John Debney Versus THE SCORPION KING Part One

The composer discusses his work on the MUMMY spin-off

By Randall D. Larson     May 30, 2002

After several years of scoring comedies and family films like SPY KIDS, INSPECTOR GADGET, JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS, CATS & DOGS and PRINCESS DIARIES, a meaty assignment like THE SCORPION KING came as a welcome adventure for composer John Debney.

Debney cut

his teeth on a variety of films and TV movies, scoring such pics as JETSONS: THE MOVIE, television shows STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE, SEAQUEST DSV, and TINY TOON ADVENTURES, not to mention the likes of EYE OF THE PANTHER, CUTTHROAT ISLAND, THE RELIC (one of the most relentlessly ferocious horror scores of recent years), I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, KOMODO, and END OF DAYS. He also scored the American TV release of the popular anime feature G-SAVIOUR. But recently, his efforts on comedies that seemed to come in the wake of his music for Jim Carey's LIAR, LIAR in 1997 have threatened to pigeonhole the composer to the extent of eclipsing his more dramatic work. Of his landmark seven films composed in 2001, six were family comedies (Debney scored the only exception, SCARY MOVIE II, without credit). This year's SNOW DOGS continued the trend, but only temporarily. Debney's moody, evocative score for DRAGONFLY gave him a chance to return to the romantic mysterioso sensibility of earlier films, and with the energetic dynamic of SCORPION KING, Debney is primed to strut his musical stuff once more down the mean streets of Hollywood music.

Debney was called into SCORPION KING last summer. Editors had temp-scored early cuts of the movie with various pieces of music, including a lot of Debney's material such as CUTTHROAT ISLAND. Director Chuck Russell liked what he heard and arranged to meet with Debney. After several discussions of what the score should ultimately become, Debney was in.

"I really

didn't know what to expect," Debney says. "They told me it wasn't THE MUMMY there are no monsters, per se!  But I guessed it was going to be in the CONAN realm, and that was true. It's a big, adventurous throwback movie, reminiscent of some older swashbuckling films. I was blown away by the scope of it."

As with most big Hollywood productions, everyone from editors to studio executives had their ideas about what the music ought to be. Fortunately, Debney was able to run this gauntlet and emerge unscathed with the kind of score he felt was proper all along. "I always knew what I wanted to do," he says, "and as it turned out, I ended up writing exactly what I thought the score should be. There were times when the studio wanted to go into a more contemporary way with a lot of the music, and we tried it in many ways. I demo'd a lot of cues that were in a conventional rock and roll mode, and also a more cutting-edge, contemporary approach. A lot of it worked really well, but at the end of the day it swung much more back to the traditional approach, with some contemporary elements added."

Those contemporary elements consisted of electric guitar, bass and drum set, merging hard rock with traditional symphonic orchestration. The mixture hasn't always been successful. As far back as 1985's LADYHAWKE, composer Andrew Powell wrote a rock and roll score with symphonic elements for Richard Donner's elegant period fantasy with ill-fitting effect. More recently, Joel Goldsmith mingled rock guitars with his orchestra on his score for KULL THE CONQUEROR with much more positive effect because they were better integrated dramatically with the tone of the composition. Even John Williams' latest score for STAR WARS: EPISODE II includes electric guitars as subtle flavorings within his symphonic orchestration. Dennis McCarthy's music for STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE found a similar texture appropriate.

"It's very

important for me, as a composer, to stay current," Debney says. "I think some of my colleagues have had some problems when styles change a bit here and there, and I've always made a conscious effort to go with that and learn. Every time there's a little bit of a style change, I like to be in that. When I did THE REPLACEMENTS, I got to jump into a lot of techno and Chemical Brothers, and I learned how to work with loops on MICHAEL JORDAN TO THE MAX. The one constantly is the orchestra but it's what you put with the orchestra now that's so fascinating to me."

With SCORPION KING, Debney relished the opportunity to marry these two seemingly contrapuntal elements, and quite successfully. Even Variety, in its review of the movie on opening day, pointed out Debney's "big, epic score with guitars added to give it oomph!" Debney finds these new musical experiences quite exciting. "I don't have a problem with trying to marry some of these worlds together," he says. "I'm not so much of a purist. I love trying new things, and I think I've had a certain amount of success doing that."

Check back soon for part two of our talk with composer John Debney.

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