'Frozen 2' Songwriters Discuss Writing Music for Animated Musicals | Vanity Fair

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- I knew that if we won for Let it Go,
that he was gonna get an EGOT.
So the girls and I made pasta glue necklace
that had "EGOT" and I slipped it to the PR people.
I knew that if I had presented the pasta necklace to him
in the speech, it would have really embarrassed him
because he really doesn't like
to talk about his honors at all.
- I don't like attention.
I do this job despite the attention.
The necklace fell apart but I still,
I've got pictures of it.
I remember the "t" fell off and it just said "ego"
for awhile. [laughs]
And then I had to throw it out.
[swelling music]
[timer ticking down]
- I'm Kristen Anderson-Lopez.
- And I'm Bobby Lopez.
- And this is our process for composing animated musicals.
[sweet piano music]
I think it actually starts with talking about
why are you working on the movie.
What do you have to say?
What do these characters have to say?
And that's where everything begins,
and it really is about talking story,
and character with Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck,
and amazing animators at Walt Disney Animation.
- In the first movie we were collaborating
with the team on story, and we find a spot,
that we called Elsa's bad ass song,
which evolved into "Let it Go" as we wrote the song.
It was about Elsa going from someone
who was keeping secrets inside and then in this one moment
she transforms and allows her power to come out,
and becomes the Elsa we know and love.
In this film we already kinda knew Elsa.
- We knew that Elsa had already been accepted
by her community, but there was still the burning question,
which drove, actually creating Frozen II,
which is why does she has these powers,
and what purpose do those powers have to play?
[soft music]
We'll talk a little about our process as it relates
to "Into the Unknown," just breaking that down.
We knew that there were questions that she still had.
We need to embody that restless feeling we all have
when we know, maybe I'm not exactly where I need to be.
That we would embody that with this voice,
that is actually the Dies Irae which is used by composers
of operas and musicals for centuries.
- [chanting] Dies Irae
[dramatic music]
[soprano chanting]
And it's actually a mythical call,
usually to danger of some kind.
Bobby had this vamp that he was working on
that had this drive, that was like
[music note sounds]
- Right, that became the chorus.
Kristen said, "It's 3 a.m., she has to wake up
in the middle of the night, it has
to feel more mysterious, more 3 a.m."
And I said, "Okay what if we put it up an octave,
and what if we make it minor,
and what if we add a sixth to it, and..."
- And he started playing like this
[music note sounds]
and I was like,
♪ I can hear you. ♪
[laughs]
♪ But I won't. ♪
♪ Some look for trouble. ♪
Like it felt like a voice you would talk to at three a.m.
And then the chorus itself is actually,
tells the story of the whole movie
if you look at it from a musicology point of view.
So you have,
♪ Into the unknown, ♪
that's an octave, safe.
We know octaves,
♪ Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do ♪
Then, ♪ Into the unknown.
That's actually... - One higher.
It's a ninth.
- Stepping a toe outside of what you know,
but coming right back.
And then,
♪ Into the unknown. ♪
Is like, "whoa!"
You just flew the coop,
you just went - That's an eleventh.
- Way to an enchanted forest somewhere.
It's an eleventh.
- Which is an interval.
They strongly urge you not to write.
[laughts]
- That kinda mirrors the story of Elsa,
hearing the voice but staying safe,
stepping a toe out, and then finding herself
in this enchanted forest of transformation.
- [Elsa] ♪ Into the unknown! ♪
♪ Into the unknown! ♪
- And that then the song could become a duet
between Elsa and this voice, that first she's resisting it,
and then she gives in.
It's leading her away from everything she knows,
everything she loves,
her home, and comfort, and her queendom,
to brave this journey that's very challenging,
very dangerous, into the unknown
to find where it is that she's meant to be.
[lighthearted music]
- Again, we just try and tell the story
and we try and tell a story that really resonates
for us, and in the case of the Olaf Song,
we were feeling very like stuck in an enchanted forest,
we couldn't get out of, that we couldn't make sense of,
because these stories are hard,
certain story points will get locked,
while others are very, very in flux.
- Yeah.
- And you know there's this deadline coming
and you keep telling yourself, "Okay trust the process,
trust your collaborators,
in six months this will all be over
and it will all be solved."
Even though you don't know how to solve it then.
I was skating to try and self soothe.
I was ice skating around, and I thought,
this will all makes sense when I'm older.
That's what Olaf can sing,
and I ran to the ice skating rental guy,
and I said, "Do you have a pen and paper?"
And I would do a lap and then write a line,
and then do a lap and write a line.
