I always try to pick projects by: Is this something that excites me? What are the people like to work with? Obviously you spend a lot of time in a room together with them, so I always try to find projects that hopefully have great people attached.

We knew we wanted to have our own tone for the show. And then the big instrument that actually we came up with was the cello. It has a big range. It can play really low. It can play high. And it has a dark sound, and 'Game Of Thrones' is obviously - it's a dark show, and the cello became the featured instrument.

I always like to tweak things and push things forward.

That's what I like: to kind of get up and start working right away in the morning.

I'll say, 'I really like Daenerys,' and then I go, 'Wait, but I like the Stark theme, too, and I like the Lannister theme.' I keep jumping around. But I think that's kind of the beauty of 'Game of Thrones,' that there's so many different ones, and they're all kind of different, and they do different things.

I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.

I think a melody is a melody. And the way I usually start is I start writing my themes without even writing to picture to just try to find the tone for the movie or the TV show.

It's always daunting to start from scratch, but it's exactly what I love about my job.

I was born and raised in Germany, so I was classically trained. Classical has been deep in me from a totally early age. Then, as a teenager, I picked up the guitar and was really into rock music.

I guess with any type of music or any art, there's always an evolution.

'Game of Thrones' offers such a wide range of instruments that I use and stylistically for what I'm doing, but 'Westworld' is the same.

When I work on a movie, I look at the script or watch the film, and I talk to my director or producers and make a plan: this is our main character; we need a theme for this plot. We need a love theme.

I myself am a huge Radiohead fan.

For me, always, the big inspiration really comes from talking with my creators, my showrunners and my producers, and seeing what is their vision for their project.

Find your own style, whatever it is. Whatever is inside you, bring that out. I think that's when you have something unique.

I'm one of those artists who, if you'd let me tweak, would probably keep going and going, so it comes to the point where sometimes you just have to let go and make the decision, 'Okay, that's it.'

I like to have recognizable themes and sounds that really connect to the project and that you can identify with that particular project. My goal is always, 'When that theme comes on - even if you're not in the room - you hear it and say, 'Oh my show is starting, I gotta watch.'

Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it's more powerful to leave you with nothing.

Really, I get inspired by just switching projects and instrumentation and things like that - that creative part of just being different every time is really what inspires me.

I actually enjoy the fantasy world quite a bit. You have no boundaries.

With 'Iron Man,' I have to give Jon Favreau great credit for the score because he always said, from the beginning, 'Tony Stark is a rock n' roll guy.'

After high school, I moved to the U.S. and studied music in Boston, at the Berklee College of Music.

What's so cool about 'Light of the Seven' - and what I love about 'Game of Thrones' - is you never know what's going to happen.

I don't listen to film music at all. I don't want to be influenced.