Interview with Dario Marianelli
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Dario Marianelli
Composer born in Pisa, Italy, known for Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina, Paddington 2 and Bumblebee. He won the Oscar for Atonement.
Source: Spitfire Audio on YouTube
These answers are taken from Composer Insight: Dario Marianelli on Spitfire Audio's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What advice do you have for new composers?
Not to be too flippant, I'd say be very lucky. Looking back, what helped my luck was being quite open and saying yes to virtually everything that came my way. I always tried to make the best I could with what I had in front of me, and possibly not being afraid of speaking my mind. Filmmakers generally appreciate you speaking your mind and being quite clear about what you think would work and what wouldn't. But it takes quite a lot of courage at the beginning to stand your ground with somebody who you feel might be in a more powerful position than you, like a director or a producer.
A number of composers were telling me when I was starting, the most important thing is to understand what they want and then give it to them. This always rang a bit hollow to me, and potentially dangerous, because you present yourself as a jack-of-all-trades. A director is trying to build a world that is rich and layered and self-consistent. So if you come in with ideas, as opposed to waiting for the ideas to come to you, you're making the project richer. First of all you need to have the ideas, and then be able to articulate them in a way that the filmmaker can connect to.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
Paddington was the exact opposite of Darkest Hour. I started working quite late in the process, when there was a very well-established temp track on the film already, and that temp track was made of 30 different composers, all of which the director loved. Those pieces had been in the temp for quite a while. If you watch Paddington, he's really cute and funny, but there was nothing funny about working on the soundtrack of Paddington. I'm still licking my wounds. But it was good to get to the other side, and now I'm really pleased about it and about the music that came out of me.
At some point I completely let go of the temp. I convinced the director that it really wasn't the way to go forward, me trying to be 30 different composers. On my best days I just about manage to be myself, if I'm lucky. From that point on, when he understood that I couldn't chase his temp, he let go of it.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
One big problem in writing music for films is communication with people that are not necessarily musicians. A young director who's not particularly experienced will be very worried about not being able to talk with a musician in musical terms. They'll try to talk to you about style, like, I love something jazzy here, or something romantic, and these are really dangerous generic labels. Or they'll start talking about major keys, minor keys, instrumentation. They would never say to an actor, you've got to pull this muscle here.
A trick that I found for myself, and I see it working more or less every time, is to avoid letting the conversation about music be about the music. Just as a director would talk to an actor about the inner struggle of a character, or the back history, and then let the actor flesh it out, I always find that talking about character motivation, inner thoughts, background story, the story of the film, is more useful. It's a language that we all understand. Can you mark with the music the moment when this character is taking a decision that will change their life forever? Of course you can. That's what music does best, really.
Describe your musical style.
I panic. I drink a lot of coffee. I procrastinate. Once I've exhausted all the possible excuses, I start by messing around on the keyboard until usually something happens. This sounds a bit vague and haphazard, but in fact it's a tried and tested system. Over the years I've got more experience in allowing chance and serendipity to enter my work.
I have a very unique relationship with Joe [Wright], where he asks me to write music before he shoots the film, on the basis of the script, or in the case of Atonement the novel. When I start messing around it's very free. I don't chase any particular image. If the music connects to something, it's not something visual, by definition, because there are no visuals. It connects with something else, and that something else is possibly more important. It might be the essence, or a different point of view in the story.
If you think about what a director would naturally do with lighting and costumes and camera movement, every one of these elements will try to make a point about what you're seeing. So why should the music be a decoration on top of everything else?
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
On Atonement, [Joe] didn't want any music there. For a long time there was this kind of war of attrition, where I was saying, will you let me try to do something? It might be interesting. And he would say no, it's very dramatic as it is, and the choir is moving as it is. And then at some point, months after I had started writing the music, maybe he was relaxed after we had covered almost everything else and he was very happy with everything else, he said, you want to have a go?
