Interview with Harry Gregson-Williams
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Harry Gregson-Williams
English composer of the Shrek films, The Chronicles of Narnia, Kingdom of Heaven, The Martian and Gladiator II, and of Metal Gear Solid and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Source: Score: The Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from Score: The Podcast S1E2 | Harry Gregson-Williams, Behind the Score: Alfred Newman & Name That Score on Score: The Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
When did you start writing music?
Being a film composer hadn't crossed my mind. I was a bit of a late starter. I was in my middle thirties when the thought crossed my mind. Coming right out of music college, I thought, what the hell am I going to do? I couldn't play in an orchestra, I wasn't good enough, and I didn't want to sing in a choir; I'd done that as a little chap. So I thought the best thing I could do was to teach the stuff that I love and that I know. I had really good teachers myself, going back to when I was 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11: really great, amazing, inspiring teachers. I could still remember how it was to be taught, and what I would want to be taught.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
On Prometheus I came in at the very end, after Marc Streitenfeld had scored the film, and I think Ridley, and definitely Pietro Scalia, the editor, felt they were lacking a little bit in the melodic department. Ridley asked me if I could write a theme for the very opening of the film. I said, why don't I write a theme and you come by and hear it. He said, that would be tomorrow night. Once he'd heard the theme he said, great, I'll spot five or six places in this film where you could write a variation. Eight in total, I remember. So I wrote the theme for the very beginning and then quickly developed it in these eight places, and within days I was on a plane to Abbey Road for two sessions. Boom, boom, boom, done. So it was very pleasurable.
A similar thing happened on Exodus: Gods and Kings. Ridley called me up and said, I've got a really good Spanish composer, but I'd like some of you on this. I'd like you to part the Red Sea, specifically. Contributing to these things has always been quite pleasurable.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I did five or six years of teaching right out of music college, in a private school, a little boys' boarding school, the kind of school that I went to. I absolutely loved every minute: I taught music and sports, the two things that I'm good at. But I woke up one morning and thought, I'm going to blink and it'll be 20 years, and this will be my life. I've really got to do something a bit more challenging. I hadn't gone on to get a teacher's diploma, so I thought, well, I could teach abroad.
I looked in the back of the Times Educational Supplement, and there was this really strange job which would require me to go to Alexandria and Cairo for about a year and a half, go into many of the schools there and give a report at the end of the eighteen months as to what I thought about the music in schools and how it should progress. Which I sorted out in about six weeks, so I spent about a year and a half having fun going into all these schools trying to inspire the kids. Many years later I was there in Persia, as it were, to do Kingdom of Heaven.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
On Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley was saying, I'm not hearing enough Turkish or Persian inflections. I'm wise enough to hire people who know better than me. I have a very good friend called Hugh Marsh, who's collaborated with me many times playing electric violin on my scores, and he had a big relationship with musicians in Istanbul. So I flew him over from Toronto to London and packed him off to Istanbul with four or five of my cues and the musical charts. The melody and harmony were all there, but there was no oud on it, none of these wonderful inflections. He came back with a lot of stuff I had to edit, but all the flavor was fantastic.
There was a certain amount of money for musicians, and Fox had said, this is it, Harry, don't go over. Knowing that Ridley would probably make me write three or four hours of music that all needed to be recorded and then cut down, which he did, it was a very expensive score to knock out. But within that figure, I got to fly Hugh out and pay his musicians in Istanbul. That actually encourages creativity.
Has your career as a composer progressed the way you expected?
I found myself doing a couple of films that I didn't really want to be doing stylistically, and I asked myself, what are you doing? I was supporting a huge team of people that I had pulled together over 15 years, and a certain lifestyle that wasn't healthy. When I rented the building on the beach in Venice, the rent was about eight thousand dollars a month. By the time I left it was twenty-four thousand. So it was untenable really. It was fantastic, it was brilliant, I wouldn't change anything. It was a decade of much creativity. But I had to stop, renew and regenerate and start again.
At that moment I was asked if I would like to go back to the school that taught me all my music in England. So I went back and taught music and sports, cricket and rugby. My wife and children had never really seen me other than as the guy who was rarely home for dinner, a guy who looked wrecked. So I was home for dinner, I had weekends off, and I was able to recharge. Then I was very fortunate that Antoine Fuqua called me just at the end of my sabbatical and said, I'm doing The Equalizer, why don't we get together again?
