The score for the upcoming Netflix series Man on Fire, composed by Max Aruj, blends propulsive action with a deeply emotional core. It was developed over a six-month process with a mandate to avoid the original film’s musical legacy. Central themes include “Creasy Investigation,” a driving baritone guitar–led motif, and “Man on Fire,” a sweeping piece tied to the series’ most powerful moments.
Based on A.J. Quinnell’s book series, Man on Fire tells the story of John Creasy. Once a high functioning and skilled Special Forces Mercenary, known for surviving even the most desolate of situations, Creasy is now plagued with intense PTSD. Determined to overcome his personal demons, he sets out on a path to redemption. But, before he can adjust to this new life, he finds himself back in the fire, fighting harder than ever.
In addition to serving as composer on Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and the video game Screamer, Max contributed additional music to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Top Gun: Maverick, Mission: Impossible – Fallout and the series The Crown. When we last spoke with the Los Angeles–based composer in June 2021, Aruj was working on CRAWL and ICE ROAD. https://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2021/06/interview-with-max-aruj-composer-of-ice-road-lansky-and-crawl/
Man on Fire will stream on Netflix on April 30.
The series stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the lead role of Creasy, alongside Billie Boullet, Alice Braga, Scoot McNairy, Bobby Cannavale, and Paul Ben-Victor. Director Steven Caple Jr. directs the first two episodes of the series’ seven-episode season.
https://www.netflix.com/title/81645170
WAMG: It’s good to talk to you again. It’s been since, like, 2021.
MA: I know, a long time.
WAMG: The new trailer for this show, have you seen it?
MA: Wait a second, is there a new trailer?
WAMG: There’s a new trailer, it’s great! Have you seen the series yet?
MA: They’re wrapped. Oh, yeah. Because by the time I came on, they were already picture-locked, so I just got to score the whole thing straight up, really smooth. really streamlined, so it worked out great.
WAMG: I gotta tell you, congratulations on all your success in the recent years. I mean, when we last spoke, we were talking about Crawl, we were talking about Ice Road, and then I see you as composer on Mission Impossible, Top Gun, another Mission Impossible!
MA: And I see right next to you The Right Stuff poster, and that is a movie that we discussed when doing Mission, because McQ (Christopher McQuarrie) loves that movie, and loves that score.
WAMG: So let’s talk about Man on Fire. It’s really great! The score is terrific. Who did the vocals? How did you come about that? Because the vocals on that one cue are fantastic.
MA: Thank you for pointing that one out. This gentleman named Maroka Paris, who is a singer from Portugal, so, what I love about this whole process is that at the beginning, I worked with the Netflix team, and they said, let us know how we can help, what can we do, And we just kind of talked, and we said, what cool musicians could we work with? The story’s very intimate. The story’s very personal, and also, you know, there’s these big moments of action where the score explodes. And Sam and Ashley brought up a bunch of musicians, and Morocco was one of these singers that has this super unique tone and a really special approach to singing.
I listened to his music, and I thought, whoa, we have got to get that guy. And we reached out and spoke to him, and thank goodness he was available and interested. And then we spoke, sent in the tracks, and then we did a remote session with him, where we sent them the tracks, and we had video, and we got an audio feed, and we got to watch him sing. And it was one of my favorite moments, I think as a professional, because I heard his voice and I thought, whoa this is going to be so impactful and it was such a win for the whole team.
WAMG: I’m listening and all of a sudden, you hear these amazing vocals come in. Plus, there’s a lot of great percussion from another country.
MA: That’s right. So since they’re in Brazil in the show, we’ve really got to dig into those colors. So, for example, we used some samba influences, maracatu influences, which is African-influenced drumming. Ashea, which is kind of a combination of samba, reggae, and pop. And then, in terms of instrumentation, we got to use Kashishi seeds, timbales, cajon, Congas, frame drum…Hondero, and these weren’t necessarily all invented in Brazil, those instruments, but they’re heavily used in Brazilian music. So, it really started to feel special and unique to that location.
And then we also got to work with another wonderful musician whose name is Ayuri Oliveira. And he’s also in Portugal and plays some incredible Brazilian percussion, and when you get a good musician, in music, it becomes three-dimensional, because all of a sudden, these bills are popping, And these grooves are just combining in ways that make it feel like a living piece of music. So, I’m so glad you enjoyed that, and the percussion is something that, again, from the very beginning, working with the team was such a win.
