Interview: Film Score Composer Henry Jackman on Scoring "Jumanji: The Next Level"

Henry Jackman was already a major sensation in music, producing material for artists like Elton John and Seal, when Hans Zimmer recruited him for a career in film music composing. Mr. Jackman has contributed additional music to modern classic films like The Dark Knight, The Da Vinci Code, and Pirates of the Caribbean, but he has a breathtaking career catalog of his own opulent compositions on star-studded hit movies like Detective Pikachu, Kong: Skull Island, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Captain Phillips, and X-Men: First Class.

What can one achieve on when you have already covered every film score genre? Infinity. Mr. Jackman, a classically trained composer, keeps going because of his family work ethic to always deliver your best effort in achieving greatness. In his most personal interview to date, Mr. Jackman breaks the barrier of composers being just another name on the film credits to explain how he became the success story he is today.

Your colleague’s mom hilariously thought that films came with the music included like a two in one shampoo-conditioner. Basically, that film score composers don’t exist. What other misconceptions have you been told, comical and serious, that you want to correct readers on about film score composers?

The funny thing: that’s about my only story of a funny misconception. The only other things I can think of are to do with samples and recordings, and a real orchestra. Most people who go to the cinema who are not especially thinking about music don’t listen to soundtracks and are blissfully unaware that there is music. They just go and enjoy the movie. In a way, that is your job. You should be writing music that so supports the movie, it seamlessly integrates. If you see the movie without the music, you realize, “Wow. It doesn’t work. There is something really missing.”

It’s not really a misconception, but in a way, it is one of the attractions of a movie that is most invisible. In a way, you know it’s there, but it’s one of the odd ironies of a film score that if it is really doing its job, you shouldn’t be coming out of a movie, “Oh, I was listening to the music,” because that would mean the music was disassociating from the movie. Most people would get a real shock if they watch movies that they know and watch the movies without the music, and they’d go, “Oh! I only just realize a lot of the enhancement of the feeling is massively driven by music.” Very few people are going to have the experience of watching a movie with no music in it. It is a peculiar irony that as a film score composer, you really work hard to create all this music.

By the time the movie is finished, you hope the audience is spending of their time not focusing on the music, which is probably why the mother of my colleague had that thought of music coming with the movie, like batteries with a flashlight.

You have said that you grew tired of studying exclusively classical music theory in school and wanted to have some fun learning about popular music techniques. But film composers who only have rock backgrounds will complain that they don’t know how to read sheet music, they don’t understand some classical music concepts and never will, they can’t write octave jumping material, and they are so hard on themselves about it. Do you think you’re just being picky? What is great about having classical music knowledge and modern music skills?

There are so many interesting and cool things about contemporary music stars from rock to pop music, house music, drum and bass, and all that kind. It's all great, and what's interesting about it is the groove and the electronic textures and all the novelty and all the rest of it. The one thing that is more conservative and less exploratory in all those stars: it tends to be harmony. And if you have a big knowledge of [Claude] Debussy and [Igor] Stravinsky and [Maurice] Ravel and all these composers from the early 20th century, it's much more sophisticated harmonically.

The one thing that will be true if all of your musical background comes out of rock music and electronica, and you have no background at all or knowledge of classical music, is it means that your knowledge of harmony and chords will be just a bit more narrow. But even then, if you're really creative, imaginative, and talented, that doesn't matter. You'll just find it find a different way to use a smaller amount of chords and still do something beautiful and creative with them. I'm just lucky that I because I've got this symphonic background as well, that's one of the reasons I started getting bored in pop music. You listen to Benjamin Britten or Stravinsky or [Nikolai] Rimsky-Korsakov. There's this whole world of chords and harmonies, which if you're doing some movie like Jumanji or Predator or something that needs this weird, otherworldly feeling to it… And if they don't want a score that's just electronic, you need in your toolbox to know some of these strange harmonies that produce otherworldly and mysterious feelings.

There’s no rules. You could have a composer with an immense knowledge of all sorts of music who for whatever reason just doesn't write very interesting music, and you could have a composer with a quite narrow knowledge of music who because he or she is so creative and imaginative does something fantastic with it.

