Composer Elliot Leung on His Journey From Hong Kong to Hollywood

Film composer and, though he’d never call himself that, musical prodigy Elliot Leung settles the score on his journey from Hong Kong to Hollywood. And the metaverse. And beyond.

It’s a factoid oft-repeated that Mozart composed his first symphony at the age of nine, then his first opera at 12. Beethoven was 21. And Elliot Leung was seven when inspiration first struck. “Nineteen, officially, though,” says the blockbuster film composer, appropriately pedantic about the details. You might just have to be if you were to make it big in Los Angeles.

Leung, proudly signed to Kraft-Engel, an agency representing the likes of Danny Elfman, Alexandre Desplat and Emily Bear, composed the film scores for three of the top-10 highest-grossing non-English films. He is, at the time of writing, the first and only composer from Hong Kong to have broken into Hollywood. And he is, at the time of writing, one of the highest-grossing film composers in Asia, too. Not that he’s counting.

“Hong Kong makes music a very competitive thing,” he says, evidently frustrated about the quality of musical education he’s lived through as an alumnus of St Paul’s Co-educational College and, later, the International Christian School. “Unnecessarily competitive. As a student musician growing up, you’d always inevitably view musical pressure from your teachers, from your parents and very much so from your peers. Because, again, it’s competitive.”

But Leung was not just your run-of-the- mill musical student.

“My mother plays the piano, but her mother didn’t let her study music,” Leung remembers of his parents’ artistic inclinations. His dad, a talented artist, told a similar story: he’d originally wanted to major in visual arts, but the idea was axed too, in favour of a more, say, practical vocation.

“My mother keeps telling me she was quite good when she was young,” Leung says. “There’s no way for me to verify that because she definitely lost most of her chops now. I suppose [my parents] are decently artistic people, but they just never had the opportunities. So, when they had me, my mother started teaching me how to play piano when I was two years old.

“I was essentially forced to learn piano,” he says, backtracking almost immediately. “OK, I wouldn’t say ‘force’ because I didn’t know what else I could have done as a kid. When your mother tells you to do something, you’re going to do it.” While others were suffering through fingering lessons, Leung, as his parents and musician friends would discover, was good. More than good. “I was learning quickly, so when I was five my parents threw me into St Paul’s, which had a good music programme. And when I got there, they said, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at music, so you’re going to need to pick another instrument.’” Between pictures of the violin and the cello, which first-grader Leung was made to choose between, he picked the latter.

“I chose the cello because the guy in the picture was sitting down,” Leung recounts with a guffaw. He was also thrown a trombone in the seventh grade and, if we were to count specifically, he’s also played the recorder, his only woodwind rendezvous. “But everyone has to play the recorder, so that doesn’t count.”

Thus began years of rehearsals and placements into every musical ensemble in hand-distance existence, with time committed bleeding into after-school and 8:30am starts on Saturdays that ran until 6pm. So, a full-time job, from age five. “I didn’t know there was another way,” he says. “I didn’t know weekends existed.”

And suddenly, the pendulum swings. For once a student of music who’s, essentially, mastered all there is to know about performance and execution, there’s but an obvious next-challenge to conquer. “I started to want to play pieces differently,” Leung says. “At certain points, I almost wanted to rewrite the pieces. A lot of industry people tell me that was the point when you start becoming a composer because you’ve started having your own takes on music.”

The work paid off. Leung started arranging pieces for his ensembles and performing in at least eight concerts a year from age 12. “Every concert, I’d have some kind of like a spotlight on me,” he says, frankly. “If I wasn’t a soloist, someone was performing my pieces, my arrangements.” And it’d be at one of these teenaged orchestral performances that director Dante Lam, in attendance, would recognise Leung’s immense talent.

While music is demonstrably a definitive part of Leung’s formative years, this isn’t to say he’s had no fun. He’s made time to become a stellar athlete; basketball and football were his sports. And he loves video games.

“So, going back to middle-high school, that’s when Xbox was really popular,” Leung says. “My friends and I would play this game called Halo. I’d secretively play with it my parents noticing.” Halo, the massively popular media franchise that made its start as a first-person shooter game to the chagrin of early 00s parents everywhere, was a watershed piece of media for the video- gaming industry but, as Leung was keen to explain, it’s also a momentous piece of media specifically for video game music.

“Prior to Halo, video game music sounds like things you’d hear in Mario Kart, you know, like these eight-bit chiptune sounds,” he explains. “Halo was one of the first mega franchises that used symphonic music as video game music. And now, everybody’s into symphonic music.

“Because I played a lot of Halo and given that I was musically sensitive enough, I realised then that someone needed to have written this music,” Leung says. “This is an actual career. And so, I looked up who wrote it.”

