John Debney Versus THE SCORPION KING Part Two

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, June 06, 2002

Composer John Debney has spent several years scoring comedies and family films like SPY KIDS, INSPECTOR GADGET, JIMMY NEUTRON: BOY GENIUS, CATS & DOGS and PRINCESS DIARIES, but recently he received a much more meaty assignment: composing chores on the MUMMY sequel (or prequel, if you like) THE SCORPION KING. Today we continue our discussion with Debney.

Debney wrote

a lot of music for the SCORPION KING score almost 92 minutes was recorded, of which about 84 ended up being used in the movie. Not bad for a 94-minute movie. "It was a really heavy, intensive score with a lot of music," Debney says. "But I had a little more freedom on this movie than I normally would, because the time kept shrinking. They were doing re-shoots and editing the movie, so the lack of time worked to my favor. I was able to demo enough for them to hear that they were comfortable with the direction of the music, and they wound up leaving me alone for the last two or three weeks of the six-week writing period, which was wonderful. And the truth was I needed that time to write and just get it done, or else they wouldn't have had music for the last reels!"

While he usually prefers to write two or three main themes when scoring a picture, SCORPION KING wound up being essentially a monothematic score, built around a single main theme. "I'd actually written a love theme for this movie, but in the end we really didn't find a lot of places to use it," says Debney. "My intent was to write something that would uplift the film and give it a little bit of an elegance and an epic quality that it might not otherwise have had. It was a big adventurous movie, with a star, The Rock, who's extremely popular but in a different arena (no pun intended!). I wanted to give it a gloss and an emotional depth so it was more than just a swords-and-sweaty-guys action movie!"

Debney recorded the score at Todd A-O Studios, with an orchestra of 93-players enhanced by a 90-voice choir. "It's probably the biggest score I've ever done," he says. "It's a huge orchestra, big choir, loud rock and roll guitars and drums and bass in some areas, and a lot of synthesizer." Debney also brought in a number of unique ethnic textures, including a duduk player and solo female voices. "We had a bit of Middle Eastern flavor with some instruments, and we brought in a female singer who did some work on GLADIATOR. She's known for her very beautiful, ethereal voice, and we added some of that into the score as well to give it a sense of depth."

With the

evident success of THE SCORPION KING, Debney hopes new opportunities like it may come his way, although his next assignment will be a return to family comedy with SPY KIDS 2: THE ISLAND OF LOST DREAMS. "I've been fortunate to do all kinds of stuff," says Debney. "Hopefully THE SCORPION KING... will lead to bigger assignments. I would consciously like to do a few less comedies and do more dramas, and if this film helps out with that it'll be great. That's why it was fun to do DRAGONFLY at the end of last year, because it was just a completely different thing for me."

Debney wound up scoring DRAGONFLY, Kevin Costner's moody supernatural thriller, when original composer Christopher Young had to drop out due to a schedule conflict. Debney came in at the last moment to helm the musical score: "Luckily, I was able to come up with a couple of melodic ideas that made everybody happy, so it was a quick three weeks!"

DRAGONFLY was an evocative supernatural love story, although it was marketed as a movie in the vein of THE SIXTH SENSE. "This wasn't so much of a thriller," says Debney, "as it was a love story. It's the story of the spiritual journey this guy goes through in order to find his wife, who was killed in an accident. It's a similar genre, and yet the music was meant to have much more of an emotional edge to it. It's not as suspenseful as it is hopefully more spiritually uplifting."

Debney had

gotten involved with last year's SPY KIDS along similar lines. Director Robert Rodriguez had originally hired Hans Zimmer, who began to compose some thematic material until he, too, had run into a schedule conflict as the SPY KIDS postproduction ran into delays. Zimmer protégé Harry Gregson-Williams inherited the project but, after writing several themes, had to put out, reportedly for health reasons. Finding himself with little more than two weeks to find a score for his movie, Rodriguez tried to piece one together with friends of his, including the group Los Lobos, and composer Danny Elfman, who composed a theme for the film. When that patchwork approach didn't work, Debney was called in, crafting a full score around Elfman's main theme.

"I ended up replacing maybe two thirds of the score, and the rest of it we kept as it was." In the end, SPY KIDS was an amalgamation of Gregson-Williams' music, Debney's music, Elfman's theme, plus themes by Chris Boardman and one or two others. Debney's forté, embracing diverse but complementary styles, served him well in creating a cohesive composition for SPY KIDS, as it has in the marriage of diverse musical forms that invests his work in THE SCORPION KING.

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