The example I always give is side A of U2’s Joshua Tree. Joshua Tree only has about four chords on it, and it's one of the most iconic albums of the 80’s or indeed, one of the most iconic rock albums ever, but if you break it down in terms of chords, it's only got about four chords, and I mean, it's not winning any awards for the chords, but there are so many other amazing things about that album. It’s not setting out to win an award for the most sophisticated chords in the world, and yet, it's amazing, iconic, and that album will last in history. So that really ends up being to do with what you will find comfortable and what you will not find comfortable. If you have no background at all in symphonic music, you don't want to end up on some score that requires a sort of profound knowledge of symphonic music. but as long as it isn't that, you'll be fine, and conversely, if you had a composer who is so traditional that he or she only knows how to use an orchestra and symphonic music, that person might feel uncomfortable if it's a very modern, electronic, textual score because they're a bit out of their depth. It’s just horses per courses.

Where I feel really blessed is I was lucky enough to have a profoundly strict classical education, and then I had a sort of decade and a half of the exact opposite, making all sorts of underground electronic music, so I just had that charmed lucky life, or I got exposed to all of it, and some of that, I have my father to thank for. My father was so eclectic musically. There's some time when I was a kid, he would shout, “Henry, come down to the music room!” I’d come down, and he'd be listening to Béla Bartók's opera, The Miraculous Mandarin, which is furiously complicated orchestration. You'd have the score out. He'd make me follow the score, and it was so beyond my understanding really, but I'd listen to it and think it was amazing.

But then a week later, it would be like, “Henry, come to the music room!” And he’d be playing like, Paul Simon or something and go, “You have to check out this bass line. This bass line is just ridiculous.” So my dad didn't really distinguish. He thought the bass line on “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes” by Paul Simon was equally worthy of checking out because it was as awesome as a great 20th century East European, complicated composer, so I was brought up with the attitude any and all kind of music is good if it's imaginative, and it just doesn't matter what style or what genre it is.

Anyone who wants to do film score music? The one piece of advice I would give, given that there are so many different kind of movies, and if you want to be really versatile, I would say it's a good idea to be as well versed as you can be in as much musical style as you can. Only for the reason that then it will restrict you less in your choices of what kind of movies you can work on.

But having said that, I can't emphasize enough that if someone is really imaginative and creative, then something great will happen anyway, even if they've got fewer colors in their paint box. They’ll just mix them more imaginatively. If someone's really creative and imaginative, they'll always do something good, so it's not a necessity to know the whole history of music.

Let’s go for it! Our teachers always told us we needed to pay attention in school. What is something you learned from music classes that you recently used on a film score? I’ll go first. I hate to admit to my music teachers I learned in class, but I love using flutes like punctuation marks of commas, exclamations, and periods in verbal language. What about you?

Well, that's a good question. Again, what's funny is I actually had a very formal musical education, and I at the time, at this very spot, I was a music scholar. All these posh schools in England. I went to Oxford and everything. At the time, I was probably a bit ungrateful and thinking, “Ahhh, it’s a bit of a waste of my time.” Because it all felt so traditional, and I wanted to work in the record industry, and I was being too cool for school. At the time, if you'd spoken to me age 20, I’d be, “Ahhh, this is all a waste of time. Why am I learning all this old fashioned rubbish? I want to get to London and start making drum and bass records, and blah, blah, blah.” Because there's a natural rebellion in life.

But looking back on it, I'm so glad I did. Let me think. For example, just come back to our conversation about harmony. I'm working on something at the moment where I've had a conversation with a director. I had to study sixteenth century church music, which has a very different use of harmony to either pop music or indeed, even classical music. It's a type of harmony called modal harmony, and you would think, “Well, that sounds a bit specialized. Only an academic would need to know about that.” Well, I just recently had a conversation with the director that was a bit of an interesting artistic challenge because he's talking about. “Is there any way that you could write something that has a love theme but, instead of for a person and not romantic? A love theme that is for an ideal, for an institutional ideal, but emanating from a person? How would you go about that? So it mustn't sound romantic, but it's like the love of an idea?”

And I've started fiddling around with this idea, and funnily enough, I found that instead. It's an American thing, so instead of going down the obvious route of an Aaron Copland strong Captain America solo trumpet and open fits and falls conjuring up a sort of fanfare for the common man, which we've all had a million and one ripoffs of that type of Americana, which would be a bit on the nose, and the thing that I'm trying to achieve is something that has a bit more devotion to it.

