Michael Giacchino

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Giacchino was ten years old when he started building worlds out of stop-motion animation in his family's basement in New Jersey, recording his own homemade soundtracks to go with them. Nobody asked him to. Nobody paid him. He just knew, somehow, that the pictures needed music, and that he was the one to write it.

  That basement instinct would eventually carry him to the Academy Awards, three Grammys, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a Primetime Emmy. He would score eight Pixar films, reshape the sound of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and write music that millions of people heard without ever knowing his name. He would also, in time, step behind the camera himself.

  But the path from Edgewater Park Township, New Jersey, to the Oscar stage was not a straight line. It ran through video game studios, late-night college courses, a six-month unpaid internship at Universal Pictures, and a department store where he worked to pay the rent. What does it take to turn a childhood obsession into a career that spans decades and genres? That is what this story is about.

• 2. New Jersey Roots

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  Giacchino was born on the 10th of October 1967, into an Italian-American family in Riverside Township, New Jersey. His father's ancestors came from Sicily; his mother's family had emigrated from Abruzzo in southern Italy. He grew up nearby in Edgewater Park Township and graduated from Holy Cross High School in Delran Township in 1986. He holds dual American and Italian citizenship.

  An art teacher at Holy Cross took notice of the teenager's unusual combination of interests and recommended that his parents look into the School of Visual Arts in New York City. When Giacchino visited the school, the experience hit him hard. He later described standing there thinking that he could not believe colleges existed where a person could actually pursue the things that genuinely excited them. He enrolled at SVA, majoring in film production and minoring in history.

  During his final year at SVA, a film publicity instructor announced an unpaid six-month internship at Universal Pictures. Giacchino was the only student interested. He took the position, attending classes during the day, working the internship at night, and paying rent by working at Macy's. He graduated from SVA in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, then went on to take music classes at the Juilliard School and afterward at UCLA. His brother Anthony Giacchino, meanwhile, became a documentary filmmaker.

• 3. Video Games as a Doorway

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  After graduating, Universal hired Giacchino full-time. He later moved to Disney, and when Disney relocated to Los Angeles, he went with them. He worked in publicity by day and took night classes in instrumentation and orchestration at UCLA. His Disney publicity role put him in regular contact with the producers who hired composers, and when a job opened at Disney Interactive for a producer, he applied, reasoning that the position would let him hire himself to score the games he produced.

  His early composition work for Disney Interactive covered the 16-bit era, including the Sega Genesis games Gargoyles and Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow, and console versions of The Lion King. His first major score, however, came from DreamWorks: the video game adaptation of the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park. That game was among the first PlayStation titles to feature a fully original live orchestral recording. The collaboration with DreamWorks continued with the Small Soldiers video game in 1998 and a wide range of other titles.

  Giacchino's award-winning work through the Medal of Honor franchise covered the first four entries in the series: Medal of Honor, Underground, Allied Assault, and Frontline, as well as Heroes 2 and several other World War II-themed games, including Secret Weapons Over Normandy, Call of Duty, and Call of Duty: Finest Hour. He also co-wrote the theme for Black with composer Chris Tilton and composed the theme for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction with Pandemic Studios. In 2007, he returned to the franchise for Medal of Honor: Airborne, followed by Turning Point: Fall of Liberty the next year.

• 4. The Abrams Connection

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  In 2001, J. J. Abrams was producing a new television series called Alias. He had heard Giacchino's video game work and reached out directly, asking him to provide the show's soundtrack. The result was a departure for Giacchino: full orchestral pieces woven together with upbeat electronic music, a sound unlike anything in his earlier catalog.

  Alias led to Lost. Giacchino's score for the 2004 Abrams series became one of the most discussed television scores of its era, in part because of an unusual percussion approach: he incorporated spare pieces of actual airplane fuselage as instruments. The score also carried a signature brass fall-off at the end of certain themes, a sound that became immediately recognizable to the show's audience. He also composed for the pilot of the Abrams-produced series Fringe, passing the remaining scoring duties to his assistant Chad Seiter and later to Chris Tilton.

  The partnership extended into film. Giacchino scored Abrams' 2006 feature Mission: Impossible III, then the 2009 Star Trek reboot. For the Abrams-produced monster film Cloverfield, Giacchino wrote an homage to Japanese monster scores in an overture titled "ROAR!", which played over the end credits and stood as the only original music in the film. He scored Abrams' 2011 film Super 8 as well. In 2015, Giacchino appeared on screen in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, playing First Order Stormtrooper FN-3181; he reprised the role in Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018, and in 2019 appeared as a Sith trooper in The Rise of Skywalker.

