I used to do puppet shows as a kid - me and my brother would do them - and then any poor soul who came into the house had to sit and watch our puppet shows.
— Michael Giacchino
I've been pretty lucky in that I'm not a big writer's block kind of person.
When I was growing up, every show had live music. Now, almost none have live music. Probably 97 percent of the shows on television are probably synthesized, or mostly synthesized, and that's a shame.
I like live musicians and personally orchestrate about 80 to 90% of all my scores.
In 'Ratatouille,' there are two different themes that express the two sides of Remy's personality: the creative side: the chef, and the 'thief' side: his nature as a mouse.
People on 'The Incredibles' would ask me if I listened to a lot of spy scores, but no, I don't.
I've always, always, always listened to music since I was, like, 7 years old and made up stories in my head based on what I was hearing.
I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.
One of the things I was never thrilled about with 'Medal of Honor' was that it was non-stop music.
I love percussive instrumentation.
My parents loved music, but they weren't musicians. So my musical training as a young kid was limited to piano lessons. I was not the best student; I was awful, never practiced. But I was always interested in just messing around on the piano.
That's the time I remember as a kid, being so excited to go to the movies. To be part of that now is really an amazing gift.
Sometimes people do things because they are sad or because they are upset or were hurt by other people.
I think that one of the things I'd learned from being so attentive to the careers of the people I've admired is the fact that they would say 'no' a lot. Early on, I took that as a cue to only work on things that I knew I would be passionate about.
Life is #1 on the agenda, and #2 is work.
I think the Wachowskis are two of my favorite people on the planet; they're the best.
I even went to film school at School of Visual Arts in New York City. And then, after that, I got a day job at Universal publicity department, then moved over to Disney publicity department. So I had this day job, and at night I would study music.
I think I learned everything about comedy and timing and drama from watching 'The Muppet Show,' which was one of the best shows ever produced.
I made tons of stop motion films with my friends in my neighborhood.
Most television, the music is very much the same from show to show.
I think that to capture food in music, you really are capturing an emotional response to food.
Hopefully, by the time I do a project, I already have a true understanding and love of what I'm about to do because if I don't, I'm not going to work on that project. I really want to have those connections so I can be truthful to the emotional aspect of what I have to deliver for the story.
When I was 10, I had a group of friends that I used to love to make movies with, and we made them growing up; we did it all through high school.
For me, growing-up music was always about telling stories.
I feel like I'll be writing World War 2 music the rest of my life.
That's one of the neat things about 'Call of Duty.' There are areas in the game where we were able to score the gameplay.
I like to write a piece of music that reflects how I felt about a film as opposed to, here's this action scene; here's this set piece.
My dad gave me his camera, so I spent my childhood making movies with the kids in the neighborhood as actors.
Music helps immensely with math skills, and math skills help immensely with music skills.
For me, the music is always speaking from the point of view of the characters. Rarely do you score an event.
When you're starting out in this business, it's very easy to want to say yes to everything that's offered to you.
There are a lot of guys who do this job, and they have tons of assistants. They all kind of write together, and for me, it's basically me here in this room, and that's it.
As an audience member, everyone I talk to is like, 'I'm so excited to see 'Super 8.' I'm so excited to see it.' And part of that is because of his drive to make sure that it stays hidden until the last minute.
My entire life was making movies.
You've all seen movies where the music isn't working with the story. And it's either because... the story isn't working itself. Or the composer kinda just wants to write whatever they want to write, not paying attention to the thing.
I was obsessed with 'The Twilight Zone' as a kid, and one of those things I didn't realize until I was in college was that I had been listening to Bernard Herrmann all my life.
'Lost' is such a thematic show that I'm always afraid that if I know something's going to happen at the end, I'll subconsciously write something in where someone who's astute will go, 'Oh, he used so-and-so's theme: that must mean so-and-so is coming back!'
Who can't relate to a story of a dreamer who, against all odds, is going to make something of himself that is completely unexpected?
I grew up listening to every style of music you can imagine, and I have a love for all of it.
I always feel like my writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything, you know.
If you have a bad story on your hands, you have a bad story on your hands, and no amount of score re-working is gonna save that.
I have an uncle who was heavily involved in World War 2, so over the years, I've talked to him many times.
I grew up listening to 'Planet of the Apes' and other scores, and it was fun for me because you weren't just listening to those scores, but you were also questioning what you were listening to. What are those sounds?
It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing. I was in a lot of the school plays and musicals, and there was a lot of down time during rehearsals. I would go into the orchestra pit and mess around on the grand piano.
When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.
I was fortunate enough in my public school that they had a full music program, and no one escaped it. It was treated as a subject that was as important as everything else, and I believe it is.
I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.
I've always looked at guys who I've admired, like John Williams and Lalo Schifrin and Max Steiner, and looked at the choices they made and always try to take a cue from that.
I'm not the kind of person who works 24 hours a day, mostly out of laziness; I don't know.
I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.
