When I heard about the true story of Ni-ihau I was actually astonished that the story hadn’t already been made. It has such relevance to our time – the dilemmas of tribalism, racism, clash of cultures, human relationships. From a musical perspective, I’ve never scored a period drama set in the pacific which sounded like a great creative challenge that I could put a distinct stamp on.

From the outset Gabriel wanted to have a fusion of the two musical cultures and having experience of writing a lot of world influenced musical scores I listened to and studied the scales and harmonies of Japanese music and music from the pacific.

When you think of Hawaiian traditional music, the first thing that comes to mind are chilled positive songs played on ukeleles and lap slide guitars and I knew before writing the score that a) that style wouldn’t be suitable for the tense emotional drama and b) I wanted to stay away from convention. So after some research I found Hawaiian slack guitar.

The Japanese elements were more straightforward where I relied upon the Koto – a Japanese zither – the Shakuhachi – Japanese flute and the Japanese Taiko drum and integrated many of the harmonic styles and sliding bending notes you hear with the strings.

Ultimately the story and relationships cover universal themes – so I wanted to create a score that covered the universal subjects and have a orchestral foundation. In sympathy with the organic, traditional island I avoided using any elements that sounded as though they were created using modern technology. The film is quite intimate in scale and so I wanted to create a small chamber strings with a blend of Japanese instruments, Hawaiian guitar and Taiko drums and hand played percussion.