Ultraman: Rising is the latest entry in a franchise that dates back to 1966. The character was co-created by Eiji Tsuburaya, a special effects director who also co-created Godzilla in the decade prior to Ultraman’s arrival. Over forty years, and films, later, Ultraman: Rising serves as a fitting introduction to the franchise, as it doesn’t require any prior knowledge of the franchise. This could be in part because co-writer and director Shannon Tindle didn’t initially envision this family tale as an Ultraman story, and steps into that universe for the first time with this film.

Another newcomer to Ultraman is composer Scot Stafford. Stafford had collaborated with Tindle before on projects including the Netflix miniseries Lost Ollie, but Ultraman: Rising provided both the chance to craft a new kind of story with the goal of inviting a multigenerational audience. Stafford is also a founding member of Pollen Music Group, a music production company with credits including Trash Truck and The Simpsons.

Admittedly inspired by the great John Williams’ work on films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stafford took care to do much more than emulate the composer for Ultraman: Rising. The soundtrack features interesting instrumentation and unexpected musical moments that make the score a classically melodic, yet refreshingly unique, complement to the movie. Stafford detailed the process composing the film in conversation with Screen Rant tied to the film’s release.

Making A Classic-Sounding Film Score Was A “Risk” For Ultraman: Rising

Screen Rant: I do want to say that I love this score. I am such a fan of melodic scores that don’t sound like every other melodic score, and I feel like that’s getting increasingly more difficult to do.

Scot Stafford: Thank you so much. If I took any risk, it was in doing something that was classic when, honestly, to get the next job, there is a huge amount of pressure to sound like a lot of other stuff. There’s some incredible stuff out there, but there’s a certain way of going about that where you can make incredibly impactful scores that you just know people are going to love. [Ultraman] is meant to be a popcorn superhero action movie, but there was something about it. It was the way it was written. It’s a very emotional movie. It’s very much multigenerational. It’s about sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, and about loss and reconnecting with people you’ve been alienated from.

If you talk to Shannon Tindle, who co-wrote and directed the film, one of his biggest influences was Kramer vs. Kramer. For a superhero movie, you would almost think he was joking, but he meant it. There are a lot of Kramer vs. Kramer references and you see it in the scenes that are family-based where it’s kind of messy.

[That] reminded me of movies like Close Encounters and E.T. Sometimes we forget those scenes, where it was just a family bickering or fighting or looking like a chaotic home, and you almost never see that in movies anymore. In E.T., in the opening scene, you learn that the mom’s husband had just left her for a secretary. It was said in such a nasty way by a kid that she’s laughing, but at the same time she’s reacting like it’s really painful. A lot of that translated into this movie.

It felt like I had permission to go back to the, as you say, melodic scores that I grew up with, and get really classic with it without being too nostalgic, or vintage, or retro. It had to have some modernity to it, but I felt like I had permission to go very classic with it. It was a dream, as a composer, to be able to work in that format.

Ultraman: Rising Was Originally A “Fanfiction” Movie Called “Made In Japan”

Shannon Tindle did an interview with Screen Rant and said this movie wasn’t originally conceived as an Ultraman movie. Was it a superhero movie when you started?

Scot Stafford: He was at Sony working on a project at the time that was called Made in Japan, which was a different story but had a lot of the same elements. It was essentially like fanfiction that was inspired by Ultraman, but it was such a good story. Sony ultimately didn’t go for it. They had a deal, it went away, a bunch of people had to be fired. It was very painful.

But out of that tragedy, somehow, Tsuburaya—the owners of the original Ultraman IP, and the same people that created Godzilla—got a hold of this script, and thought, “My god, this is such a great story. What if, instead of it being inspired by Ultraman, it actually was an Ultraman story?” So, that was the origin story of the film and how it went from, in Shannon’s own words, fanfiction to the actual franchise.

I had read the original script for Made in Japan, and I was hoping he tapped me for the composing job. I went to meet with the team when it was just Shannon Tindle, his co-director John Aoshima, and his producer Tom Knott. Because Shannon is very much a team builder, he builds a family around him of very, very talented people. Everybody who worked on this project was just game.