And I brought it back to Bobby
who then discovered this amazing spooky, Halloween
meets samhain kind of music to put it to.
- He's got so much anxiety because he cannot process
the craziness that is going on around him in the forest
[Screams]
that the song itself is almost like a
"calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean" kind of mantra
that he's self soothing with.
- [Olaf] ♪ Cause when you're older ♪
♪ absolutely everything makes sense! ♪
[strings music]
This is fine.
[soft piano music]
- The first big song we wrote for the movie was
"The Next Right Thing," a song that Anna sings
towards the end, and it was a very daring thing
that we all agreed we would try,
because it's a song about grief.
It's a song about what do you do when your whole world
is collapsed, and you don't know what to do next,
you can't image a future.
And Anna shows this quality in the song
of realizing like you can't think about the future,
you just have to think about the narrow,
the very next right thing, take a step,
and then make another choice.
Because the grief comes in waves,
and that's what we wanted to write about.
- Right.
Anna is such a optimist, and she's usually so
all over the place, not unlike myself,
[laughs]
Kristen also had done this beautiful monologue
about how being an optimist is not a thing that you're given
it's a choice you make every day.
- Right, it's not that she magically feels happy
all the time, it's that she feels all the feelings,
she deals with all the darkness,
and it's a choice to still keep going,
even when things look like you can't.
- There are those moments when the world gives you
something that seems impossible to recover from.
I did ask Chris Buck if I could share this story.
During the press junket for Frozen I,
Chris and his wife lost their son.
Then I watched as he had to show up for work,
and show up three weeks later for the Golden Globes,
and then the Oscars, and how he just
had to keep putting one foot in front of the next,
and the courage that he showed,
dealing with the unimaginable,
and I think I wrote this lyric like in one sitting.
I was just thinking about what he must have felt like
in that moment, and I brought it to Bobby,
and he put this beautiful music to it,
and we said, "Can we put this in a Disney movie?"
And it was Chris and Jen who were like, "Yes."
Not only can we, but we must.
And so, we're really grateful to them for that.
♪ [Anna] How to rise from the floor, ♪
♪ When it's not you I'm rising for. ♪
- You know, all of that was in a soup
for this moment that we wanted to give Anna
because Anna is this human heart,
who shows us how to be human.
And Elsa is this mythical heroine
who really shows us how to be even better
than we can possibly be.
- How to find our power.
- Yeah.
[lively music]
- Part of being a boy is repressing
a certain range of emotions and vulnerability.
We wanted to show the world that it's okay
for boys to feel their feelings.
We think that it's healthy.
My journey as a person,
and getting out of my own comfort zone
has been to express my feelings
and to learn to be more romantic
to this woman who deserves it.
- Aww.
If Kristoff allows other boys to feel what they feel,
and their feelings are real,
that's something that Kristoff brings to the world.
- [Kristoff] ♪ I'm the one who sees you home ♪
♪ but now I'm lost in the woods, ♪
♪ And I don't know what path you are on. ♪
- We'd already written the bulk of the Kristoff song
and, I believe, went back and tagged on the
"reindeers are better than people" reprise to set it up.
You need to think of it like an airplane ramp,
every song needs a really clear pathway
to takeoff into singing, and that is a really thing
to get, especially with this song,
which was going to go so stylized
into the 80s, both visually and sonically.
And so the best way in was through Sven allowing us
to go to a really stylized place, and that's what we did.
- We had a blast writing,
and once we and the team discovered this moment,
and I think we knew that it had this 80s flair.
We had no inkling what Jen and Chris were gonna do
with the visuals of it because it just brought it home.
It was so over the top.
- A storyboard artist named Dan Abraham,
who is known for being really great with humor,
I think somewhere we had said a note like,
this could be shot like an 80s karaoke video.
He took that note [laughs]
and boy did he run with it!
And I think it was actually their idea
to put the reindeer chorus in,
which allowed us to go, - Which we ran with it.
- Allowed us to go, this is the kind of chicken and egging
that happens with the amazing animators,
that allowed us to take it into these harmonies
that were like boy-band kind of harmonies,
so it's so fun when you're not just writing in a vacuum,
but you have all these amazing artists inspiring you
to zig and zag.
[piano music]
What very few people know is that it's never
that we are handed a full script
with like, "and song goes here."
That never happens.
Nor do we ever hand them a whole score
and say like, "work a story around these songs."
- [laughs] Right.
- That's just not how it happens.
It happens with talking almost every single day,
usually for two hours,
sometimes while Jen is driving in,
we're calling at 11 a.m. in New York,
we have an idea, so we catch her in her car,
sometimes she calls us at 9 p.m.
after we've put our kids to sleep
to say, "I have an idea!"