I ended up reaching for some harmony that I obviously learned way back when I was a simple age in choir school and had to study at school the sort of modal harmony that actually crops up in in Victorian [Giovanni Pierluigi da] Palestrina or modern some [Claudio] Monteverdi, but without using a choir or an organ because then it would sound too religious. Actually, by stealing some of the harmony from sixteenth century music and then using American, more modern instrumentation, I think I'm halfway to finding this really cool, slightly ecclesiastical and fractionally institutional, but also devotional vibe, and hopefully we'll end up writing a piece of music that does sound like a man's love for an idealized institution.

I'm being a bit vague because I can't give too much away about what the project is, but there's a really good example. It’s a political drama in which I need to express a theme where someone who's head of an extremely important American institution has an idealistic veneration for the public office that he holds, and so that's kind of a tricky one. But my point is, I'm lucky that somewhere rumbling around in my subconscious mind is how to do modal harmony and whatnot. There is a good example of something.

At the time, I was probably cursing when I was singing that music as a choir boy, I've really enjoyed it. When I was at university having to study this, and we had to copy and do sort of mock-ups of this sixteenth century type music, I was probably thinking, “When am I gonna go to the pub?” And, “This is a bit boring, and I can't finish my homework on time.”

Little did I know that 25 years later, understanding that kind of harmony could be a really useful creative tool in a completely creative process. Just at the time, it felt like training, but that's just a good example of having some extra skills lurking in your paint box that you can reach for naturally without having to learn it from scratch because it's some musical language that you're aware of and is a natural part of your vocabulary.

I’m so excited to interview you because you have a wide range of genres you compose for, including animation. Most composers, maybe not always willingly, maybe they get typecast, only cover say, action. Whimsical animated films. How have you avoided being typecast in your work opportunities? And, what subtleties do you notice in composing for action blockbusters versus animation?

Well, that's a really good question, and there's a few different things. In order not to be known for doing one thing, I think there's a whole bunch of different factors, right? The first thing actually just goes back to what we were talking about, which is are you a composer with sufficient variation in your musical knowledge to be able to tackle various different things? You need the answer for that to be yes if you want to do a whole range of different things. If something is like a really tough action score, that's a very different thing to a sort of whimsical animation, so step one is do you have the various skills? Different orchestration techniques? Do you understand enough about non-orchestral stuff and how to make things sound brutal or tough, or have all these different techniques? First of all, have you got enough paints in your paint box?

Secondly, some of it is luck. When you're starting out in your career, you just say yes if someone says, “Do you want to do it?” Think how many people would love to do movies. A lot of it is just good luck, so the first thing you get asked to do that's a big movie, you're gonna say yes. The first sort of eight movies you do, just try to make sure that they're not all the same thing because after the eighth movie that's similar, if you were to do eight back to back animation scores, people could be forgiven for thinking, “Oh yeah. So he does animation scores.”

And with a combination of good luck and trying to be as picky as you can… It’s difficult to be picky when you're starting your career because when someone says, “Would you like to do a score for a movie?” The answer is yes. It's only much later in your career when too many people are asking you to do music that you can pick and choose. When you start out, you're just delighted and amazed anyone's asking you to do anything, so some of that is luck, and some of it is judgment. Don't keep doing the same thing.

And I would say the third quality to do with the versatility and flexibility is adopting a slightly different psychology, for example, to a singer-songwriter. If you’re a singer-songwriter, your sense of yourself is that you're an artist, and hopefully if you're good enough and you're connected enough, your lyrics and your ideas are sufficiently worthy that people just love what you do. And you write music, and hopefully have a fan base and people follow you, and hopefully you develop, and you evolve. But it's basically about you and the stuff you're writing.

Whereas a film composer, you need a certain element of humility. I'm not saying that singer-songwriters or recording artists don't have humility, but there's an added humility to being a film composer where if you really want to help the movie that you have been tasked with enhancing, your number one mission is to slightly leave yourself aside for a second and go right, “What is this movie? What is the project? What does it need? What is the literary criticism? Break it down. What is the narrative? What are the themes required? What is the tone of this movie? What could I do musically to massively boost this already hopefully good piece of filmmaking and send it right over the top into something that's really special?”

Your first questions aren't like, “What do I want to do? It's all about me.” It’s like, “What would this movie really benefit from?” And the advantage of having that kind of psychology is it will take you to all sorts of different places, so if you're working on a movie set in sixteenth century France about Henri de Navarre, and it's about the massacre of the Huguenots and the Catholics and post Medieval history, you're going to be sent down that road, and you'll start thinking about that. Maybe again, you could nick some harmony from that sort of era. You could think about some of the instrumentation, and you're being guided not by your own ego but what would serve a movie about sixteenth century European history.

