Lin-Manuel Miranda on the music of ‘Mufasa’ and making one of the world’s most beloved franchises his own [Exclusive]

With great trepidation and responsibility (laughs). But when you hear the words Barry Jenkins next to The Lion King, you can't help but be intrigued. When the opportunity presented itself, I said, ‘Yes, I would love to read that script and see what they're up to.’ And then I was just so surprised by the script. I think we all think we know Mufasa and Scar. They're like the good guy and the bad guy and they're brothers, and this movie scrambles your notions of that. And I love that because I feel like one of the things I find myself talking to my kids about all the time is that there aren't good guys and bad guys. We're all just doing our best and there are good and bad choices that all of us make.  

So just the notion of scrambling that story and seeing the roots of that animosity was interesting to me. The other thing is that the dialogue was so good that most of the titles of my songs were original lines. ‘I Always Wanted a Brother,’ I was like ‘That’s a song title, thank you, I’m taking that.’ There was already so much good stuff there. I think for me, it was a matter of being in service of the story that Barry wanted to tell. And making sure I had Lebo M and Mark Mancina in my corner in the music department, who worked on the original film. That first voice you hear in the original movie [he imitates the opening of ‘The Circle of Life’], that’s Lebo. And his incredible singers. I knew they would keep me grounded in the world and make sure it sounded like The Lion King.

It was great! I said yes to the project because I wanted to learn new things and working with him is such an education. He writes with his voice. He doesn't write things down on paper or on a computer. He gets in the studio and he sings a line and then he harmonizes with himself and your job is to like, jump in and join him (laughs). Or just watch. And I didn't wanna just watch.

I remember our first meeting was in Carmel, California, which is where Mark Mancina’s studio is. He'd flown all the way from South Africa to California. I got to the studio at like 7:00 AM and found out that he'd been working there already for four hours beause he was jet-lagged and he was in the studio making shit up (laughs.) And I was like, ‘Well, I gotta get in here.’ 

I started feeding him melodies that I had already written for the movie, and he started building those in. So our opening sequence was built that way. It was just him in a studio creating these harmonies and me feeding him melodies. And so we had this weird kind of overture that we created in the room with our voices. It was a great way to meet him.

Yeah, collaborations are my favorite part of the process. The notion that together in the room we’re gonna let the best idea win and we’re gonna make something we could not have made alone. That's my favorite part of the process. And everything from writing the song, leaving space for Lebo’s harmonies… there are spaced-out melodies because I wanted room for all of those beautiful textures that he brings into every song. 

(Laughs) I remember the only song that I pitched to Barry that wasn’t in the script was the song for Kiros, who’s the big villain. I was like ‘Let me write the villain song. We haven’t had a big bad villain in a minute. You have Mads Mikkelsen, who’s got such a distinctive voice. I’m hearing Dance Hall reggae under that. I know those two tastes are weird but I think they’re gonna taste great together.’ I’m really proud of it, that song is called ‘Bye Bye.’ 

I mean, my kids are all in the expanded Lion King universe. Like they're big The Lion Guard fans. But also, more than anything, I remember seeing the trailer for The Lion King in 1993. There’s so much discourse now about movie musicals hiding the fact that they’re musicals. Like, you’ll see a trailer and there’s no songs in it. And they showed us the fist four minutes of the movie and then they just said The Lion King. And we were all like ‘We’ll be there.’ 

It was such a flex. Probably the greatest marketing flex in the history of movies. So yeah, I remember being transported from those first four minutes and being like ‘I can’t remember the last time a trailer transported me.’ They had such faith in what they had made. It was really exciting.