Wish Interview: Composer Dave Metzger On His Favorite Songs & Working With Julia Michaels

Disney’s Wish celebrates the 100th anniversary of the iconic studio with nods to prior films and a celebration of Disney’s oft-used motif of wishing on a star. The film was directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn and written by Buck along with Jenifer Lee and Allison Moore. It stars Ariana DeBose as Asha and Chris Pine as the sorcerer Magnifico, but also boasts a strong supporting cast which includes Alan Tudyk as the scene-stealing goat Valentino.

As with other Disney films, Wish arrives with a soundtrack full of new songs destined to be remembered. Every song on the Wish soundtrack was penned by pop artist and songwriter Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice, and fleshed out for the screen with the help of composer Dave Metzger, who also wrote the film’s score. Metzger scores his first full-length Disney film in Wish but is no stranger to the company; as an orchestrator and arranger, he has contributed to films including Frozen, Moana, and Disenchanted.

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Screen Rant interviewed composer Deve Metzger about scoring his first Disney film, working with Julia Michaels and Benjamin Rice on Wish, and more.

Dave Metzger Talks Wish

Screen Rant: I saw an interview where you said this has been a 50-year journey for you, from when you started writing music to finally being the composer of a Disney film. How much pressure is that when you finally get the opportunity? Or is it just excitement and eagerness?

Dave Metzger: I’ve got to say, it’s all excitement and eagerness. Even though I haven’t had my own film until now, I’ve worked on so many films, and I know the whole way everything works. It wasn’t a big mystery to me. But what was just unbelievable was to finally have the opportunity to be in this chair. It was just complete—well, it was almost all complete thrill. About five minutes after I realized that was my job, it was a little bit of, “Oh, my gosh. Now I really have to do it.”

You worked on Frozen II; you’ve been in the Disney world. Were there certain things to you that felt inherent to a Disney movie, musically, that you wanted to incorporate or touch on?

Dave Metzger: One of the beauties of Wish is that it’s the 100-year Disney anniversary film. Even though it’s not meant to be a flat-out homage, we didn’t want to run away from that. Musically, what that means is that I was able to incorporate elements of the 100-year history of fantastic Disney music.

Since I’ve worked on a ton of Disney films in the role of arranger [or] orchestrator, I’ve been really lucky to have copies of the original scores for Snow White, Pinocchio, Peter Pan, or Cinderella. I have a lot of those scores, so as soon as I got hired for this film, I immediately went back to studying them. I went back and reminded myself, “How did they orchestrate? What instruments did they use for Snow White? What were the general tendencies of the melodic shape?” I was able to kind of go back and incorporate some of those beautiful styles and techniques that were used throughout the 100 years.

Given that background, did you orchestrate this yourself as well? I feel like that’s kind of a rare thing.

Dave Metzger: Yeah, it is. In today’s world, you have to mock up all of your cues with synthesizers and samples for directors to hear what’s going on, which makes a ton of sense; before they get to the expensive scoring stage, they know what they’re going to hear. My mockups are completely accurate, because since I’ve always orchestrated all my own music, I have learned long ago that the more thorough I am on the writing side of it, the easier it is when I actually have to put it on paper. The violin I parts, the violin II parts, the French horn parts… those are all in my detailed mockups. Normally, I would get all of those onto the paper by myself. In a film like this, I didn’t have time. I was able to do about a third of the cues myself, and then I had somebody else do the orchestrations. Dave Giuli–he did a fabulous job.

I want to ask about the Wishing Star theme in a second and [its relation to “When You Wish Upon A Star”], but as you were diving into those old scores and pulling from those old films, were there other things that you were excited to lift or get inspiration from musically?

Dave Metzger: One of the conversations that I had with the directors, Chris and Fawn, at the very beginning, was [about] what they were interested in, [and] where they were drawing their inspiration from. One example would be the teens: Asha’s friends meet early on in the film, [and] one of the inspirations that Chris and Fawn had there was Snow White. Those characters all have tendencies towards the Snow White dwarves.

So, then, a light bulb goes off–I should go back and look at Snow White for that cue. I was trying to shape my melody for the theme of the teens to be what would have been not inappropriate in 1937. [And, I wanted] the orchestration arc to be reminiscent of that period and that film without actually using the themes. I was building a world that could have lived in 1937 but that was also modern enough to live in 2023.

How early in the process did you know you wanted to take “When You Wish Upon A Star” and kind of use the base of that for one of the key themes in this film?

Dave Metzger: I would kind of like to clarify that it’s actually not “When You Wish Upon A Star”. The theme that I did is a unique, original theme for the character Star, but the goal was to have it allude toward Star.

I started working on the film [last September], and the first eight months, I was just dealing with the songs. I was arranging and orchestrating the songs, and I didn’t flip over to the score until June. I had six weeks to write the whole score—68 minutes, or whatever—so that was a lot of work. But the entire time we were working on the songs, I was thinking about and postulating different ways I was going to deal with different characters and different thematic materials. And I knew, obviously, Star was going to be a major player in the film.