On the other hand, if you were doing a movie like Winter Soldier, and Captain America's friend Bucky is trapped inside this metal body like a massively screwed up cross between Robocop and Terminator, then forget that kind of lovely lush and previous music I was discussing. That's going to be something metallic, barbaric, brutal, maybe not even that orchestral. So I mean that if you listen to the track “Winter Soldier” on the on the soundtrack CD, it's just this crazy messed up thing that owes a lot more to drum and bass and electronic music. It's full of gnarly, hideous, messed up sounds and all kinds of sound design and whatnot, but the reason you end up in all these versatile places, it's not really because you're thinking of yourself. It’s because you're thinking, “Well, what would be a really good sound for a human soul trapped in a metal body that's been reprogrammed by some hideous institution?”

You could just keep thinking of different movies. Instead of staying in your hometown, every time you do a movie, it's a new country. You've got to learn a new language. Find out what it's all about and go with where the movie takes you, and if you've got enough open mindedness and enough different musical skills, it should be there. No wonder that if you listen to different scores, they're wildly different to one another as long as you've got that versatility. I think maybe that third aspect is almost the most important. If you can let go of any sort of preconceived notions and then think about what sort of musical ideas would most benefit the filmmaking, then the music is going to be as diverse as the filmmaking that you're working on.

If you listen to that Winter Soldier track that I was talking about and then listen to the stuff I did on Winnie the Pooh, you'd be forgiven for thinking, “That's surely not the same person.” Because one of them sounds like very homely, pastoral, naïve, comforting storytelling animation, Winnie the Pooh, and the other sounds like profoundly disturbing, messed up, electronic, brutal and almost sort of willfully unpleasant to listen to. You’d be forgiven for thinking, “Surely, that's done by two different people. That doesn't really sound like the same person.” Because they're so wildly different in a way that if you're a singer-songwriter, you're unlikely to have two pieces of music that are that wildly different because you'll lose your fanbase. They'll be confused.

So I think that it's a combination of the versatility of the different skills that you need in your paint box and then leaving yourself behind and just trying to immerse yourself into whatever movie you're working on to try and think what would best serve it, and I think that's one the great things about film music is instead of repeating yourself and it always being about you, what you're really doing is collaborating inside all sorts of wildly different filmmaking visions. Which is hopefully why you'll end up in very different musical places every time you do something.

Jumanji: The Next Level comes out on December 13 in the USA. We already what The Rock is cooking. Spoiler: it’s poached eggs and breakfast potatoes. What have you cooked up for the score? How much of the theme do you carry over from the last movie? Are you introducing any new styles?

That's a really good question because it's only recently I, despite the fact I've done a lot of movies, I haven't very often done two movies in the same franchise. Wreck-It Ralph. That was the case. And Captain America 2 to 3, and now, Jumanji. It is a really interesting experience. Obviously, when you start a brand new movie it's a blank space, and the joy and the challenge is creating a complete soundscape, an idea for that movie. With, for example, Detective Pikachu, I really enjoyed that because of the nature of that world of Pikachu and some of the electronic and nostalgia that goes with that. It takes a lot of work because you're starting from a blank canvas, and once you've established that world if people like it, and Jake [Kasdan, the director] loved the score for the first Jumanji film, you can be forgiven for thinking, “Oh, wow. I've done all this hard work.” Particularly on Jumanji, I was very proud of the thematic material because Jake really likes those old school action-adventure symphonic scores in the tradition of Alan Silvestri and James Horner and John Williams’ Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future.

It was one of those movies where there was a quite deliberate self conscious preoccupation with falling into the lineage of those kind of action-adventure movies that if you're of a certain age, you will remember, and they were much in favor in the 80’s and early 90’s and then slightly less in favor after that as all filmmaking got a bit darker and whatnot. But the point about Jumanji is the filmmaking still feels modern. It feels like a 2019 movie, but it does have some of that warmth and fun that derives from that generation of films, the ones I mentioned, that Raiders of the Lost Ark or Back to the Future. It was a great opportunity in the first one to really bed down some, as far as I could, classic and big themes, so it would be ridiculous to throw them all away for the second one, but what's interesting is even though you have the thematic material, it's actually best to really think of it as a brand new movie because even though you have these themes, it doesn't mean weirdly that the score is twice as easy because so much of the time you are repurposing the things or harmonizing or reorganizing them.

