Michael Giacchino Part 1
I will spend a couple of chapters in this blog discussing different composers that I have worked with and how they have impacted me and the world of film music!
Today I would like to talk about Michael Giacchino. I was Michael Giacchino’s principal horn for over twenty years beginning with the first session he did in Hollywood for television, with his great orchestrator, Tim Simonec. It was a made-for-TV movie entitled Semper Fi. I knew, even at that moment, that this young man was something very special.
My collaboration continued with him through every project he did. He would occasionally record outside of Los Angeles in London or Seattle, but in LA I was always his first call. My experiences with him at the recording session was very reminiscent of the “Old Days” when you could get the work done and still have fun at the same time. It’s not quite like that anymore, it’s become a far more serious enterprise.
I worked with Michael on the TV show Alias, but he is most well-known for his work on the show Lost, which of course didn’t use horns! There was, however, one singular episode where he tried very hard to introduce me into the character of the score. I had one episode with one horn and lots of solos, and he wanted it to continue, but the producers did not want the original sound of the show to change at all. (Too bad for me!) Michael then went on to movies!
He did a number of smaller films, Disney Channels’ Sky High (2005) and The Family Stone (2005) amongst others, but his jump into the big time was scoring The Incredibles with Pixar. That put him on the global map. Michael did a number of movies for Pixar including Ratatouille, Cars 2, Inside Out, and Up (this won him not only two Grammy’s but also the Golden Globe Award for Best Score, BAFTA’s Award for Best Film Music, and of course the Academy Award for Best Original Score).
Michael first came to Steven Spielberg’s attention by writing the score for the video game “Jurassic Park: The Lost World.” They would later work together on the 2011 film Super 8, which Spielberg produced along with J.J. Abrams.
He also scored two Mission Impossible movies and the reboot of the Star Trek series. Each one of these opened with a horn solo that played the main theme, and I had the honor of recording that theme. I didn’t know ahead of time that I would be performing that solo, I just sat down and there it was. He always trusted me with my leadership of the section, and rarely questioned any interpretive ideas I had for how to bring out the best in his music.
The first Star Trek film there was one little pick-up session for a few instruments, and at the last second they decided to change something in the opening that would require the horns to come back to the studio. Even though the solo had already been recorded, he wanted to add a vicious horn section rip (glissando for any non-horn players out there!) at the end of that opening section to connect to the beginning of the film. We were doing it the normal way, sitting down, and he wasn’t getting the color of sound that he wanted. So, I suggested to him that we stand on our chairs to sound as vicious as we possibly could!! When you hear that in the movie, you are hearing four horns standing on their chairs getting brassier and brassier until that Armageddon-like rip came forth!
One of the most interesting elements of Michael’s scores is that they require different skill sets from different instruments based upon the style of the music. For example, for The Incredibles he had all the top big band trumpet players: Wayne Bergeron, Gary Grant, and Rick Baptist, to name a few. He has always had world-famous percussionists and rhythm section players, Bernie Dresel on drums, Abraham Laboriel on bass, and Alex Acuña on percussion.
As a person, Michael is a very congenial person to work with, very friendly, very supportive, and respectful both of the industry and extremely respectful of his musicians. His personality could be felt in the performances that the orchestra gave him. I don’t think there is a composer still working who is more beloved by his musicians.
One of the things about working in Hollywood is that you could almost always tell when something was going to be a big deal. When we saw the original Star Trek theme in the end credits of the movie on our stands, the one by Alexander Courage… It was a huge deal to those that were performing it, because we knew that we were becoming part of television and Hollywood history. Since I was 10 years old when the original series was filmed, I never had the pleasure of playing it. No one knew back in the 60s when it first came out just how iconic that music would become, especially since the series only lasted three years. I don’t recall many moments where I had that same thrill as when I got to play that line.
I’ll continue my discussion of some of my film work with Giacchino in the next post, but check out the videos below for some more great moments.
Some of these thoughts will be contained in my upcoming autobiography entitled “The Six Stages.”