Interview: Alan Menken and Glenn Slater on Creating the Songs and Score for ‘Spellbound’ and the “Perfectly” Cast Rachel Zegler

“Some of my absolute favorite songs that I’ve ever written sit in a drawer somewhere. Because I just don’t have a context that was appropriate for that, or things changed…” Any musical lover’s ear would perk up at this statement from the legendary Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, but don’t get your hopes up that you’ll ever hear them. “I never go to the trunk. I’m superstitious about that.” Menken, speaking with Glenn Slater about their collaboration on the songs for the new Netflix animated feature Spellbound, prefers to approach every project fresh. “Everything has to be born of that world and of that process,” he says, to the point where he will start a songwriting session by asking to hear something that feels like the world the current song needs to be in.

After a long career composing some of the most memorable movie melodies (most notably the Disney Renaissance trio of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin), Menken still worries about copying himself, even if it hasn’t happened that often. “That’s why I love having a collaborator in the room with me,” he says. “Many times I’m in the room and I’ll write something and I’ll go, ‘I really like this,’ and Glenn will say, ‘I think you wrote that before.’” According to Slater, “working with Alan is kind of like working with the world’s most advanced music AI,” because of the composer’s ability to take any number of disparate prompts and turn them into a fully-fledged melody.

That ability was especially helpful for Spellbound, which was different from any film either of them had worked on. “I worked so hard to try to make this formulaic,” Menken laughs, “and it didn’t want to be formulaic.” One particular song, in which Princess Ellian’s parents – who have been magically turned into monsters who lack the ability to speak or understand human language – slowly start to regain their ability to speak, is emblematic of the work the pair did on the film. “This movie is so unlike every other animated film, and we had to take a lot of big swings and do things in places where you wouldn’t ordinarily have a song, or emotions you wouldn’t ordinarily find in an animated film,” says Slater. “This was one of those moments where it’s not plot, it’s not a comedy moment, it’s not an emotional big soaring thing, it’s a weird little awakening that would benefit from having music.” The opening number went through numerous rewrites due to similar issues: “Unlike many other animated films, we’re starting this one [where] everything has happened already, and we’re a year in, and we needed to catch the audience up so fast,” Slater explains. “So how do we get all that backstory into one moment so that the audience is caught up, understands what has happened in terms of the narrative, understands where Ellian is emotionally, understands what’s at play, possibly gets what the allegory that we’re going for is going to be.”

Menken offers a surprising reference point for their work here: “I feel like the analog… feels mostly like A Little Night Music in a way sometimes.” While the two pieces couldn’t be more different, you can see the connection in the way Sondheim takes little moments that aren’t traditional musical moments and turns them into songs that reveal the characters’ mental state. Read on to discover more about the duo’s process, how the casting affected one of them more than the other, and how they made these tricky musical moments work.

Dan Bayer: So, Spellbound! When were you guys brought onto this project and what drew you to it?

Alan Menken: The beginning. John Lasseter started this musical and I think Chris Bontan, who had been the head of music at Disney, was also a very good, besides an associate, also a good friend of his. And we basically reassembled the team that we had worked together with Tangled, and of course I worked with Chris on so many things. So it was right at the very beginning, we came in.

The number one thing that drew me was in fact the collaboration, the people we were going to be working with. I was drawn to the ambition, and sort of terrified also of the ambition of the story, because it’s really… the architecture of this is an emotional situation that doesn’t necessarily fit the normal formulaic arc of a musical. And so, the challenge is how do we create this journey and we just sort of jumped into the sandbox.

Glenn Slater: There was a concept, there was some key art, there was a general plot with not a lot of detail and we came in that early. So yeah, we got to really be with the project from the very conception and kind of riding it through all the permutations until we got to the end.