And when they land in Jumanji the second time, it's a completely different world than Welcome to the Jungle. So even though you've got the architecture of the theme, some of the harmony in the orchestration, you're describing a different landscape. There are new characters. There was a new villain. There’s a completely new Jurgen the Brutal theme that was a great fun with. Jurgen the Brutal is a sort of Medieval overlord, so I wanted to get a combination of some barbaric kind of horn sound but mixed with a sort of semi [Richard] Wagnerian [theme]. I took him very seriously and gave him a sort of massively Wagnerian classical theme because he's such a sort of almost over the top, mighty Teutonic overlord.

That was huge fun, and that was all new material, and then you have to figure out how the old things will work with the new material and all the rest of it, so it's an interesting one. Even though you do have material that carries over from the first film that the director loved. There's a Jumanji adventure theme and a fanfare theme that came from the first movie. It pretty much is just as much work as starting from scratch in a weird way.

I remember talking to Matthew Vaughn on the second Kingsman movie as he was working really hard in the edit going, “God, you know this might be the most difficult movie I've made! I was thinking because Kingsman worked out really well, we’d all get on a bit of a roll, and it would be like twice as easy as making the first Kingsman movie.” And he goes, “If anything, I think it's twice as difficult.” I think it could be a bit of a universal law that if you're working hard not to be lazy, and you're really trying to make the next movie in a franchise not repeat itself, then ironically, far from being just recapitulating what you last did and in some sense it being easier, it can sometimes actually be more difficult ironically.

You told Variety, “When I was in the record industry I was constantly on the phone to my agent, moaning about the restrictions and the same four chords, and why can’t we do something more interesting?” What are examples of that on some of your scores including the Jumanji films we can hear more risk taking work? I feel like you may have already answered this.

I’ll answer just by saying this. I feel increasingly ungrateful every time I hear myself quoted back at myself because, for example, when I was studying all this classical music I'm, you know, moaning and going, “I want to be cool. I want to get down to learn to get my sampler. Forget all this boring classical stuff. I'm gonna make some cool drum and bass and whatnot.” And then notice how like ten years later, when I am in the record industry, now I'm moaning the other way round going, “Oh God, you know, pop music! It's all like three minutes, 30 seconds, and we only use four chords, and we spend forever just mixing three minutes 35 seconds.”

I guess it just shows the grass is always greener on the other side, but the one way I will answer that question is I am incredibly grateful to just the fact of the existence of the genre film music is the most amazing home for me. And also I should be very grateful to Hans Zimmer. So for example, there I was in all these classical institutions feeling constricted and wanting to rebel. You know, because I'm a teenager. I like going out to raves and clubs and whatnot. So then I go into the record industry and make club music and dance music, and then I'm still feeling restricted because, unfortunately, I've got way too much of this other baggage of musical knowledge.

So nothing’s really working because I'm feeling constrained one way or another, and then I bump into Hans Zimmer. “You idiot. You should be doing film music.” Well, he didn’t call me an idiot. But he said, “What are you missing around the record industry for? You should be doing film music.” And I gave him my grand speech about these various different parts of my musical education. And he goes, “It’s so simple. Film music is the one place where all of these things will come in useful. You may need to do something that sounds like an Austro Viennese piece of sonata form classical music. You may need to do something that sounds like German dubstep.”

For instance, in the Pikachu score, Pikachu to this club and ends up accidentally breathing in a whole load of gas that looks suspiciously like some sort of, you know… He gets high accidentally, and then there's this massive dubstep tune in the background. So all of that ended up being useful. He was so right. As soon as I was soon as I was lucky enough to fall into film music, instead of moaning all the time, it was, “This is fantastic.”

But you know what? Somebody told me a while ago that people who complain about stuff at every moment are more intelligent because they notice everything, so really we look at things like that’s bad because we are always complaining, but we need to see it more as a positive.

I see what you’re saying. Yes. It’s a form of you’re not gonna find your true home if you settle in something that isn't right, so in a way, the moaning is part of how you get out of where you are at that moment to try and find where your true home is kind of thing. But I'm so grateful to Hans Zimmer because I had this huge conversation with him, and he goes, “Look, it seems clear to me with all this, you've got this ridiculous amount of musical knowledge and whatnot. Why don't you come and hang out like a fly on the wall and see how movies get made?