I had an idea that was quite clear: the music would start early and then would find the choir on the beach and merge together, and then the camera would move on, the choir disappears from sight, and the score continues. So there was this merging between the two. I had one first go where the idea was completely there, but the execution wasn't particularly noteworthy. But Joe could see the idea and he liked it, and he said, have another go, see how far you can push it. So I had another go, and that's what's in the film.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
On Darkest Hour, I met Joe for the first time to talk about this film, and he showed me a kind of grainy black-and-white picture of Churchill walking with his hand on his back, walking very fast, leaning forward. He told me, Churchill always comes across as a slow person, but in fact he was full of energy, thinking very fast, doing everything very fast. So I went home and I wrote a few fast pieces just for piano, without thinking too much. It was really a way to throw something at Joe that he could start reacting to. One or two of these pieces he really liked.
Incidentally, the black-and-white grainy photograph wasn't Churchill. It was Gary Oldman in a costume test. But Joe didn't tell me until later. He just tricked me, but it was a good trick.
On Atonement, when the idea came, I just wrote six pieces for typewriter solo and gave them to him, and he said, oh, this is interesting, I like this.
Dario Marianelli's Full Biography
Dario Marianelli was born in Pisa and studied piano and composition in Florence and London. After a year as a postgraduate composer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he spent 3 years at the National Film and Television School, from which he graduated in 1997. Dario's film scores include 'Paddington 2' (2017), 'Darkest Hour' (2017), 'Kubo and the 'Two Strings' (2016) Everest (2015), 'The Boxtrolls' (2014), 'Anna Karenina' (2012), 'Jane Eyre' (2011), 'Salmon Fishing In The Yemen' (2011), 'Eat Pray Love' (2010), 'The Soloist' (2009), 'Agora' (2009), 'Atonement' (2007), 'V for Vendetta' (2006) and 'Pride and Prejudice' (2005). He has written orchestral music for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra and the Britten-Pears Orchestra, as well as vocal music for the BBC Singers, incidental music for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and several ballet scores. Dario won the Oscar, Golden Globe and Ivor Novello Award in the Best Original Score category for the award-winning Working Title film 'Atonement', for which he also won the World Soundtrack Award and was BAFTA nominated. He was also nominated for a Classical Brit Award in the Soundtrack Of The Year category for 'Atonement'. In 2006, Dario was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Original Score category for his music to Joe Wright's 'Pride & Prejudice'. This score won him the Classical Brit Award in the Soundtrack/ Musical Theatre Composer of The Year category and also earned him an Ivor Novello Award nomination. Dario's collaboration with Joe Wright on the film 'Anna Karenina' led to his nomination for an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Original Score, and in May 2013, he won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Film Score for 'Anna Karenina'. In 2014 Dario composed the score for Laika animation 'The Boxtrolls', which was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award. He has recently completed work on the score to his second Laika animation, 'Kubo and the Two Strings', for which he won an Ivor Novello Award, and also worked on his fifth film collaboration with director Asif Kapadia on live action feature 'Ali and Nino'.
During 2014 Dario's 'Voyager' Violin Concerto also had its world premiere in Brisbane, Australia, performed by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra as part of a spectacular event combining science, music, voice, and film titled 'Journey Through The Cosmos'. The piece was featured alongside a lecture given by Professor Brian Cox and has since gone on to be performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Harding and featuring highly acclaimed violinist Jack Liebeck.
In 2017, Dario continued his working relationship with Joe Wright on 'Darkest Hour' and also scoring Paul King's 'Paddington 2'. Dario was commissioned by The Royal Opera House to compose their new ballet, 'The Unknown Soldier', which premiered in November 2018. He also worked with Travis Knight, composing the score for the latest film in the Transformers film series, 'Bumblebee.' Dario collaborated with Matteo Garrone to score the Italian feature film 'Pinocchio'. Most recently Dario composed the original score for 'A Boy Called Christmas', directed by Gil Kenan, which was released in late 2021.