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SLANT Q&A with Max Richter

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NASA's launched its Voyager program over 40 years ago, and since then, sci-fi films like James Gray's Ad Astra have been drawing inspiration from the journey that the program's twin robotic probes have made through our outer solar system. And for the film's post-minimalist soundtrack, influential composer Max Richter actually pulled plasma wave data from the Voyager probes and used it to make music that would embody the story of the long and precarious journey that an existentially fraught astronaut, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), makes through space to find his famed father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones). 

Though Ad Astra's music is written with an interstellar scope in mind, Richter is modest when speaking about his diminutive "notes on the page." "If you don't get the notes right on the piano, they won't sound right when they are being played by an orchestra," he says. 

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