And I think you'll find that all these different kind of skills not necessarily on one particular movie, but suddenly instead, it's gonna be a strength. It's gonna be versatility because film music stories are about anything and everything. They're contemporary. They’re historical. They’re futuristic. They’re fantasy. They're grounded. They're realistic. There's so many different stories that there's suddenly all this different sort of schizophrenic musical knowledge you've got? It's actually gonna be handy.”

And he just couldn't have been more correct. You’ve still got to work like crazy and prove yourself and everything, but I hadn't really thought about film music, and then I met him, and it changed my life. I will be eternally grateful for that intervention to be honest. The point about that answer is that the great thing about film music is it's such a wide and eclectic church that can handle anything from the most stripped down of minimalist electronic scores to the most richly orchestrated and sophisticated symphonic music, and somewhere along the line, people need all of these different things, and that's what's great about working in this in this field.

It is said we need to be role models to our younger selves to truly be successful. With your film music career, how do you feel that is true? In terms of achievements but also things you do within the music itself?

Well, that's a tricky one. That could be an hour long conversation, but just briefly I think it's not true all the time. I think it is possible for many people, say aged 11 or 12, to have some idea or some feeling of what they would like to do later which it turns out is in fact a bit of a fantasy and not necessarily appropriate, and they shouldn't beat themselves up if they reflect on their lives at middle age and in fact, they're not… Think how many English kids are like, “I want to play football for England.” Football of course, meaning soccer, in my case. If everyone in society had some grand artistic dream, then I don't think the world would function, so I don't think we should berate the whole of society if they haven't all fulfilled some idea that they thought they might have had aged 11 or 12 because some of those ideas will be semi fantastical.

Having said that, you're absolutely right. There is always a sense of disappointment if there is a genuine impulse and a creative idea to do something that is attainable and realistic, and somewhere along the line it doesn't work out, you've got to be realistic about it.

 I just got incredibly lucky. I remember as recently as being 30, maybe early thirties, thinking, “I'm never gonna afford to buy a house. It's just never gonna happen because I'm just scratching around, and I’m enjoying music and everything. I’ve never made enough money.” And had it carried on like that, I have ended up doing something else to supplement my income. Meaning, I don’t think you should berate or be harsh to people who have some idea or dream of something that becomes economically unsustainable, and they end up doing something else with their lives because some of life is luck.

The one thing I guess which is not quite related to the question, but I definitely think is a helpful adjunct to a vision of wanting to do something and it's another thing, I'm very grateful for my family background. Despite the fact that I went to quite highfalutin institutions for classical education, whatnot, I was always the scholarship kid. It wasn't because my parents were wealthy. I got to all these places because you have to get a scholarship, which means you have to submit composition and play the piano, so it's kind of on musical merit, not the fact that your parents have a lot of money In my background, there was always this tremendous sort of blue collar work ethic that started with my grandpa.

My grandpa's grandpa was a household servant, and my grandpa would have had a very sort of standard working class career, but he just decided having heard Benny Goodman on the radio he was gonna be a musician, and his work ethic was unbelievable. By the time I spoke to him, say in the 90’s, I was working in record production, this is an example of the sort of work ethic my grandfather had. He was in these swing type, big band groups at the highest possible level, and he would go down to the BBC in the 60’s, and they would get 25 minutes to sight read about two hours of music in a really tight ensemble, you know like, alto sax, tenor sax, baritone, rhythm section, you know, like a Sinatra type setup.

They'd get literally like 25, 30 minutes to look at all this music, and then the red light would come on, and they would play live to the nation for two hours, and trust me, if you're making more than two mistakes over those two hours, you don't get called again. And that was the kind of standard he was. He wasn't getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or anything. His attitude was, “You have to practice. The only way you're going to be any good is by the sheer dint of hard work.”

Even though I keep going on about luck and all the rest of it, the one thing I will say is whenever you do get some sort of opportunity, I've always taken the attitude if whatever the task is, like when I first started doing things in film music, I was given the most undemanding of tasks. So I would always think to myself, “If this is what's expected, how could I do something that's way beyond what is expected? Even in this somewhat menial task?” So that anyone encountering what I'm doing said, “Wow, I didn't expect–so you've gone and done this, and there's, no, that's pretty impressive.”

