Mexican musician Antonio Sánchez on composing the soundtrack to the Oscar-winning Birdman

Films have always been unspooling silently in the background of Antonio Sánchez’s life.

The drummer’s grandfather, whom Sánchez calls a “completely ubiquitous” star of Mexico’s golden age of cinema, played the title character in Macario (1960), his country’s first work to gain an Academy Award nomination for best foreign-language film. Meanwhile, his mother was tasked with rating the age certification of new releases, so he got to see “a lot of movies I shouldn’t have”, he says. “Movies that were not for kids.” And despite “traumatic” childhood encounters with John Carpenter’s work, he nurtured a teenage love of horror. Sánchez credits the 1984 Mozart biopic Amadeus as the moment he decided to become a musician: “I was a kid, so to see a kid being able to conduct orchestras and write symphonies and operas, to me, was fascinating.”

And then there’s Birdman, the offbeat 2014 Michael Keaton vehicle that Sánchez soundtracked with a series of virtuosic, scene-conjuring improvisations, solely performed on percussion. The film won four Oscars, including best picture, and while Sánchez’s work was snubbed on a technicality, it did bag a Golden Globe nomination, transforming the musician from a respected member of the jazz community to a low-ranking Hollywood celebrity.

“All of a sudden, I’m hanging out with Jeff Goldblum and Bill Murray and all these people,” he says. “I had a little bit of impostor syndrome. I knew what had transpired with Birdman was beautiful and amazing. But I was like, I don’t know if I should be here with these guys who have been doing it for decades.”

Now, 10 years later, Sánchez is revisiting the Birdman score on stage, performing live alongside two screenings of the film at Hong Kong’s Freespace Jazz Fest next Sunday, October 27.

While the original soundtrack featured just under 30 minutes of his playing, on tour Sánchez accompanies the movie’s entire two-hour runtime. And don’t expect to hear those scenes as you remember them from the film, because he’s creating them afresh every night, only now, he says, his work sounds better than it ever did in the cinema.

“It was an improvised score to begin with,” says the 52-year-old, “and now I’m improvising over what was the improvised score, so every night is completely different. I have had time to sit with it for 10 years, so I know the movie intimately. The challenging part? It’s the easiest gig I can do on the road. It’s just me. They play the movie; I sit there and I just play along to it.”