I’m a big fan of Julia Michaels. How much did you collaborate with her and Benjamin Rice? Were the songs already there, where then you expanded on them? What was that like?

Dave Metzger: The only song that was written by the time that I was brought onto the film was “This Wish”. All the other songs were written while I was a part of the team. Without question, they wrote the songs, but I believe that one of reasons I got hired to do the job—I’m speculating; I don’t know for sure– was that I did have a fair amount of experience, I have a fair amount of experience in Disney, and I have a fair amount of experience in cinematic scope. I think one of the things I was [looked toward] to do was to make the songs cinematic and bring them into the Disney canon as much as they should have been. It’s not that they needed a ton of that, but I think that was one of my jobs.

I met [Julia and Ben] right off the bat; for my first meeting on the film, Julia and Ben were there. They’re incredibly talented songwriters and musicians, I love them, and they’re great people, too. We spent a couple of days just hanging out; we went to Ben’s studio, and just hung out. I played bass, because we were trying to formulate what the vibe was going to be, Ben would play guitar and percussion, and Julia would be singing along. It was our chance to meld together.

Off of that, I got an idea of what they were hoping for and looking for. Then, the process was [that] I would do my pass on what I thought would be appropriate for the songs, and then Julia and Ben would listen to it, and they would say, “We like that,” or, “We don’t like that at all.” It was a nice combination of different worlds that, I think, works really well.

Do you have a favorite song from this that you were able to work on?

Dave Metzger: I try to put heart into everything that I do, and so the one that I think I relate to the most is the song that’s in the end credits: “A Wish Worth Making”. There’s just something about that; the melody—the arc of the melody, the way that Julia wrote it–is very beautiful, and the chord progression is great. It was one that I felt that I could go into a really emotional world with, and it wouldn’t hurt it. The song could support it and kind of called out for it.

But I love them all. In this film, I think they’re all exceptionally strong songs, and they all work. I was just thrilled to be working on all of them, frankly.

Because songs are so heavily featured in this in this movie, what is it like to then write thematic scoring material for characters like Asha? Is it redundant if you are too thematic with them?

Dave Metzger; I think you’re right that if you overdo it it’s redundant but, on the other hand, you can’t ignore the songs. When I watch some musicals—not Disney ones, really, at all–what tweaks me a little bit is that when you hear the score is clearly one thing and the songs are a whole different thing. The score is going along in one world and with one sonic sound and everything, and then you get to the songs, and they don’t belong together at all. Since I was able to be involved in the songs and the score, we recorded in the same studios, so the sound palette is the same. The orchestra makeup is the same, mostly; I did a couple of changes here and there.

I did use “A Wish Worth Making” in a couple of the most emotional moments for Saba, who’s Asha’s grandfather. Occasionally, I would use the theme, literally, from “This Wish”, including in the very beginning of the film. You’re coming out of the logo, and there’s a little bit before you get to the first shot. There’s the Mickey Mouse Steamboat Willie thing, [and] in a ghostly manner I did the five notes of “This Wish”. So, I wasn’t afraid of using melody moments in the score.

You have a post-credit scene that is so beautiful. Did you get to write that arrangement?

Dave Metzger: It’s George Doering, who’s a studio legend guitar player in LA. He is incredible. I just produced George up. There was the sheet music for him there, and the chord changes, but I didn’t actually write out every single note for him, because that would have been ridiculous. He could play so much better than if I would have boxed him in.

He’s playing throughout the whole score, and I am generally very specific in what I want him to play in the score stuff, because that has a different role, but [with] “When You Wish Upon A Star” at the ned, it’s just, “George, please. Here’s the key we’re in. Here’s the melody. You don’t need it, but here it is. Here are the chord changes I’d like you to use; voice it how you’re going to voice it.”

When I was at the premiere a couple of weeks ago, [and] I got to that point, it all was all emotionally coming down to me that I had finally had a chance to do a film, and it was [one as] beautiful as Wish. When we got to that point, the tears did start streaming when George started playing there, because it made me aware of just how fortunate I am, and how lucky I am in so many ways.

I was reading theories from people saying that this movie was going to be the one that proves that all the other Disney films are in the same universe. It got me thinking; if you had the opportunity to jump into another Disney film and write a song or a score for another character, who would you want to write for?

Dave Metzger: Wow. That’s a good and hard question. There are so many great characters; I don’t know that I could really just pick one. How about this: a duet with Anna and Elsa from Frozen, Snow White, and Belle. I think [it] would be fun to have a quartet with them, because they have such different experiences, and they’re from such different eras. It would be interesting to come up with something that would work for them all.

About Wish

In “Wish,” Asha, a sharp-witted idealist, makes a wish so powerful that it is answered by a cosmic force—a little ball of boundless energy called Star. Together, Asha and Star confront a most formidable foe—the ruler of Rosas, King Magnifico—to save her community and prove that when the will of one courageous human connects with the magic of the stars, wondrous things can happen.

Check out our other Wish interviews:

• Ariana DeBose
• Chris Pine
• Jennifer Lee
• Chris Buck & Fawn Veerasunthorn
• Juan Pablo Reyes Lancaster-Jones & Peter Del Vecho