All I had to work with was storyboards, which is basically like a comic strip version of a film, and art. If you’ve seen a lot of animated movies and looked at making-of books, you look at the concept art, which is incredible, but looks nothing like the final film. It’s this aspirational thing. But Shannon wanted me to start composing really early [so I could] be part of the collaborative process. I would see art and it was so mind-blowing, and the colors and style were so pushed. I needed a lot of reassurance that it was actually what it’s going to look like, because you want the music to sound like it looks. Shannon was so reassuring, like, “No, it really is going to look like that,” that I was able to write stuff back in 2021 that is virtually unchanged from what you hear in the film today.

Ultraman’s Original Music Very Integrated Into The Score

How much did you want to draw on the history of Ultraman for your score?

Scot Stafford: I definitely wanted to draw on it. I wanted to do both. I wanted Ultraman fans watching this for the first time to hear it, because that’s really meaningful, right? If you’re a fan of something, and they actually take a melody from the first series and put it into the score in the opening prologue, [that’s meaningful.] I definitely wanted to say, “We’ve got you.”

I wasn’t one of these hardcore Ultraman fans—of which I’ve met many—but some of my earliest memories are when Ultraman was on local TV when I grew up. My brother and I would watch it and make the hand gestures. I even remember the rubber bands of those cheap knockoff Ultraman masks. I don’t know if you ever had to suffer through late ‘70s, early ‘80s mask design but they had these incredibly painful rubber bands. It was not one size fits all.

I have very early memories of Ultraman, so I wanted to honor the original by quoting it in new and meaningful ways. I take the original theme and I play with it, turn it upside down, move it from major to minor, slow it down, and hint at it. I did a lot of exploration of the original theme, and I felt that was an important thing to do.

As was trying to use the score to also suggest a pre-history. I felt like if I could get people to feel that Ultraman has been around for a long time, [that would be effective.] It was all part of this effort to make it feel like a story that’s really been around.

Japanese Toys And Video Game Consoles Were Turned Into Instruments

I’m curious how you put “Emi’s Theme” together. Listening to that was a moment where I was like, “What is happening?” in the best way.

Scot Stafford: It was one of the later themes [I wrote]. Gigantron was the first, and Emi is Gigantron’s daughter. She is incredibly cute. I fell in love with her over and over again. As I was thinking about what her theme should be like, I was aware that it wasn’t just that she was adorable. It’s that there’s this parental bond that Ken, Ultraman, develops with her. And it’s reinforced by this sense that we’re really proud of her, [because] Emi is learning and growing so quickly. I started to realize, “Oh, my God, it’s not just that she’s cute. She’s precocious.” We’re falling in love with how well she’s doing on crushing life the way a father would feel towards a daughter. I had this idea of a round, like “Frère Jacques” or “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” where you have a simple melody that people can start at different times.

While I was thinking about that, Shannon sent me a link to a video of a Japanese musical toy called the Pocket Miku. It’s a Japanese vocal synthesizer that triggers random Japanese phonemes in a vocal melody based on the notes that you hit. It created this gibberish that reminded me of solfege. My response to Shannon was, “We watch the same videos,” because I had literally seen it before, and it was funny that we both were into the same thing.

Then he said, “This sounds like what Emi feels like,” and the serendipity was just one of those amazing things. I wrote “Emi’s Theme” literally that day, and I sent it in the next. I remember thinking, “This is never going to be in the movie,” because it was really quirky, and it’s also hard to put vocal music beneath dialogue. But if you listen to the music when Ultraman first brings Emi home, you hear my original sketch almost unaltered.

I was worried that there might be accidental Japanese words in there. I gave it to a Japanese friend of mine and said, “Did you hear anything that sounds like a word?” because I didn’t want to accidentally say anything. I wanted it to be almost toddler gibberish. And I think that’s hopefully what it sounds like.

I also read that you turned game consoles into synths for this. Is that accurate?

Scot Stafford: That’s right. There are a lot of ways of doing that, and there are a lot of ways to use software plugins to do all of these things, but I wanted to have fun with it. And, frankly, it was the pandemic. It was before I had even seen many storyboards.

We got a Nintendo Entertainment System, and I also got a Commodore 64, and we tried about three different methods of hacking them. Basically, you’re taking MIDI from a modern sequencer and then translating it into whatever code is required to trigger sounds from the sound chips that were shipped with the original devices.

