Conversation With Netflix Composer Gautier Abadie

Composer Gautier Abadie specializes in creating the musical scores for films and video games. Educated at The Juilliard School in New York, Abadie now works as a ghost-composer for the Israeli-American composer Noam Kaniel. Kaniel has sold over 8 million albums and is well known for his work composing the scores of many popular productions.

Gautier, you’ve worked as a ghost-composer since 2017 for Noam Kaniel. You composed music and sounds for Power Rangers and Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat which are available on Netflix and Nickelodeon. How did you get started in ghost-writing, and how is it?

Noam lives in Paris now, but he is American and having a ghost is normal for Americans. Once you achieve celebrity, you don’t have enough time to do all the work, so you employ someone to do the work you don’t have time for. It’s called a “ghost.” The same concept exists in fashion, literature and other fields as well. 

In 2017, when I was studying film composition in Annecy, France, there was this famous “Festival d’animation.” I met Noam on my first day at the festival. That’s when I started ghostwriting for him. Now we’re going on three years of working together on a daily basis.

You mentioned that working for him gave you “a real idea about what this industry is like” and that “it taught you how to produce quality content under the pressure of deadlines.” Can you describe the process of composition and orders?

I don’t receive orders from the producers, as they don’t know that I am doing the work. That’s part of being a ghost composer. I receive messages and feedback directly from Noam. He is the director, and I follow him. For example, with Power Rangers, Noam transfers the assignment to me. He tells me what to do and what not to do. For example, which instrument to use for which character. I send him my take on it, and then he sends me feedback. In the meantime, he is working on another episode. So instead of delivering just the one episode he worked on, he is able to deliver two episodes every 10 days. He then receives notes from the producers with specific revisions and feedback that he sends to me. 

Comments from producers are often very specific, but also very broad and vague at the same time. They’re very good at what they do, but they don’t necessarily have the vocabulary to communicate it. We don’t speak the same language. It’s like they’re telling you exactly where you need to go, but they don’t tell you how to get there. So you don’t know if you should take a car, a helicopter or a boat. It’s very hard to know precisely what they want. 

British people got the opportunity to hear your music through Aleksandar Mileusnic, who participated in Britain’s Got Talent with an arrangement of the song “Seven Nation Army” that you arranged with a jazzy, swing twist. The judges praised him for the unique arrangement of the song, and the video now has more than 5 million views. How did you end up composing for him? 

I was studying in Annecy, France in 2017. I took a car with a girl named Laura and her boyfriend. That was him. A couple of days later we got together and played music at my place. A month later his girlfriend broke up with him. We ended up living together at my apartment for 6 months. We composed lots of songs together, which we never released, but it was nice.

One day he called me and told me, he was doing Britain’s Got Talent. He asked me to take care of the song. The show that night was watched by 180 million people. It was quite a struggle to get the producers to play my arrangements. They didn’t want to pay me, because they have their own in-house producers. They tried to re-arrange it differently and it was never as good. I knew his voice better. 

How did you end up moving to the U.S.?

In Lyon, France, there is a prestigious conservatory, and it’s the only place other than Annecy where you can study film scoring. I tried to apply three times in a row, but I didn’t get in. I thought I would have to stop music and get “a real job”. But I saw this post on Rick Baitz’s Facebook page announcing that he would be teaching at the Juilliard School. So I sent him a message. On September 14, 2018, he sent me a message saying I was accepted at the Juilliard School. I had two days to get there. The next day I was on a plane.

You’re currently studying concert composition...

My goal is to be an eternal student, and to experiment. When I was at Juilliard School, I met Michael Giacchino, the guy who made the music for films like Ratatouille, La-Haut and Coco, and he told me that his secret to making good music was to be an eternal student.

In film-scoring, the music is there to help the movie, not to be the main focus of the movie. Alexandre Desplat said that with good music, you don’t hear it come, and you don’t hear it leave. As much as I like it, I kind of get tired of it. Music is such an amazing thing, and movies need music. But music is its own thing. That’s what brought me to concert music.

How is composing for video games different from composing for movies?

It takes way more time to compose for a video game. The music in video-games has much more of a presence than in the movies. You could still see a good movie without music, but what would Tetris or Super Mario be without their iconic music. People also spend much more time on video-games than watching a movie. You have to think of video-game music on a much larger scale - people will hear your music for hours and hours. Also, music is coded in video-games. The music changes when the character dies for example. But to be well programmed on a computer, it needs to be well programmed in your head. If you pause the game, the music continues. You need to think about it all in a way that fits together smoothly. So, you have to plan the world of the game and its music in its entirety. 

How is it to be a film-composer in the U.S.?

There are many movies produced in the US. American people dream. They are positive. Things seems possible. I’m not a huge fan of the idea of the American Dream, but I do believe you can create opportunities if you work hard. In cities like New York it’s easy to create opportunities.

I remember in France when I started studying at the conservatory, the first thing they told me before my first course was “you’re not going to do this as a job, because you’re already too old.” I was 16 at that time. I think in the end, it’s work and determination that brought me here. Thankfully, my mom always told me I should do something I love. There’s no point waking up every morning to do work that we don’t like. I worked at McDonald’s and a few other small jobs so I know what it’s like, and I don’t want to do that anymore. I strongly knew that I had to work hard in order to do something better and create the chances to help me succeed. Overall, there will always be a place for someone who is dedicated and who works hard, no matter if he lives in France or in New York. No one succeeds without doing something. Work is the key to success.

I hope this interview will give courage to young people. I didn’t come from a wealthy family, and I was always told in France that my music would lead nowhere, that it was risky. It's that, that reluctance, that's the thing that's difficult in France. People like to criticize for the sake of criticizing, and it discourages people from ever trying anything. My tip: get out of your comfort zone. Go to concerts of people you don't know. Be curious. Try.