ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim recently sat down with songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda for his new movie, Mufasa: The Lion King. Miranda is known for his Broadway work with Hamilton and In the Heights, his music for films like Moana and Encanto, and his critically acclaimed feature film Tick, Tick…Boom!
“Lost and alone, orphaned cub Mufasa meets a sympathetic lion named Taka, the heir to a royal bloodline,” reads the official synopsis. “The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of an extraordinary group of misfits searching for their destinies.”
Mufasa: The Lion King roars into theaters on December 20.
Jonathan Sim: I actually want to tell you about the first time that I ever sat in the same room with you. I was six years old. You came into my first grade class. I’m a New Yorker, P.S. 212. You gave a lecture on how you translated the lyrics for “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Bryan’s class.
Yes, that was it! It’s been 15 years, and I still vividly remember this. I’ve always wondered because your work had such an impact on me when I was a kid, how do you hope that your work impacts youth of today? And do kids ever go up to you and quote your lyrics back at you?
Yes, to the second part. Yes. I think for the first part, I think more importantly, my job is to stay in touch with the kid that’s in me that fell in love with musical storytelling, that fell in love with Sebastian the crab when he started singing Under the Sea. Or Mufasa. I think the job of an artist is to kind of protect that flame of creativity that I think all kids have naturally.
I listen to my kids make stuff up, and you just can’t believe the gems they casually drop because they’re little, and everything’s possible. And I think your job as an artist is to maintain that and stay in touch with it. So I’m happy when kids love music I’ve written or stuff I’ve worked on, but I’m really trying to satisfy the kid in me who was transfixed by Under the Sea when he was nine.
I ran into you very briefly at the Critics Choice Awards back when you were promoting Tick, Tick…Boom! I love that film, by the way. And I’ve always wondered, would you ever want to get back into the director’s chair? And if you do, would you want to stick to music? Or would you wanna do other stuff?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I think that I love directing. For me, it is the closest thing to composing, actually, because you’re essentially working the same muscles as creating an original score. You’re telling the story over the course of an evening. You’re playing with tension and release and when to stay in a moment and when to speed through a moment.
I really enjoy it, and I think that and, and I’m working on a couple of movies that I’d like to direct, and they’re all musically based, you know, like I didn’t work this hard to get good at writing music to then abandon that. So for me, even if they’re not musicals, they all have some kind of basis in musical storytelling ’cause that’s my bread and butter.
Talking about Mufasa, you get the call; Disney wants you to work on Mufasa, a sequel/ prequel to The Lion King, which has arguably one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. Like, no pressure at all. Was there any hesitation before you signed onto this?
My only hesitation was the timing when they called me ’cause It was summer 21. I was not done editing Tick, Tick…Boom!. And I had just finished working out the Madrigal’s problems in Encanto. Like, I had literally just written the finale number, and I was on my first vacation. And so I was just like, I’m fried, and I’m still working on the things I’m working on. I’m not a great multitasker. I need to work on things that are really different to be able to do them simultaneously.
For Mufasa, I was writing The Warriors and Mufasa at the same time. Those are really different. It’s very easy to keep them separate. But I was fried, so I basically loved this. I think I can be of service to this really great script. And, of course, I’d love to work with Barry Jenkins. But can you wait six months till I just have like a long nap and a week-long vacation? And they did.
So I started working at the top of 2022, but I didn’t have any hesitation in writing in this space because a lot of people have written this space. If it had just been the original animated movie, absolutely. But Beyoncé has made an inspired by album that expanded the sound of what a Lion King album could be. There’s an amazing Broadway musical with incredible arrangements by Lebo and Mark Mancina that sort of totally expanded the palette of what these songs sound like. So I just felt like there was space to play because so many people had worked in this space before.
With a film like this, you have songs like “I Always Wanted a Brother” and “Bye Bye”, which is a new one. When you are crafting a good Disney villain song, where are you drawing inspiration from? Where does the inspiration come from for a good Disney villain song and what are the ingredients to make that work?
Yeah, listen, I was really keyed up to write a Disney villain song. I hadn’t had the chance to write like an old-school bad guy villain song. And I actually pitched it. It wasn’t in the script. I pitched it to Barry, and half the inspiration was Mads Mikkelsen. I mean, that guy’s, like, he’s a Bond villain. He’s one of our great villains. And I could just picture his voice really clearly. And then I just wanted to surprise people.
So I just thought, what is a really contemporary dance holish sound that no one would expect coming from this lion? And so the fact that it’s low-key a bop and you can dance to it, I think was the thing that was most exciting. I think Mads is slinky in a way, and I wanted it to be slinky like him.