• 5. Pixar and the Oscar

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  Brad Bird, directing The Incredibles at Pixar in 2004, had first approached composer John Barry, best known for his work on the early James Bond films. Barry was not interested in revisiting those styles. Bird had also been listening to Giacchino's work on Alias, and he hired him instead. The result was an upbeat jazz orchestral score, a sound new not only to Giacchino but to Pixar, which had relied on Randy and Thomas Newman for all of its previous films.

  Giacchino received two Grammy nominations in 2005 for The Incredibles, in the categories of Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, and Best Instrumental Composition. His next Pixar collaboration was the Paris-inspired score for Ratatouille, which includes the song "Le Festin" performed by French artist Camille. That score earned Giacchino his first Academy Award nomination.

  The Oscar win came with Up in 2009. Giacchino worked closely with director Pete Docter on the film, which marked his first Pixar collaboration outside of his work with Brad Bird. The Academy Award for Best Original Score he received for Up was the first time Pixar had ever won in that category. Giacchino later noted that on the same night, his SVA classmate Joel Harlow won the Academy Award for Best Makeup for Star Trek. He returned to Pixar for Coco in 2017, Incredibles 2 in 2018, and Lightyear in 2022.

• 6. Marvel, Batman, and Beyond

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  In 2016, Giacchino composed the fanfare for the new Marvel Studios logo, which debuted with Doctor Strange on the 13th of October 2016 in Hong Kong. That same film was his first Marvel score. When Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived in 2017, he rearranged the theme from the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon series, replacing his own fanfare for that film. He later rearranged the Marvel Studios fanfare again for Thor: Love and Thunder, this time in a more rock-inflected style.

  In September 2016, it was announced that Giacchino had been chosen to replace Alexandre Desplat on the Star Wars anthology film Rogue One after Desplat became unavailable following reshoots. He went on to score Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019, Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022, and The Batman in 2022.

  He also composed the fanfare for the Paramount Pictures 100th Anniversary logo, which debuted with Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol on the 7th of December 2011 at the Dubai International Film Festival, and extended to the logos of Paramount's other divisions. He was asked in 2009 to conduct the Academy Awards orchestra for the 81st Academy Awards, for which he rearranged famous film themes, including a 1930s Big Band treatment of the Lawrence of Arabia score and a bossa nova version of Moon River.

• 7. The Pun Tradition

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  Soundtrack album track titles are usually utilitarian: cue names written for editors, not listeners. Giacchino turned them into something else. He became known for filling his albums with puns and wordplay that reward anyone who reads the track listing carefully.

  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World offered an especially dense run of double entendres: tracks named "Gorilla Warfare" and "Raptor Your Heart Out" are representative examples. Giacchino also built running motifs across albums. A track from the Medal of Honor score called "U-Boat" showed up as an adapted submarine motif in the Lost season five and six soundtracks under the titles "Sawyer Jones and the Temple of Boom" and "Sub-Primed". A numbering game ran across the Pixar albums: The Incredibles had a track called "100 Mile Dash"; Ratatouille answered with "100 Rat Dash"; Up countered with "Three Dog Dash"; Coco closed the sequence with "Shrine and Dash".

  Over a dozen of his scores include a track titled "World's Worst X": the first Lost album had "World's Worst Beach Party" and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol had "World's Worst Parking Valet". One notable exception to this tradition was the score for Society of the Snow, from which Giacchino omitted the pun track titles entirely, out of respect for the victims of the disaster the film depicts.

• 8. Stepping Behind the Camera

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  Giacchino grew up making short films as a child, long before he thought of himself as a composer, and the pull toward directing never fully left him. In 2018, he wrote, directed, and scored Monster Challenge, a satirical short film taking aim at Japanese game shows, starring Patton Oswalt, Ben Schwartz, Dermot Mulroney, Amy Brenneman, and Benedict Wong, among others. The film premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2018 and became available on YouTube on the 20th of March 2020.

  His professional directorial debut, however, was the Star Trek: Short Treks episode "Ephraim and Dot" in 2019. Then in 2022, he directed the Marvel Studios Halloween special Werewolf by Night for Disney+, which also carried his score. The project was confirmed by Variety on the 7th of March 2022; The Hollywood Reporter named the project four days later.

  In January 2023, it was announced that Giacchino would make his feature directorial debut with a remake of Them! for Warner Bros. Pictures, a project he is also expected to score. His son Mick has followed him into composition, representing a second generation of the family working in the field Giacchino claimed in a New Jersey basement more than five decades ago.