WAMG: There’s so many emotional parts to your score… some powerful stuff. I was wondering, you had already said everything was locked in? By the time you went to score the film, had you seen some of the rough cuts, or was it completely done when you started scoring?
MA: I started basically August 1st of last year, and I worked until the end of January. So, I think everything was picture-locked, so when I started, I wrote some suites, and then they said, okay, we like these, but we’d love to see more. Then I scored the whole of episode 1 all in one go and then presented it to them, and in general, every concept worked. Because we have them named one way for 6 months, and then we change them at the last minute.
WAMG: When I was listening to it, I found my favorites were the real emotional, very melodic tracks, “My name is John Creasy” and then “She needs you…“
MA: With “My Name Is John Creasy”, that kind of descending melodic line we actually pitched for the titles as well. That was in the running, and the director said, I love it. But they wanted something a little more punchy for the titles, and I’m glad it landed where it did.
I’m so happy that everything went according to plan, because creating these variations from that piece I thought would work was well received, and it worked so well with picture, and just kind of gives just the right hug to the music that it needs to feel that emotion.
WAMG: So, it sounds like everybody was really receptive to what you brought to the table, what you brought to the series. Which came first, them saying, here it is, here’s what we want, or you, here’s my music, here’s what I have to offer.
MA: I watched it, and we had some initial discussions, and they said, we want you to come in with a vision. And at first, I was like, whoa, okay. I asked some questions where I was thinking, do you want it to be like this or like this? They responded and said, we want you to come in with your own ideas.
They gave me their vote of confidence, which really is the best way to start a project, because you just feel so supported, and then I did, and it was so fun and exciting. Episodes 1 and 2, we had a lot of back and forth. kind of working out a few of these creases, Uh, no pun intended.
And just making sure that all these moments were honored. But in general, the stuff for Poe, the stuff for Creasy worked really well off the bat, so I’m so glad.
WAMG: In these last few years, you’ve been working on Top Gun, you’ve been working on Mission Impossible but every time I’ve listened to one of your scores, they all sound so different. How do you avoid repeating when you’re trying to get that distinct, unique music palette for a new project? How do you go from not sounding like the Top Gun theme, or how do you go from not sounding like the Mission Impossible to this, because it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve ever done, quite frankly.
MA: Thank you. That’s a great question, and I think that question is starting to apply even more as I’m doing more, because now, I’m booking jobs where people will say, we love what you did in this thriller. We’ve also got a thriller. They don’t say, can you do the same thing?
But as I’m working on it, I might do a piece, and I think, you know what? Did I not kind of do this concept already? How can I enhance it? How can I reinvent it? And it’s hard. And people like Lorne Balfe are the master at when they start a new project, they have to think of new ideas, and think about how much he’s done, and always thinking, okay, how can I approach this with a new lens and a new perspective?
I think the challenge of it is that when you book a project, you’ve got to deliver quickly. So that means you have to write original material very quickly, and then the next part is, it needs to sound original sonically with either new instruments or new sounds that no one’s ever heard before, so you really have a lot to do super quickly. And in this case, on Man on Fire, I was thrilled that both elements of those were received well. I was always thinking throughout the project, it’s going so smoothly, like, when’s the other shoe gonna drop? And then it never did!
WAMG: It’s a great score! There are certain scores that can stand entirely on their own, outside the context of the movie like Star Wars. There’s certain iconic movie albums that you could listen to outside of the movie. There doesn’t even have to be a film yours is one of those scores. This is a great score just to listen to. Are you, as a composer now, writing for the visuals, or are you writing so the music stands by itself?
MA: That’s the goal, is that someone can listen to it and be moved, and have no clue about what the series is. They should hear notes, and they should feel a sense of loss and longing. And a rousing sense of heroism, or trying to find some heroism within yourself. And if the audience or listener can feel that, then that’s the goal, you’ve won, and especially with a well-written series, every episode has been crafted and sculpted. So, if you write a good piece of music, it will mimic a good character arc. It just naturally will happen, and so if you write a good theme and melody, if you put that up against episode 7 in the climactic moment, it needs to work, because if it works there, then you work backwards and backwards. And it will just take on a life of its own, even without picture, so it takes practice to do that. I feel like only just understanding how to do that, because I don’t think that it’s automatic being able to do that at all.