Martin “Marty” O’Donnell was the name that came up on that Google search. A secondary search would take Leung to where O’Donnell went to school (Wheaton and USC). He applied. “Without thinking twice,” he says, then admitting he probably, honestly, OK, all right, most definitely should’ve done more research. “Because that was also when I was a mega fanboy. So, I went to Chicago to this, without knowing, very small liberal arts school. Regardless, I went there and quickly established myself as one of the finer musicians there. And then, I got connected with Marty.”

Never meet your heroes, they’ve always said. Unless your name is Elliot Leung, it seems. Now under the Albatross-sized wing that must be O’Donnell’s, Leung finally sees a door into an industry that’s once seemed so elusive.

“Some people make it because they’re like, Brad Pitt and Lady Gaga’s child. I’m not that,” the now-Hollywood composer says, a clear outlier in the industry’s nepotism-baby discourse. “Marty told me the reason why he took me on was because I had this abnormal amount of motivation and drive. That I really just wanted to make it. And that he hasn’t seen someone with that hunger to succeed.

“Because I really never had a plan B at that point,” he says, indulging in a split-second tangent on an interior- design fantasy he’s once had and quickly abandoned in the 10th grade. “I didn’t even want to have the mental capacity to have this backup drive. This all goes back to the motto I live by,” Leung, the once-athlete, says. “I don’t want to go back to the bench with energy. I want to go back to the bench knowing that I’m really, really tired because I gave it my all in the minutes I was on the court.”

These days, Leung’s court is in the big leagues. Having scrapped his USC graduate studies in 2017 for his big break as lead composer for director Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea, Leung has since traversed past action, the genre he was most known for, for narratives more emotive in Disney+’s Anita, the devastating biopic on the Cantopop legend. He’s been nominated for a Golden Rooster award; been inducted into Forbes’ 30 Under 30 roster in 2022; is a three-time ASCAP Award winner; and is excitingly working on composing for video game Six Days in Fallujah alongside unnamed, unnumbered, hush-hush Hollywood projects.

Through the face of all this prodigious talent and integral hunger for pushing boundaries in worlds real and virtual, Leung is, still, somehow, unerringly human. “There are a lot of new things I want to try to do but I don’t actually know how to fully go about it. There’ll always be moments where you don’t know if you’re good enough. At these points, I might be thinking, ‘OK, uh, shouldn’t you just call John Williams or something, maybe he knows how to do it?’”

And while Williams has the scores to Star Wars, E.T. and Harry Potter to his name, Leung is, too, delving into terrains unexplored – some might even argue: non-existent – with the world’s first Metaverse Symphony co-commissioned by the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Asia Society with support from gallery Ora-Ora, to be performed in May.

“[The four-part Metaverse Symphony] is incredibly difficult to play,” says Leung, entirely unapologetic about the 45-minute- long score he’s composed. He’s sat with this music for over a year now and he’s confident it’s his best work yet. “And it also is a hell of a ride. It’s very visual, and I suppose that’s why I’m in the film industry to begin with. People have described my music as it being very visual, they can see things from it.”

Colour, after all, is how Leung describes his creative process. While others laser-focus – excessively, Leung would lecture – on melodies and harmonies, the film composer is searching for context. For perspective. So a C-note isn’t just a C; an A-flat isn’t just an adornment.

“When I write for anything, be it film, a video game or the metaverse, I visualise it performed,” Leung says. “I hate faking something. And it’s very easy to fake now with technology. But I really don’t enjoy faking something that will not be possible to be performed live. Dishonest is a very heavy word, but it doesn’t respect musicians who play and hone the craft. I suppose that honours my classical roots,” he says.

It should come as no surprise, considering the hours upon hours the younger Leung – who’d pass every Saturday in practice; who’d heard his first full-house standing ovation at the age of 18 and thought it momentous – spent on this innate talent-turned-career- making vocation. Because what is music if not performed? What is music if not enjoyed, shoulder to shoulder, alongside people all sharing in the kind of collective bliss only a live performance can acceptably conjure?

As Leung delves deeper and deeper into concepts of orchestration, his creative processes and something called a, uh, Phrygian scale, it’s clear: he’s living his dream made all those year ago, when he once scribbled “Conductor” as a job he’d like to have. And the dream, for the musician who stubbornly, steadfastly refused to consider
a back-up plan, continues. To Hollywood he goes. To the metaverse he goes. And to worlds uncharted he’d, likely, go.

And, in closing, any dreams not of the musical variety?

“To own a football team,” Leung says, with a grin. We’d consider the goal set – and scored.

Featured image courtesy of Nathan Erickson

The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.

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