Two-time Grammy Award-winning music producer and composer Sam Slater has
received overwhelming praise for his original score in the global blockbuster
series ‘The Railway Men.’
The successful four-part mini-series is being praised for a variety of
reasons, one of which being the music and original score composed by Sam Slater
of ‘Joker’ and ‘Chernobyl’ renown.
Sam opened up about the massive human loss caused by the Bhopal gas
disaster in 1984, and he composed music to try to recreate the sadness and
grief that people felt on that terrible night in Bhopal.
Sam said, “When I was working on The Railway Men, I had known about the
Bhopal gas disaster but only in an academic sense. I never really investigated
it or understood it holistically. Through this series, I was able to understand
more about what happened and the number of people whose lives were lost and
impacted. It left me heartbroken and quite angered. I wanted to make sure that
the music itself had that darkness and that anger in it.”
He emphasised how The Railway Men’s immersive music had to be distinct
from the music heard and experienced in ‘Chernobyl.’
Sam said, “Chernobyl had a very specific framing, it was entirely made
with recordings from a nuclear reactor in ‘Chernobyl.’ When we began working on
The Railway Men, we were using very different source materials. That already
meant the colours were very different. Furthermore, as we got into the series,
we realized how much more energy and how much drive the railway men had on that
night and that became a driver for us to compose music.”
He added, “It starts as a drama, but it ends as a thriller. It needed
much more action in the music to do this. So, the kinds of sounds we were using
and the music we were writing very quickly became so different to anything that
could have been in Chernobyl. And furthermore, just the air and Bhopal, as it’s
being depicted in this story, is so different than 1980s Ukraine.”
Talking about the series, the four-episode series is set against the
backdrop of the Bhopal Gas Leak, the world’s worst industrial disaster.
Inspired by true stories, ‘The Railway Men’ is an account of courage and a
salute to humanity. It offers a poignant narrative of the unsung heroes – the
railway employees of India – who went beyond their call of duty, trying to save
the lives of hundreds of innocent citizens trapped in a helpless city.
In the late hours of December 2, 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from
a pesticide factory owned by the American Union Carbide Corporation.
It has been reported that more than half a million people were poisoned
that night and the official death toll exceeded 5,000.
‘The Railway Men’, which is created under the banner of YRF Entertainment
is out on Netflix on November 18.
ANI
