Michael Giacchino (/dʒəˈkiːnoʊ/jə-KEE-noh,[1]Italian:[dʒaˈkiːno]; born October 10, 1967) is an American composer of music for film, television, and video games. He has received many accolades for his work, including an Oscar for Up (2009), an Emmy for Lost (2004), and three Grammy Awards.
Giacchino began combining images and music at age 10, when he began creating stop-motion animation with homemade soundtracks in his basement. While in high school, an art teacher who mentored Giacchino recommended to his parents that he attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Giacchino describes visiting the school with his parents thus:[6]
I thought, wow, this is fantastic. They actually have colleges like this? Where I can do the things that I am really interested in doing? That was amazing to me. I loved SVA. I loved the kind of freedom that it provided. It was kind of like this great experiment—okay, you're here because you like something. So let's see how much you like it. We're not going to regulate you too much. We're going to see how passionate and driven you are, and how much you want this thing.[6]
Giacchino enrolled at SVA, majoring in film production and minoring in history. During his final year at SVA, his instructor in film publicity announced an unpaid internship was available at Universal Pictures. Giacchino, who was the only one interested, obtained the six-month position, which he filled at night while attending school during the day and working at Macy's to pay his rent. He graduated from SVA in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, after which he took music classes at the Juilliard School, and then at UCLA.[6][7][8][9]
Career
Video games
When Giacchino's internship ended, Universal hired him, giving him a job upon graduation from college. He later moved to Disney, and when Disney relocated to Los Angeles, Giacchino moved with them, working in publicity, while taking night classes in instrumentation and orchestration at UCLA. His work for Disney had him interacting with the various personnel who worked in films, such as the producers who hired composers, so when a job at Disney Interactive opened for a producer, Giacchino obtained the job, thinking he could hire himself to write music for the games he produced.[6][7][8]
Giacchino's work on various video games led to his entrance into television.
In 2001, J. J. Abrams, producer of the television series Alias, discovered Giacchino through his video game work and asked him to provide the new show's soundtrack. The soundtrack featured a mix of full orchestral pieces frequently intermingled with upbeat electronic music, a departure from much of his previous work. Giacchino would go on to provide the score for J. J. Abrams's 2004 television series Lost,[16] creating an acclaimed score which employed a unique process of using spare pieces of a plane fuselage for percussion parts. The score for Lost is also notable for a signature thematic motif: a brass fall-off at the end of certain themes.[17] Just like his counterpart Stu Phillips, he worked with the television show creator Abrams on his shows with his music scores while Abrams supplied the show's main themes on certain series such as Alias.
In 2004, Giacchino received his first big feature film commission. Brad Bird, director of Pixar's The Incredibles, asked Giacchino to provide the soundtrack for the film after having heard his work on Alias.[18] The upbeat jazz orchestral sound was a departure in style not only for Giacchino but for Pixar, which had previously relied on Randy and Thomas Newman for all of its films. Director Brad Bird had originally sought out John Barry – perhaps best known for his work on the early James Bond films—but Barry was reportedly afraid to repeat the styles of his earlier works.[19]
Giacchino scored the Pixar film Up (and its accompanying animated short Partly Cloudy), for which he collaborated with director Pete Docter. This marked the first time Giacchino worked with a Pixar director other than Brad Bird. This work gained Giacchino his first Academy Award for Best Original Score: the first-ever win for Pixar in that category. Giacchino notes that he won on the same night as his SVA classmate Joel Harlow won for Best Makeup Oscar for Star Trek.[6]
Giacchino has continued his collaboration with J. J. Abrams. For the Abrams-produced monster film Cloverfield, Giacchino wrote an homage to Japanese monster scores in an overture titled "ROAR!", which played over the credits, and constituted the only original music for the film. He composed the score for J. J. Abrams' feature Super 8 in 2011. He also composed for the pilot of the Abrams-produced American television series Fringe, after which Giacchino gave scoring duties to his assistant Chad Seiter, who scored the first half of season one. The task was then passed on to Chris Tilton, who scored the latter half of season one and all subsequent seasons.
