Collaborating with Shonali Bose for the second time, Mikey McCleary on creating the score for Priyanka Chopra-starrer The Sky Is Pink
Sonia Lulla (MID-DAY; October 11, 2019)

Having associated with Shonali Bose for the second time after Margarita With A Straw (2014), Mikey Mccleary says it is owing to the similar aesthetic taste that they share, that the director appointed him for The Sky Is Pink.

"Once you’ve got the main theme of the score in place, you weave the rest of the music around that. For this film, it was the hymn of a five-year-old girl that made for the crux of the score, which both Shonali and the producers liked," says the musician, adding that he was delighted to get Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s nod for his work. "She had a lot to say about it and was encouraging. She understood the place of the right background score in this film, and how it would keep it uplifting, [despite the subject]. The positive reaction at the Toronto International Film Festival was also an impetus," says McCleary, who currently has the second season of the acclaimed web show, Four More Shots Please, and another Netflix original, in his kitty.

Even though score and music composition go hand-in-hand, McCleary says, in this case, he had little interaction with Pritam Chakraborty, who weaved magic into the tracks of the Zaira Wasim and Farhan Akhtar starrer. "When you compose for both, you can often use the melody from the songs for the score too, so as to have an interaction between them. That treatment is fairly common in Bollywood. But in this case, we treated them differently," he signs off.