Brian Tyler remembers being in a hospital mattress when the music for “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” got here to him.
While in his music studio in August 2025, the composer suffered a significant medical incident: a double subarachnoid mind hemorrhage — bleeding within the house between the mind and the membrane masking it.
“It just happened out of nowhere,” mentioned Tyler, 53, talking from his house in Los Angeles. “It’s like lightning striking and I was touching the void, facing the blackness.”
Many individuals with such a hemorrhage die immediately, according to Cleveland Clinic. Among those that make it to the hospital, one-third die whereas hospitalized. Another third survive with a incapacity.
Tyler mentioned the reason for the hemorrhage wasn’t clear. He went on to spend three weeks within the hospital present process remedy.
Soon, he discovered himself beating the percentages. He put pen to paper, persevering with the film compositions he had been engaged on when he suffered his aneurysm — for each “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Nuremberg,” which got here out final yr.
“It was like a cathartic kind of way to come back and it gave me a goal and a sense of where I was headed,” he mentioned.
Now, with “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” having garnered greater than $747 million globally on the field workplace and on monitor to be one of many yr’s highest grossing movies, Tyler is feeling grateful.
He quipped that his rating was liable for “99%” of the movie’s success. It could have been a joke however to many superfans of the movie — a sequel to 2023’s massively profitable “Super Mario Bros.,” which Tyler additionally composed for — the music is a key part.
“The music is such an important part of Super Mario Bros. and I wrote it all as one piece,” Tyler mentioned. “The goal was to write something beautiful, epic and really impassioned.”
Tyler has had a storied profession, composing music for dozens of main movies together with “Rambo,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Iron Man 3.” He has additionally composed the theme for the U.S. Open Golf Championships and Formula 1.
Tyler additionally labored on the music for “Nuremberg” within the wake of his large medical emergency, the critically acclaimed 2025 movie starring Rami Malek as a US Army psychiatrist who evaluates Nazi leaders together with Hermann Göring, performed by Russell Crowe, forward of the post-WWII trials. “’Nuremberg’ was such an important film historically, and it needed to really capture that era of time,” Tyler mentioned.
Tyler noticed a thread between his personal expertise and the 2 movies he labored on.
“It happens to be that there’s these parallel lines with the story where you’re rising up, you’re enduring and you’re searching in both movies,” he mentioned. “So, for me, it was like I was able to really write music for the experience I was just in.”
At the second, although, it’s all “Super Mario Galaxy” on a regular basis. The movie, directed by Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Pierre Leduc and Fabien Polack and starring Brie Larson and Jack Black amongst others, is predicated on the legendary Nintendo online game sequence.
A fan of video video games himself, Tyler understood the significance of meshing tunes with the visuals within the animated movie, which was knowledgeable by one in all Tyler’s tremendous powers: chromesthesia.
The neurological phenomenon causes those that have it to have the ability to see sound as colours and shapes, which Tyler mentioned acts as “a cheat code” when he’s conducting an orchestra as a result of he’s ready “to see the coloration of chords.”
“It’s like an added kind of way to listen by seeing the music itself,” Tyler mentioned. “When people talk there’s always colors. I’m just used to it. I thought everyone had it.”
He will quickly be capable to present individuals what that seems like. Tyler is directing a dwell multimedia expertise known as “Are We Dreaming” that he describes as “a modern day ‘Fantasia’ meets ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’”
“I’m doing the visuals and the color timing and the music and filming it,” he mentioned. “I’m making it so you can see what I see.”
Correction:
This story has been up to date to mirror that “Are We Dreaming” shouldn’t be a movie, however a dwell multimedia expertise.