EXCLUSIVE interview of 'Chernobyl' fame and Grammy Award-winner Sam Slater on Netflix & YRF's 'The Railway Men'

British composer Sam Slater, who’s best known for composing the score for Chernobyl, has also composed the original score for Netflix and Yash Raj Films’ The Railway Men. In an exclusive interview with Firspost, he spoke about the prep that went through in creating a musical piece for the series, working again on a show that’s against the backdrop of a tragedy, and collaborating with the director Shiv Rawail. Edited excerpts from the interview What are some of the responses that you have received for The Railway Men so far? I usually wake up every morning and check various social media platforms and all kinds of comments come out. A lot of positive comments have been coming my way and people have said the story has really touched them, sometimes, people have personal relationships to the event itself and they felt the music and everything did a beautiful job of telling a challenging story. You also composed music for the series Chernobyl and now The Railway Men, both of them ironically based on two of the biggest disasters the world has ever faced. How do you decide the kind of music such stories need? In Chernobyl, our framework was very clear and nobody wants to repeat the same thing. For this, me and my relatively small team here recorded train stations as much as we possibly could and spent a lot of time with Shiv to understand the emotional framing of the story. It also needed lots and lots of experimentations and building instruments that didn’t exist, trying to find sounds. Chernobyl is a very slow drama and The Railway Men is a thriller, literally. The actual drama is in these wonderful four people and there’s a lot of energy in that. The music also needed to have that energy and not be slow. Were you aware of the Bhopal Gas Leak tragedy that happened in 1984? What was the brief given to you by the makers? I didn’t know much about it but I did know some specific story about it. I am from the UK but we do have an understanding of what happened, but the number of victims was far higher than what I knew. I was shocked as I learned more and more about it, and there’s such sadness in it and full credit to Shiv and his team to write something that had so much hope. What were the challenges you faced as a composer since the series was being filmed when we were in the middle of the pandemic? We, as music composers, start working when the film is over or when the series has mostly been shot or arranged. The pandemic was almost over when I started working on The Railway Men. But the challenges the pandemic threw were that I had to meet different people in different rooms and couldn’t travel. I was in Berlin and not allowed to leave the city for some time. I had to completely reinvent myself in creating sounds. I have been to India a lot, I love the country. I have never met Shiv in person, we worked entirely virtually. The Railway Men is currently streaming on Netflix