WAMG: When do you know that a scene doesn’t need music? Is it difficult to leave a scene silent as a composer?
MA: Let’s just put ourselves 10 years ago when the producer and director are coming into your studio for every meeting and you will watch a reel, so let’s just say 20 minutes and you will craft that stuff together, and then you will come upon a scene where you’ll talk to each other, and you’ll say, I don’t think this needs music here, because we just had such a moving cue before, and then we go right into an action scene after. So, this 2-minute dialogue scene, let’s do it without music. And then you will have remembered and decided together as a team that that works. I think when everyone is remote, and everyone is off on their own, It’s just more natural when you’re sitting by yourself to think, Should this have music here? And the answer is, it could. but you know, the scene is well written, it doesn’t need it, we know where the characters have come from, we see where they’re going.
So a lot of the time, I would score more scenes than I needed to, and then on the dub stage, at the very last second, we’d say, you know what, we don’t need this here. And the post supervisor, Paul Goldman (co-producer) was brilliant in saying, we don’t need this here, and he would be cutting out music along with the whole team, and I thought, this is what we want, because we don’t need to over-score all these intimate scenes. If it works without it, that’s what we’ve got to do.
WAMG: The last time we spoke, you were composing the score for the video game, Wrath of the Druids, and now you’ve done the score for The Screamer, which got great reviews. A lot of composers go back and forth. For instance the Game Awards held in December have become huge now. They have 3 Music categories (outstanding original scores, licensed soundtracks, and original songs in gaming), and the composers getting nominated are big names (Bear McCreary, Lorne Balfe). Even the Grammy Awards – The Academy now hosts a dedicated Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media category. Do you find that you’re still approaching that just the way you would any score for any projects?
MA: I think, as I’m getting better and better when I was scoring those cut scenes, because the length of a scene or of a piece, or a game really matters, so I started to learn very quickly that almost every cutscene had three parts to it. There was a beginning, middle, and end. So as soon as I understood that, I tried to boil the scene down into these really simple parts, so that I could maximize the effect of the music, just knowing that we’re going to bring the audience in, then there’s the body of the scene, and then in the last part of the scene, there was some climax. or some conflict that would yet be resolved, or that is resolved. So I think once I understood these scenes, I was just flying, and I knew how to approach each one of them.
WAMG: Your YouTube page, especially for people who love film scores and want to be composers, is great to watch. Before, you got a score, you bought the record album, and that’s all you got out of it. What advice do you have to people who might want to become composers? https://www.youtube.com/@maxaruj3831
I think practice is always the number one thing. You know, when you’re practicing an instrument like piano, you can practice 12 hours a day. With brass, you can’t practice that much, but with composition, one should see it like an instrument, so you should be practicing and writing pieces and setting goals for yourself. 7 days a week. When you’re starting out, there’s plenty of things you need to do, but what I love is that now, once I’ve gotten the wheel going and I’ve made some amazing connections and worked on some amazing projects. Now I’m almost back to the basics of it, it’s all about the writing.
I think for any aspiring composer, what I can say is that it really is you need to do networking, but let’s say you get the project, then you have to be able to write all these different genres and teach yourself other genres and new genres you may have never even heard of. So, it’s just about practice.
WAMG: What do you have coming up?
MA: First of all, we do have Man on Fire videos that are being made right now, so, those will be coming out in a couple weeks and we worked with an amazing editor named Dallas Crane, who spearheaded this whole process, so I’m really thankful for him.
And next, I’m actually working on a thriller right now which is kind of wild and exciting. They have a deadline coming up. I’m doing a first pass, but not gonna rush, because we’re going to revisit it after this deadline.
And I’m also working on a video game. It’s a VR game, actually. And as I was saying, I had to learn an even new genre for this project. It’s so humbling starting a new project and you’re thinking, oh my god, I thought this music was really easy to make, but it’s not. That keeps you engaged and challenged and excited, so I’m thankful for it.
WAMG: At CinemaCon, Paramount Pictures talked about the next Top Gun movie, so I hope to see you as composer again. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-3-script-underway-tom-cruise-1236566290/
https://deadline.com/2026/04/top-gun-3-cinemacon-1236863201
Max, it was a pleasure, once again, to speak with you. I love the score and I think people will really like the music. I think people who love the movie will also like the series.
MA: Thank you.