And then if you get another mission after that, how can it be wrong to whatever task you're engaged in, just see if you can go way above and beyond what anyone might expect of it? And then if still nothing works out in your life, at least you can say, “I swear to God. I gave it everything I had. Because nothing would be more disappointing than, “Well, you know, I really did have a few opportunities, but I sort of, maybe I could have, maybe I could have done it. But I didn't really throw everything I had at it.”

That definitely came from my family where the attitude is, if you're gonna do something, you just simply do it to the best of your ability because there's nothing more that can be asked of you. If something doesn't work out, fair enough, but the one question that can be asked of you is, did you do something to the absolute best of your ability? And it can be quite exhausting if you have that attitude throughout life, but it's about the only way. Inspiration and luck will account for a certain amount of life, but the vast majority of getting a film score done after the period of sort of creative inspiration which, who knows where that comes from, is seriously hard work. There’s a lot of talented people out there, and so often, the difference is just the application and the dedication. It’s just one of those things.

Many, many times, people have the feeling, “Well, if someone's really talented, why doesn’t it just all happen on its own?” That might be true if you’re a singer, and other people write the songs and do all the production. You're such a rock star, you just like show up and sing the lead vocal, but if you want to be a film composer, an awful lot of it is hard work.

Because people often have a sort of romantic vision of Beethoven with this crazy hair, and it just all comes out of him in one giant splurge as if the inspiration is just coming straight down his pen onto the piece of paper, and for some people, they are so inspired, it is a bit like that. Mozart never made any corrections. Anyone who wants to think about how possible this sort of career is, the one thing I really emphasize is you’ve just go to work really hard. Along with all the other things we've been talking about. I'm just very grateful the background that I received from my parents and my grandparents was the opposite of entitlement. The only way you get anywhere is you have to work really, really hard.

I’m going to be the millionth person telling you Hans Zimmer is one of my biggest career inspirations, but I will be the first to say it isn’t because of his music. He inspires me as a brilliant businessman exactly like how I feel about Peter Jackson, and if I could have an ounce of his business savvy for my own filmmaking and film music careers, I would be so happy. People who have never cared about film music in their lives follow his career and his music. In an era of amazing artists not making money anymore, he sells out concerts and has chart topping streaming of his film scores. What has working with him all these years taught you about branding yourself so your name and work are known to people outside those who obsess over film music? What haven’t you done yet with your career branding that you plan on in the future?

 Well, that's a very good question. Hans is such a phenomenon because as you've just pointed out, most people would start talking about the music, and you're quite right, it's not just the music. It’s his business acumen and the kind of empire he's built and all the rest of it which because you're very knowledgeable, you also know about that, which your average person would mostly associate him with music, and I would say that my personal encounters with Hans have very much been less me being hugely influenced on the business and structural side of it and more just the how grateful I am for the career impact and the artistic exchange and us talking about the purpose and meaning of film music.

So my relationship with Hans is actually mostly artistic, and I would say that compared to the very things you are talking about, the branding and the fact he sells out concerts and whatnot, I just wouldn't put myself anywhere near…I would say I've hardly done any of that at all. I mostly just think of myself as someone who gets phone calls to go, “Hey, will you do the music for this movie?” And then I go ahead and do it and work as hard as I can.

 The level he is at where he can fill concert halls and have a sort of almost wider imperial perspective is definitely several stages past my conception myself, and to be honest, I don't even know. He has such an expansive personality. I love anonymity. I'm not antisocial, but I like the role of the composer as a slightly withdrawn person no one needs to see, and you see a movie. You enjoy it. You don't necessarily have to know who the composer is or don't even have a sense of what they look like, or it's relatively anonymous while you're contributing massively to the movie. He started off hanging out with Trevor Horn. He was in The Buggles.

There's a bit of Hans that is a bit of a rock star. I feel like he feels a bit like, “Well, I would have liked to go into film music later,” and would have wanted to spend a bit more time being a rock star when he was younger. You know what I mean? And he has a very connecting public type persona. I went to Coachella, and it was great. I saw his show at Coachella, and he's on stage, and it's great, and you can see him loving it. He’s got that connection. People are enjoying the experience. That's a different skill set. That's a performing personality, and he’s great at it. If there’s anyone who’s deserving. Think how many movies Hans has done.