And then we have to very quietly play on our piano.
And it's like a weird high pressure five year playdate.
The first time around we were kinda like [screams]
this time around we've gotten
to realize how amazing the animators are.
They take these songs,
and the way they breathe life into them,
like for instance, during "Some Things Never Change,"
Anna's holding onto her shoes,
that was an animator choice to say,
"You know, it's the end of the night,
she's been wearing heels, let's give her those heels,
and have her take them off."
When I saw it I got chills, because it was exactly right,
and it was never something I put in the stage directions.
It was all them, and it's such a dance,
so the first thing I just wanna say
is I'm so grateful for what the animators
bring to these songs.
- Yeah, the second time around you're able
to focus and appreciate your collaborators' work more,
because we never really interact with half
of the people who work on this movie, more than half.
And that's all thanks to the director
who does work with us and with every single department,
coordinating them all to tell one story.
And to me I appreciate, not only the different departments
but also the work of Jen and Chris
who somehow told a coherent story
out of all these disparate people
who never get to work together and meet.
[soft music]
Christophe Beck is the film's composer
for Frozen I and Frozen II,
and we're so lucky to get to work with him.
A, because he doesn't have to do this,
but he does take our themes from the songs
and interweave them sometimes into his cues.
He does it so subtlety and develops them in such a way
that's perfect for the drama of the scene,
and sometimes its very stirring,
its like... - Right.
- We didn't know the melodies could work that way.
- "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman"
was really a partnership with him
because we had written the three panels of
♪ Do you wanna build a snowman, ♪
But he's the one who took the themes
and went like [musical note sounds].
[music plays]
[knocking on wood]
And then could come back to our,
♪ Do you wanna build a snowman? ♪
- Yeah, I want to be him when I grow up.
[laughs] He's so good.
And he was the one, - Me too.
- He created the theme for the people in the forest,
the mist, I don't even know what the instruments are called
because I wasn't there, but there's one instrument
that just is so haunting,
that you hear when they get to the forest.
[haunting music]
[soft music]
We did some songs that were music first,
and some songs that were lyrics first,
but she was writing so confidently
that when it was lyrics first,
I would often get the song and all we'd
have to do was really set it.
It was great to watch her grow.
Maybe part of that was me just fighting back a little less.
[laughs]
And realizing that the stuff she was handing me was great.
- But often the stuff I was handing him
was inspired by things that he would be playing
in the mornings, like we have piano in our living room,
and so while I'm getting ready,
and I take much longer than he does,
he goes and he noodles down
on the piano. - I've got a lot of time
to play yeah.
- But I'm inspired by that, my brain starts going
with, "Ooh, that could be the lullaby."
- Oh so wait, you're taking longer because I'm playing?
[laughs] I can stop!
[lively music]
- When we finish a song, we're so excited sometimes
that we come home and our kids have to sit through them.
[laughs]
They love being our test audience,
and they really give us great feedback.
But sometimes we're like,
"We finished a song today do you wanna hear it?"
And they're like, "Maybe after dinner."
[laughs]
The good news was with Frozen II,
we had some of the same responses we had
to some of the Frozen I songs,
where Annie was like, "Let's listen to it again."
And Katie, Katie's now 14, so she can now even say like,
"I really like that you went into minor there.
Did I hear a sixth?"
- They've gotten so sophisticated as they have grown,
they're both teenagers, I guess a teen and a tween,
and now they're able to give very specific
feedback in a helpful way, which is nice,
but what we're really kinda looking for is,
do ya like it or not?
Like so how did you enjoy it?
[peaceful music]
- We write two specific voices sometimes
and we have been given this great gift
of working with Idina Menzel.
When I hit my 20s she was starring in Rent,
and I actually went in for that part a couple of times.
I was definitely trying to channel Idina
when I was a 24 year old actress.
So when we were given this opportunity
to write these songs for her I could hear her in my head.
And I knew that down low she has this incredible warmth
and vulnerability, but that the higher you take her
the more epic and powerful she gets,
so you may notice that we use that to our advantage
when we write for Elsa.
Everything needs to have soul.
And you can write something with like a tinge of
touching psychology and she always finds
that psychology and then brings it out with her voice.
I think that's why she's Idina.
Kristen Bell has this beautiful, pingy sound.
And one of our first dates was
actually watching her in Reefer Madness.
- The musical.
- The musical.
When she was still in college.
She sang this little weird song about like,
♪ In my lonely pew. ♪
[Laughter]
It was so cute, and I was like,
"How can I work with her?
