“Maybe there’s a young girl out there who will see my name at the end of Spirit and sit up straighter.”
Irish composer Amie Doherty has become the first woman to ever score a DreamWorks film.
Spirit Untamed, which was released in Ireland last week, tells the story of Lucky Prescott, a young girl who moves to a small rural community and befriends a horse she names Spirit.
Amie, who grew up in Ballinasloe Co Galway and received her BA in Music from Trinity College, made history as the first ever woman to score a DreamWorks movie this year. For Spirit Untamed, she’s following in the footsteps of the legendary Hans Zimmer who scored the original movie back in 2002.
“I found out a couple of months into scoring Spirit that I am the first woman to score a DreamWorks animated feature film. Bananas, right?” she wrote on Instagram earlier this year.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CPrziN6hH4g/
“I reserve the word ‘honoured’ for very rare occasions, and this is one. To break that barrier and be a part of this milestone for composers who are women is exciting, encouraging, and gives me mad hope!
“Maybe there’s a young girl out there who will see my name at the end of Spirit and sit up straighter, like I did when I saw ‘Music by Rachel Portman’ and ‘Music by Deborah Lurie’ all those years ago.
“And she’ll go on to score major studio films where seeing a woman’s name under the ‘Music by’ credit doesn’t cause anyone a second thought, because it won’t be anything out of the ordinary.”
Amie, who is based in LA, told the Ryan Tubridy Show earlier this week that when she started composing the movie she tried her best to focus on her own work, rather than that of Zimmer’s before her.
“Yeah, no pressure, huh? Pressure is for tyres,” she said. “When I got the gig I just had to put that out of my head because, you know, trying to follow up and step into Hans Zimmer’s shoes is just, unthinkable.”
She added that despite her success, she never thought she would make a career out of music. Once she moved to Los Angeles, however, that all changed. “When I came to LA I first started as an assistant to an orchestrator,” she said. “We were working on John Legend’s world tour at the time.
“I learned a lot on the job on that and then afterwards I was very, very fortunate to be hired as the orchestrator for all of the Star Trek series […] and then some other shows like Fargo and The Umbrella Academy, Altered Carbon… lots and lots and lots of shows.”
Fair play, Amie – we’re only dying to see what you do next.
