“Jurassic’s” Michael Giacchino Comes Musically Home

View image | gettyimages.com

I stumbled across this great NPR piece last night. It details the fantastic, coincident-laden journey that led film composer Michael Giacchino from a computer game meeting with his idol Steven Spielberg to swinging the baton for this summer’s Jurassic World.

But it always comes back to dinosaurs. So when he was asked to score Jurassic World, it was a no-brainer.

“It was dinosaurs, it was everything that sort of launched me into this insane business,” Giacchino says. While following in the footsteps of John Williams, who scored the original Jurassic Park, was intimidating, the task couldn’t have felt more natural.

“It was just like coming home, in this weird, strange way,” Giacchino says.

I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation when it comes to the film itself, because Spielberg’s original was as (trans)formative a cinematic experience as I’ve ever had, and I’m not sure anyone can match that. Not even Speilly himself.

But the iconic music certainly seems to be in safe (and familiar) hands (via USA Today):

Of course, Giacchino had to use Williams’ well known piece of music, but sparingly. The familiar score shows up in a key scene in the movie that serves as a throwback to the first film. (We don’t want to totally give it away.)

As for the rest of the music, it’s Giacchino’s original work. But “uber-geeks” and “super-film-score fans,” as he calls them, may be able to recognize another thread of music that existed before the Jurassic World movie: music from the first Jurassic Park video game.

Working on the Lost World game “was my first job writing music that I got paid for,” he said.

Attribution(s): Giacchino photo courtesy of Getty Images, which allows its use “as long as the photo is not used for commercial purposes (meaning in an advertisement or in any way intended to sell a product, raise money, or promote or endorse something); “Jurassic Park Entrance Arch at the Universal Islands of Adventure” by Malpass93 (own work) is licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.”