Production Notes & Screen Credits - SYE Publicity

Having a Bad, Bad Day:
Music of
Despicable Me
In the past several years, Grammy Award-winning
artist Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes and
N.E.R.D. has written and produced for such blockbuster
global musicians as Gwen Stefani, Justin
Timberlake, Usher, Madonna, Kanye West and
Shakira. In 2009, Billboard magazine named The
Neptunes producers of the decade, and Williams and
his collaborators have played an enormous role in
shaping the culture of the music landscape. Naturally,
the next step for the artist was to explore the interplay
between music and movies.
Williams has been interested in scoring music for
feature films for some time, and he became more
eager to work in this realm after observing Jack
Johnson’s musical involvement in creating the bestselling
soundtrack to Universal’s animated Curious
George. Williams expressed his interest to friend and
music supervisor KATHY NELSON. He remembers:
“I told Kathy that the very next time something comes
your way, you call me and let me know what it is. She
said, ‘Pharrell, I really like you, but I’m not going to
just give you anything.
I’m going call you
when it’s the right
thing.’ And I got the
call for Despicable Me.”
A longtime animation
fan, Williams was
eager to take on the
challenge of crafting
original songs and
themes for his first
film. “What I like about
the philosophy on
Despicable Me is that
the filmmakers don’t make children’s films. They
make films for humans that use some of the tricks and
treats of youthful entertainment, but at the same time,
there’s an amazing storyline.”
Though the task of scoring his first feature
seemed daunting, Williams was grateful that he was
surrounded by Academy Award ® winner Hans
Zimmer as the film’s music producer and skilled
guitarist Heitor Pereira as fellow composer. Says
producer Meledandri: “The moment that we showed
Pharrell the imagery, it took him about 30 minutes to
say, ‘I’ll work on this film in any way possible.’ He
was immediately struck by the character designs and
the notion of the story; his enthusiasm never waned.
“Pharrell, like our directors, took on the
challenge of doing something that he had never
done before; this is the first time he’s scored a feature
film,” Meledandri continues. “We knew that there was
going to be an opportunity in the film for a number of
songs that would be used as song score. What’s resulted
from his songs is a group of musical themes that he’s
worked on with the talented Heitor Pereira and
legendary Hans Zimmer.”
Williams’ collaboration with Pereira began as
Williams watched preliminary footage of the film and
then created musical ideas he thought would fit into
Two of the minions feign innocence as Agnes, Edith and Margo look on.
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