It’s quite difficult when you have an idea that has its own pathway that you have to follow because that’s what life is. You want to be true to the situation, and when that doesn’t follow the normal story beats, it takes a lot of work to figure out, all right, how do we tell this in a way that is as fun and exciting and as adventurous and as emotionally satisfying as a constructed plot and yet the journey is something that’s not a narrative, it’s an emotional journey. So yeah, I mean, it felt like nobody’s ever done this before. Nobody’s dealt with this particular topic in animation before. It felt like something new and there’s nothing more exciting than that.

DB: That’s really incredible. And thinking about that, since it’s so different, how, and maybe who, decided in the writing process, where the songs would go and what they should be?

AM: Well, mostly we do, I think, or we try to… I worked so hard to try to make this formulaic [laughs] and it didn’t want to be formulaic. So we would just basically posit the very beginning a structure and some of that structure survived, but a lot of that just went flying away and new ideas were introduced. And there were times we had Zoom meetings where I would just be out of the view of the camera going [snorts], but we just kept at it. And that’s one of the great things about working with John Lasseter, he just calmly is, “let’s call a meeting, let’s keep going. I like this, let’s earn this.” And it was a really amazing process.

GS: Working with people you trust enables you to not feel like you’re locked into a set plot. And it was a lot of give and take. A lot of us were saying, “you know what? This would be a great moment for a song,” and then looking at how do we get there. Or us seeing where the plot is going and say, “Oh my God, go with that because that’s where the song should be and we’re going to nail that.” And often we would work up to a moment and then go backwards and figure out what song do we need to earn this later moment that the writers came up with. Often we would reconceive how the entire emotion would work based on how the plot was laying out.

AM: Well, the best example of that was what we finally came up with, “What About Me?” The moment where Ellian just melts down… and it works. And we go, “okay, but how do we earn that in our journey?” And this is a lot of ways we worked on that. One, for instance, on musical terms, was to take the theme from “What About Me?” which is in a minor key, and create this absolutely major key bouncy journey forward of that same theme leading up to it and then it just crash lands on the song. I’m sure that’s subliminal. I don’t think most people would necessarily pick up on that, but we lay the pipe in the best way possible to ensure that moment.

DB: Yeah, absolutely. So since you were brought on way at the beginning, this was long before anyone knew who would be cast in this thing or who would play any of these roles. So after you knew who was going to be singing all these parts, did you go back and adjust anything for their voices or was it perfectly cast to what you had already written?

GS: A little bit of both. We did not know that it was going to be Rachel Zegler, and she just came in and slotted in so perfectly that we didn’t have to adjust anything for her because she just nailed it. On the other hand, once we knew that it was Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow playing her advisors, we were like, “Oh my God, they have such distinctive voices. Let’s shape that for them.” And particularly with John, we did not have, “I Could Get Used to This,” in that place where it is about two thirds of the way through the film at all. And when we heard his recording for “Step By Step”, we said, “Oh my God, he’s such a fun singer and that character is so much fun in a musical sense, let’s find another moment,” so we could really take advantage of him.

DB: I’m so glad you did because that song for him has, I think, my favorite rhyme in the whole thing, which is the “marvelous/larva-less” line.

[laughter]

AM: How about when he says “I could get used to this?” and “shake my big fat caboose to this.”

[laughter]

DB: Yes! That’s awesome.

GS: That was such a fun song to write.

AM: I’m glad as you wouldn’t know it, but he’s very funny.

GS: Yeah, you wouldn’t know it! I’m kidding.

DB: Is that one of those things – when you have someone’s voice in your head, does that make it easier to write something, hearing them in your head as you write?

GS: Yeah, I think so.

AM: I’m going to disagree with you.

GS: But you know what? There’s a reason for that. So go ahead. You say what you were about to say.

AM: Yeah, I only want to write for the character. And we create the blueprints ourselves and then it can be interpreted and can be changed. But the basic cinderblock is the character in the situation. Go ahead.