It was amazing. Modern simulations are so good, but there was something different when I actually played the sounds through the consoles. These devices are 40 years old now, so all of the circuitry has heated up and cooled off about a million times by now. There was some real voodoo in the in the sound. Most of the eight-bit sounds you hear in the score are coming out of one of those.

Are you allowed to do that?

Scot Stafford: We did have to figure this out. [I used] none of the IP—I wasn’t using any of their melodies. I was literally triggering sound waves, and you can’t own a sound wave. You can’t own a square wave. You can’t own a sine wave. You can’t own a triangle wave. You can’t own white noise. You buy a Yamaha piano and play it [and] the notes aren’t Yamaha’s. [The console] was purely a musical instrument, not a composition, and not a signature sound. At the same time, you know what it is.

Progressive Rock Band Polyphia’s Tim Henson Was Key To The Score

Is there a cue that maybe took the most back and forth or the most time and effort that you’re excited for people to see in the film?

Scot Stafford: Well, let me talk a little about working with Polyphia guitar god Tim Henson.

He was an idea that we had early on. I think it came from Shannon. People like us would just be blown away by Polyphia’s videos back in 2021, so I was excited about the idea of it. I thought Tim’s playing was very unlike other lead guitarists. He makes the guitar sound kind of like a new instrument to me, and I’m a guitar player.

He comes up with these ideas, plays them, and then splices them up, turns them upside down, and does all kinds of really creative stuff in post. I think he uses Ableton Live. Then, what he’s created is something that a human being would never come up with just by playing an instrument. It’s totally non-ergonomic. He’ll go between techniques that just don’t make sense, except for how he did it in post. He has to go back and figure out, “I’ve created this amazing sound that I love. How am I going to actually play it?” and then he has to learn how to play it. Everything that I just said, I’m pretty sure is true.

I was excited about this idea of someone playing guitar in a totally new, strange, and really amazing way, but I didn’t know what it was going to sound like. It was a long time between writing those cues that I knew he would eventually appear on [and having him on them.] So, they needed to be good. They needed to be in the film. They needed to have hundreds of people on the crew and studio executives and people on the Netflix music team [feel good about them.] They needed to sound good, but I knew that he was going to alter them and really transform them. I also didn’t know what it was going to be like to work with this rockstar.

We finally met and hung out. I sent him some things to try, but I knew I wasn’t going to write notes for him to play. I put a lot of thought into the direction I would give him, and then he would send me stuff back, and I think the only thing I ever asked for was “more.” He came up with these really great parts. They were so fun. He was so earnest, and professional, and such a great communicator. [He] just wanted to do whatever was needed to make something great.

The tracks that he plays on his guitar represent Ken as a superhero. It’s the ego of a superhero. That’s what’s great about having a guitar god—what better representation of something superheroic than an absolute shredding guitar solo?

So, in the early parts of the film, [Tim] sounds like Ken when he was just pure braggadocio. Then, when he when he rediscovers himself, he reconnects with his family, the stakes are higher, and he realizes that he has to fight for someone other than himself, Tim comes back as the more fully realized hero at the end. Those were the cues that went from the least to the most throughout the whole thing because this is a two-year period from me sending in sketches and then Tim playing on them.

Stafford Wants To See A Godzilla x Ultraman Crossover

I know there’s an Ultraman and Avengers comic book crossover coming out. Is there any franchise you would want to do a crossover with?

Scot Stafford: I would want to do another zipper suit Japanese IP. I would go for Ultraman and Godzilla. That would be amazing. Avengers would be amazing, too.

About Ultraman: Rising

With Tokyo under siege from rising monster attacks, baseball star Ken Sato reluctantly returns home to take on the mantle of Ultraman. But the titanic superhero meets his match when he is forced to adopt a 35-foot-tall, fire-breathing baby kaiju. Sato must rise above his ego to balance work and parenthood while protecting the baby from forces bent on exploiting her for their own dark plans. In partnership with Netflix, Tsuburaya Productions, and Industrial Light & Magic, Ultraman: Rising is written by Shannon Tindle and Marc Haimes, directed by Shannon Tindle, and co-directed by John Aoshima.

Check out our other Ultraman: Rising interviews:

• Shannon Tindle & John Aoshima
• Christopher Sean, Tamlyn Tomita & Gedde Watanabe