Simon Franglen

British born, award-winning composer and music producer Simon Franglen traverses the world of film, classical, and contemporary music and other visual mediums. He has spent a large portion of the last three years composing the three-hour score to Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), travelling to New Zealand to collaborate with James Cameron; this score has just won a 2022 Hollywood Music and Media Award. He also composed the score to Jean-Jacques Annaud's 2022 Film Notre-Dame on Fire (2022), the dramatic re-enactment of the saving of the cathedral. Upcoming work includes Avatar 3 (2024) to be released in 2024, Otto Bell's documentary The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, a multi-year immersive and installation project in the USA, and a new orchestral work to follow up his 2019 90-minute oratorio The Birth of Skies and Earth which featured 176 musicians and singers.

Franglen won the International Film Music Critics Award for Best Drama Score (2021) for The Curse of Turandot (2021). He received Golden Globe, Grammy Award and World Soundtrack Award nominations for co-writing and producing the theme song "I See You" from Cameron's Avatar (2009). Franglen was awarded the Record of the Year Grammy® as a producer on "My Heart Will Go On," sung by Celine Dion for the film Titanic (1997). He has done multiple films with Antoine Fuqua and Terrence Malick.

After starting in studios in London, Franglen was persuaded to move to Los Angeles. There he became a top line session musician and record producer in Los Angeles for several years, with dozens of multi-platinum albums and singles, including Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Quincy Jones, and Celine Dion. His credits include four of the top grossing films of all time and six of the top selling albums. His start in films was working for John Barry on the soundtrack to 'Dances with Wolves, then on 'Chaplin'. Franglen quickly became in demand in film music. He created the gritty electronica for Howard Shore's score to David Fincher's Se7en (1995) and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), produced the vocals for Moulin Rouge! (2001), programmed for the 'Bodyguard' soundtrack. He was well-known for his long time collaboration with James Horner as arranger and score producer on films such as 'Avatar', 'The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)', 'Titanic' and others. After Horner's tragic death in 2015, Franglen completed the score to The Magnificent Seven (2016), for which he received an ASCAP award. He was also responsible for the production and further composition of the music throughout Pandora-The World of Avatar which opened at Walt Disney World in Florida in May 2017, taking over duties from James Horner in 2015.

With extensive experience composing and mixing in immersive audio, Franglen has major 3D installations running the USA, Europe and China. In 2017, Pink Floyd asked him to produce 3D audio mixes of some of their greatest hits for "Their Mortal Remains"; this premiered at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London before touring worldwide. Shanghai Tower commissioned him to compose a permanent installation for "The Highest Art Space In The World" (CNN), this required recording four interlocking 60 piece orchestras to give a true immersive experience within an array of 240 loudspeakers - 2000ft up on the 126th floor.