How can I get her to sing one of my songs?"
- She's so funny.
Her song, I think, she came in so many times
to do it this way and do it that way.
She never got tired of trying to give us something
that we wanted.
We kept going between, sort of,
more straight-forwardly singling it
and sobbing and breaking down.
The film makers carved out a little more time
and stopped some of the rhythm of the beginning
so she could have a breakdown.
It was just inspiring to watch her come in,
with a baseball cap on,
and then all of a sudden be singing and crying
in this beautiful perfect way
that just breaks my heart now every time I see it.
- Yeah, and then Jonathon Groff,
talk about a heart.
He is just the kindest, sweetest guy.
And yet he's got this like, cool guy voice.
So it's just such a fuzzy, wonderful example
for men everywhere.
I love him.
You have a long and storied history with Josh.
- I'm very lucky to have worked with Josh.
I'm one of his discoverers, actually.
I cast him in "Book of Mormon."
He's always been funny.
He never stops being funny.
I stopped a long time ago.
[laughs]
And I'm glad - You're always funny.
- I'm really glad not to have to do that anymore.
But Josh just goes around bringing joy wherever he goes,
and every time I get to work with him is so much fun.
- It's such a joy.
- Do you know gorillas burp when they're happy?
Godos too!
Test it out.
- [Bobby] Josh was on this film before...
- [Kristen] Before we were - [Bobby] any of us I think.
- We came in at the same time as Kristen and Idina.
But they came in and they sang, "Wind Beneath My Wings"
in a duet, and that is what greenlit the original Frozen.
[gentle music]
If you had asked us at this time in 2013,
"What is the song of the film?"
We wouldn't have had an answer for you.
It's really, the audience tells us
what the song of the film is.
You know the first song, the lullaby,
is basically the roadmap for the entire musical.
You'll realize the mom is telling them
where to go and what to do to find their way forward,
because the mom knows so much more
than anybody else in that room.
- [Queen Iduna] ♪ Where the north wind meets the sea. ♪
There's a river full of memory.
- "Some Things Never Change,"
is this way to start a musical sequel,
that really gets a whole bunch of exposition out,
and tells us the journey each one
of these characters will be going on.
- [Kristoff] ♪ The leaves are already falling, ♪
♪ Sven, it feels like the future is calling. ♪
- [Sven] ♪ Are you telling me tonight you're ♪
♪ gonna get down on one knee? ♪
- Every single song does huge amount of story heavy lifting,
because there's really no difference
between dialogue, action, and song,
because we all work so closely together,
and I don't even know who thinks of what.
We don't know like, - Yeah.
- if it was Jenn and Chris. - It blends together.
- It all blends together because
we're all playing in this sandbox together.
All of our songs, at least at this moment,
all of our songs are the song of the film
because they all do major storytelling heavy lifting.
- And now that we're about to release them all,
it's almost like a, "I love you all."
- Yes!
It does feel like dropping seven of our children
at college and saying like, "Make good choices.
I hope everybody likes you."
[laughs]
[gentle strings music]
All of the songs that you've brought up
in this interview all come from a really personal place.
We can't write a song unless it's something
that we say, "That speaks to my gut."
And, "I know what that feels like."
You know, with "Remember Me," from Coco,
we were song writers having to leave our children
across the country.
So what I used to do is leave these lullabies
behind for them, that the babysitters could sing.
- ♪ I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart. ♪
- That's what those lullabies were
that we were leaving for our own kid.
All of the songs that we've written for Frozen II,
especially "Do the Next Right Thing,"
especially "Show Yourself,"
especially "Lost in the Woods,"
and "This Will all Make Sense When I'm Older"
and "Into the Unknown,"
these are all moments that I could point to something
in my life that I know how to talk about this,
I know what it feels like to feel a calling
that I'm not doing the right thing.
The great privilege and the responsibility
as storytellers is to teach empathy,
to help everybody see through the eyes of your character,
you know the small amount that we did for Coco,
at a time when people were trying to say "Build a wall,"
instead to build a bridge to this little boy named Miguel
and his experience.
We felt responsibility to do our job right
so that every single human being
could feel through Miguel's eyes.
And that's also what we feel with this idea of Anna and Elsa
searching for truth in a world where truth is uncertain.
The world has changed.
You can't keep it from changing,
and truth is getting lost,
how do we find truth,
and how do we find it through these two strong women?
Thank you so much for listening, Vanity Fair.
- I hope you guys have enjoyed listening to us talk
about our process.
- And we really hope you like Frozen II.
- Thanks.
- Thanks.