GS: What he does is the emotion, is the subtext, is all the things that you can’t put into words, but that give the shape and the power to the moment. What I do is kind of the grooming on top of it. I adjust the hair [laughs] and knowing the character, and knowing who the actor is, enables me to sort of imagine the character as that actor a little bit. And so for Bolinar, knowing it’s John Lithgow, it’s like, oh, I can get away with the bigger words and I know that he’s going to have that kind of nervous quaver in his voice, and I can take advantage of that the way I set the rhymes up. I know that playing the low language, like “caboose to this,” against the high language, is something that he would really dig his teeth into. And so I would not have necessarily done that if it was a different actor playing that role.

DB: Sure, I can imagine. And the other song for them, the duet for Nazara and Bolinar, which is so fun, I’m curious what led you to this sort of flamenco style?

AM: It actually worked out perfectly as a dance of manipulation. But there were times in our meetings where on a gut level someone would say, “I know that the world we’re in is not any one specific world. It is really kind of a combination of all the different ethnicities”, so to speak.

DB: It’s an “everyplace.”

AM: So we just played with flamenco and the flamenco, I think also influenced the tone of the lyric and the moment.

GS: In the film, there is a sort of Andalusian influence in the animation. Ellian’s outfits are sort of that 15th-century Spanish dresses with the… I don’t know what any of the language is for what this is. And some of the landscapes have that kind of sweeping feel, and the movie was largely animated in Spain as well. So I think we all had Spain on our minds a little bit as a sort of base note to the fantasy world that the movie is set in.

AM: But the score goes between that and Brazilian influences and Eastern European influences – a little bit of everything, a little bit of Indian influences…

DB: Yeah, it’s a lot. And I’m curious, especially now that you bring up all these different world music influences, Alan, you’ve scored so many films and stage musicals and things at this point, and you’ve done quite a few in this sort of fairy tale genre as well. Do you ever worry about repeating yourself or being too referential?

AM: Absolutely. Many times I’m in the room and I’ll write something and I’ll go, “I really like this,” and Glenn will say, “I think you wrote that before.” That’s why I love having a collaborator in the room with me. Honestly, it doesn’t happen that often because I generally want to be clear about the vocabulary we’re in, and we’ll spend a lot of time going, “okay before we write anything, play me something off the internet that you think is at least in the world we want to be in – what world do we need to be in in this moment?” Because I want those specific influences.

GS: Yeah, working with Alan is kind of like working with the world’s most advanced music AI, where you give him prompts, like you say, “We want it to feel Indian, but with some Spanish undertones and it should feel exciting, but lonely like a tumbleweed.” And he’ll be like, “Yeah, got it, got it. Indian, Spanish tumbleweed lonely… this.” And out comes this fully-fledged melody.

[laughter]

AM: Or, it would be different and kind of wild with Glenn going, “Okay, wait a second. Wait, that section there, that sort of contains the feel I want.” So it’s a matter of you’re feeling in the dark to find something original and exciting and appropriate, and it doesn’t necessarily come easily. But you have your barometer to go, that works. And then we can finish that song and go, “[sigh] Damn, the tone works, but [throws hands up] let’s do it again.” I think as writers, the best discipline we have is the discipline to throw things out, you know, throw your babies out, and do it again.

DB: Along that line, was there anything that you wrote for this that you ended up throwing out that you really loved?

AM: Yeah, musically, we had a flying song for a character who’s no longer in the movie.

GS: But ultimately, it’s not about writing a great song. Ultimately, it’s about creating a great movie and we have no compunctions about putting something aside if it doesn’t fit the movie anymore. And everything that we ended up with, we love. So it’s a win-win.

DB: I mean that’s the most important thing, right?

AM: Some of my absolute favorite songs that I’ve ever written sit in a drawer somewhere. Because I just don’t have a context that was appropriate for that, or things changed and, I don’t know. Maybe someday we’ll bring it back as an interesting tidbit for people to listen to.

DB: Yeah. Did you do any of that searching in the archives for this? Or was it all new?

GS: This was all fresh. This was all fresh.

AM: Oh, I never go to the trunk. I never go to the trunk. I’m superstitious about that. Everything has to be born of that world and of that process.