Giacchino grew up with an immense love for filmmaking, often spending time making short films in his youth. He made his professional directorial debut in 2019 with an episode of Star Trek: Short Treks during its second season. In 2020, Giacchino directed in his own short film, Monster Challenge starring Patton Oswalt. In 2022, Giacchino directed and scored the Marvel Studios Halloween special Werewolf by Night to critical acclaim. In January 2023, it was announced that Giacchino would make his feature directorial debut with a remake of Them! for Warner Bros. Pictures. He is expected to score the film as well.[36]
Giacchino is noted for using humorous titles filled with puns on his soundtrack albums.[37][38]Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World in particular had many ape- and dinosaur-related double entendres such as "Gorilla Warfare" and "Raptor Your Heart Out".[39] Many of those have references to previous works of his, both in style and naming. Giacchino used themes from the track "U-Boat" from the Medal of Honor soundtrack in the tracks "Sawyer Jones and the Temple of Boom" and "Sub-Primed" from the 5th and 6th season Lost soundtracks as the submarine motif. In terms of naming, the score for The Incredibles contains a piece named "100 Mile Dash", and subsequently Ratatouille had "100 Rat Dash", Up had "Three Dog Dash", and Coco had "Shrine and Dash". Another series of examples: "World's Worst Beach Party" from the first Lost album, "World's Worst Last 4 Minutes To Live" from the Mission: Impossible III soundtrack, "Galaxy's Worst Sushi Bar" from Star Trek (2010 deluxe release), "World's Worst Landscaping" from the second Lost album, "World's Worst Car Wash" from the soundtrack album Lost: The Final Season, and "World's Worst Field Trip" from the soundtrack of Super 8. The soundtrack for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol also has a track titled "World's Worst Parking Valet", and the score for Zootopia contains a track titled "World's Worst Animal Shelter" as well as the score for Incredibles 2 including a track called "World's Worst Babysitters". Inversely, the score for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction has a track titled "World's Best Carpool Lane"; the Speed Racer score has tracks titled "World's Best Autopia" and "World's Worst Road Rage"; the soundtrack for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has a track titled "World's Worst Bedtime Storyteller"; the soundtrack for Tomorrowland has a track titled "World's Worst Shop Keepers"; the Doctor Strange score has a track titled "Astral World's Worst Killer"; the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story score has an alternate title for "Cargo Shuttle SW-0608" which is "World's Worst Vacation Destination"; the Spider-Man: Far From Home score has a track titled "World's Worst Water Feature"; the Spider-Man: No Way Home score has a track titled "World's Worst Friendly Neighbor"; The Batman score has a track entitled "World's Worst Translator"; the Lightyear score has a track entitled "World's Worst Self-Destruct Sequence".
Notably - this tradition of pun names was omitted from the soundtrack of Society of the Snow, likely out of respect for the victims of the disaster.
^Burlingame, Jon. "Michael Giacchino's Mission: Make the Old Music New", The New York Times, May 7, 2006. Accessed February 3, 2013. "The backyard for Mr. Giacchino, 38, was in Edgewater Park, N.J., where he grew up watching—and listening to—Hanna-Barbera cartoons, The A-Team and reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show."
^Longsdorf, Amy. "Success sounds great for Giacchino"[dead link], Courier-Post, February 24, 2008. Accessed February 3, 2013. "Giacchino, a graduate of Holy Cross High School (Class of '86), was scoring video games when Abrams gave him his first big break writing the music for TV's Alias and Lost."
^ abcdeLincourt, Carrie. "Q + A". Visual Arts Journal. Volume 19, Number 1. Spring 2011. School of Visual Arts. Pages 46–49.
^ abBurlingame, Jon (May 7, 2006). "Michael Giacchino's Mission: Make the Old Music New". The New York Times. Accessed November 27, 2007. "The backyard for Mr. Giacchino, 38, was in Edgewater Park, N.J., where he grew up watching – and listening to – Hanna-Barbera cartoons, The A-Team and reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York, but, as music became his main interest, he took classes at Juilliard and, later, film-music extension courses at UCLA"
