stay in Los Angeles for years to come.