John Williams may be best known for his work with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but his theme for Superman could top them all. It’s a theme that has lived well beyond Williams’ involvement with the character and become almost as big a part of him as that S on his chest. James Gunn certainly thinks so.
“That soundtrack was one of my favorite soundtracks of all time,” Superman director James Gunn said at a press event recently. “When I was a kid, really, the thing I loved the most about the movie was the music. That was the thing I took home with more than anyone else.”
So it’s no surprise that, when the first trailer for Gunn’s interpretation of the character was released, Williams’ theme was in there. That was the plan from not just day one, but well before.
“I knew from the beginning what I wanted to do with the music,” Gunn said. “I had thought about it a lot. Are we going to do something completely different? Are we going to use the Williams theme?… I knew we were doing something that was hearkening back to the past and was also looking forward to the future. And so, it was about finding that balance.”
A balance between not just the past and future, but John Williams and John Murphy.
“John Murphy is a composer who I loved working with and he started working on the music before the script was even finished,” Gunn said. “He was one of the first people I gave the script to along with Peter Safran and a couple of others, so that he could start writing music for it. And I said, ‘I want to use a version of the Williams theme, but I want to do our own version of it.’ And so, that’s what you hear [in the trailer.]”
Gunn then teased how that new take on Williams would be used throughout. “What’s really amazing is how that leads into a lot of other pieces,” he said. “Some of which come back to the Williams theme, but some of which are purely John Murphy. It goes into that, comes back out, and it’s used beautifully throughout the movie. And John has worked almost nonstop for the past almost two years, putting the score together.”
The dream, it then seems, is that when kids see Superman in July they have the same reaction Gunn had to Richard Donner’s movie in 1978. Great movie, but even better music.
Superman opens July 11.
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