DB: There’s another specific song that I wanted to ask about, which is the song – forgive me, I don’t know the names – but the song where the king and queen as monsters have just figured out that they can talk.

AM: “Remembering.”

DB: Okay, yes, “Remembering.” How did you figure out what their voice was in that song – what is the language that they’re using?

GS:  [laughs] That was tricky.

AM: Well, yeah, having them become verbal was really tricky. On a gut level, I felt we need that moment when the awakening is starting to happen and let it be there as opposed to really… It does push the story forward, but it’s not about that. It’s mostly about taking in the moment of Ellian having a little glimmer of hope that it’s all going to be good, but how much can they actually say or sing?

GS: Yeah, that’s true. And just as an entire team, figuring out how verbal they could be, what that would sound like, and when they’d get pieces of that back was a tricky process to figure out. What we realized was that the audience was going to miss the stages unless we had a song to kind of mark the beginning of it, and once we had that in place, then I had to do a lot of figuring out how many syllable words could they use, what felt realistic, what differentiated the way in which they were getting back their memories. So the king is remembering things faster than the queen is, that kind of stuff just to make it feel like you’re on that journey with them and having that rediscovery along with them.

AM: And that’s an example of a moment that had to be a song. That, in dialogue, I think it would’ve been eggy. It would’ve been hard to just have them saying… you need to have the deep emotion that underscored all of this, lift up those attempts to talk and give it an emotional context.

DB: It’s a really wonderful moment in the film. It’s both funny and heartfelt, and it’s everything that you want that moment to be.

GS: And one of the things we’re so proud of with that song is that there’s not really an analog for it in any other animated film. This movie is so unlike every other animated film, and we had to take a lot of big swings and do things in places where you wouldn’t ordinarily have a song, or emotions you wouldn’t ordinarily find in an animated film. And this was one of those moments where it’s not plot, it’s not a comedy moment, it’s not an emotional big soaring thing, it’s a weird little awakening that would benefit from having music.

AM: I feel like the analog, and I don’t know if you really know, feels mostly like A Little Night Music in a way sometimes.

DB: Yeah, sure.

AM: But you wanted that timeless, impressionistic moment.

DB: Wow, A Little Night Music. I can see that! So along those lines, was that the song that gave you the most difficulty in writing it, or was it one of the other ones?

GS: It came out of him very fast. It was very much, here’s how this piecing together feels. For me, it took a little bit longer of a time. First of all, because I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted the idea yet. And Alan kept saying, “no, trust me, trust me, this is going to work.” And then I did have to kind of piece it together over several drafts and figure [it] out, but once it all fell together, it just felt like it always existed.

AM: How many rewrites did we do of Ellian’s opening number?

GS: Oh my God, so many rewrites.

AM: “Keep It Together” becoming “My Parents Are Monsters”…

GS: Yeah, there were different titles. There was a moment where it was the same structure, but the melodies were different. We had different sections that came and went and were inverted and then re-un-inverted. So many different versions because again, tricky moment where unlike many other animated films, we’re starting this one, everything has happened already, and we’re a year in, and we needed to catch the audience up so fast. So how do we get all that backstory into one moment so that the audience is caught up, understands what has happened in terms of the narrative, understands where Ellian is emotionally, understands what’s at play, possibly gets what the allegory that we’re going for is going to be. I think adults will get it. Kids might not necessarily get it, but if you go back to it, it’s all in there.

AM: We had an opening number that preceded that, that everyone loved and was setting up backstory, and losing it was actually a great move, but it came with a lot of, you know, wrenching.

DB: I can imagine.

AM: But that’s what you do. That’s our job.

DB: Well, yeah, and that song perfectly sets the tone for the film without giving too much away, which is impressive for this story. Yeah, it’s fantastic work. Thank you so much – thank you for your work and thanks for speaking with me today, too.

GS: Thank you.

AM: Thank you.

Spellbound is now streaming on Netflix.