He just reached a point going, “I’d love to take some of this stuff on the road.” And because he's got a great business infrastructure and people to figure out all this stuff, they did a fantastic job of it, and you're right, they sell out all over the place, and why wouldn't they?

Yes! Let’s hear Gladiator and “Time” from Inception. It’s a great show. He’s very imaginative and flexible in thinking like that, but to be honest, I haven't really had any of those thoughts, first because I don’t really think it terms of–

You could do that!

Yes, you say I could do that, but one of the reasons it's so successful with Hans is not only this great body of music but that his personality naturally wants to do it. He obviously reached a point of God knows how many films. He's done every superhero movie. He’s achieved this. He’s achieved that. He’s done art movies. He’s done independent. All of this stuff.

So obviously inside Hans was, “OK. Now I want to go on the road. I want to have a little bit of a rock star experience.” Because it’s celebrating all of this amazing film music, and it's a natural drive that he has because it's natural. Because it emanates from him. it's successful because it's something he wants to do, and he's good at it, and he connects with people, and he performs well. The whole thing works.

First of all, I’m just nowhere near the same sort of status as Hans, and secondly, I don’t know if I’ve naturally got that desire to sort of shine in public. I’m slightly slightly one of those personalities where if you shine a spotlight on me, I'm likely to want to move out of the spotlight and push someone else in there while I kind of go in the background. Some of it is to do with your personality. I mean that not as a criticism but in admiration. Meaning, it's not just a case of having this body of music.

You need that public charisma and connection to make that kind of thing work. Which he does really well as is proved by how successful… Once he made the decision, “Let's start doing some of these concerts,” they're sprouting up all over the place, and they've all been really successful, but I don't know. Maybe at a certain age, I'll go, “Oh, I just can't do another movie. What about we could do some of this stuff live?” Maybe that will happen, but to me, Hans’ status is considerably more stratospheric, where the possibility for these kind of moving well above and beyond the mission of completing a film score is more readily possible due to the you know enormity of his brand.

People on my social media always send me notes how they love my articles because you really get to know people as humans and we shall wrap this with my standard finale: what do you do for fun, and what are your favorite foods? Since you’re British and Apple News is also in the UK, which football (soccer) team do you support?

I keep an eye on Norwich City because from the age of about 6 to 18, I lived in Norfolk, but truth is I've been I following Chelsea pretty avidly from the early 90’s. My problem is I'm working so much of the time, but when I'm not working, I'm lucky enough to live in this really nice part of LA that's right next to a huge swathe of Santa Monica mountain range so I've become completely obsessed with e-biking and go on these 45 mile bike rides through the mountains.

Funny enough, I'm a bit of a nature kid really, because of that formative period in Norfolk. I can recognize all of the birds in this area just by that. I don't need to see them. I can tell you any bird from its call in this area, and I've counted 52 species so far that have arrived in the garden. Given that your image of LA is a big sprawling metropolis, my non-work-related sort of LA pastimes are actually quite rural because I live right next to the mountains, so it's a lot of e-biking. I’ll give you a good example. I had three deer in the garden the other day and a bobcat. I’ve had skunks. Raccoons. That’s the crazy thing about LA.

Do you feed them?

No, I don’t feed the raccoons, but I feed the birds. It’s interesting. I remember when I lived in London, I lived in Brixton, I mean you've got to drive quite a long way out of London to get that big feeling of relief, and it's the countryside. You know what I mean? Whereas the mad thing about LA is it's one of the few places you can surf and be in the mountains and then be at a meeting in Hollywood all on the same day

because of where it's located. So yeah. That's my way of staying sane and fit is charging through the mountains on an electric bike.

As anyone over sort of 40 will know, the days of just stuffing yourself with food and there being no consequences are well over. I love Vietnamese food and Japanese food, and obviously Los Angeles particularly has really good Japanese food so I spend a lot of time eating Japanese and Vietnamese.

Yeah, that's probably my favorite consistent food, but every now and then I get nostalgic and have a big sort of English Sunday roast with beef and roast potatoes, but the thing is it's hot a lot. You can only do that here in November and December. You really don't feel like eating sort of English pub food in LA when it's a hundred degrees, but I do occasionally have British nostalgia moments, and I found a couple of places in Los Angeles that do the good old British Sunday lunch. Mostly, I eat Japanese and Vietnamese food.