Describe your musical style.
When I started out, and where I am today, I think of harmony and melody pretty much first. I'm not thinking of giving you a droney score or a percussion score. Of course, I came out of the Zimmer camp, which was all about these block choruses, almost verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bang you with a tune in a different key, those big Jerry Bruckheimer action types.
On The Martian, the music should be quite uppity. The Matt Damon character has a lot of positivity. He's the only guy on the planet, and instead of feeling sorry for himself and just packing it in and dying, he sciences the s*** out of it. So the music is a little techy too, all these little arpeggiated things, and you'll notice the melody seems to be ever rising, but actually it doubles back on itself, so it gives the impression he's progressing, trying to build blocks and get off this planet. When a movie is that well written, that well acted, that well directed, it was mine to mess up. So I had to tuck myself in there and not be too ostentatious, and just let the film be as great as it was.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
Joel [Schumacher] had already had Phone Booth scored a little bit, and he wanted it done differently. He came to me because I had just done Veronica Guerin for him, with Cate Blanchett, and I had just a few weeks to do it. He said, Veronica Guerin was quite a melodic, harmony-driven score; why don't you just base this all on percussion, the sounds of the street? The whole thing's set in a street in New York, in a phone booth. I don't think there was any orchestra in it at all. There were a couple of actual instruments that I played, like a piano, but then I reversed it and screwed with it massively, so you wouldn't really know it was a piano.
It was a little nerve-wracking, but I did it. Phone Booth for me was a bit of a weird one, because it was out of that box completely. I didn't really have much experience of that, so I made it up as I went along a bit. The other thing it did for me: it gave me confidence to think that I could get through a film score without touching the orchestra.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
It's a well-known fact, I've never made any secret of this: if you expect me to score a film that needs 88 minutes of music in 10 days, you're going to get me and a whole bloody team. Back in the day at Wavecrest, on the beach in Venice, I did have a team which I could deploy if necessary, so on [Team America] that was deployed. It's no way to make a score. What do you expect in ten days? So I had Jablonsky, my old assistant, knock out a few cues. I got everybody from Trevor Rabin to God knows who: put your hand in the bag and put out a cue, don't mess it up, give it to me in a couple of days. And I did as much as I could physically.
Harry Gregson-Williams's Full Biography
Harry Gregson-Williams is one of Hollywood's most sought-after and prolific composers whose long list of film and television credits underscore the diverse range of his talents. He has received the BMI Icon Award in recognition of his unique and indelible influence on generations of music makers and was awarded the prestigious Ambassador Award by the Society of Composers & Lyricists. Born in England to a musical family, Gregson-Williams earned a choral scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge, at the age of 7 and later gained a coveted spot at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama, from which he recently received an honorary fellowship. He started his film career as assistant to composer Richard Harvey and later as orchestrator and arranger for Stanley Myers,and went on to compose his first scores for director Nicolas Roeg. His subsequent collaboration and friendship with composer Hans Zimmer led to Gregson-Williams providing music for such films as "The Rock," "Armageddon" and "The Prince of Egypt" and helped launch his career in Hollywood.
Harry recently completed Gladiator II directed by Ridley Scott which stars Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal and is scheduled for release in November 2024. Cinematic releases for 2023 included "Meg 2: The Trench" starring Jason Statham and directed by Ben Wheatley, the thriller "Retribution" starring Liam Neeson directed by Nimród Antal, and Aardman's animated feature "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget" directed by Sam Fell. Other recent film scores include "The Last Duel" and "House of Gucci" both directed by Ridley Scott as well as Disney's live action feature film "Mulan" directed by Niki Caro, with whom he had worked previously when scoring her Holocaust drama "The Zookeeper's Wife." Gregson-Williams and his brother Rupert Gregson-Williams teamed up to write the score for the HBO drama series "The Gilded Age" which is heading into season 3. He also collaborated with his friend, composer Mychael Danna, for the documentary "Return to Space" directed by Oscar-winning directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin receiving Emmy nominations for their work.
Gregson-Williams was the composer on all four installments of the animated blockbuster "Shrek" franchise, garnering a BAFTA Award nomination for the score for the Oscar-winning "Shrek." He received Golden Globe and Grammy Award nominations for his score for Andrew Adamson's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." He has collaborated multiple times with a number of directors, including Ben Affleck on "Live by Night," "The Town" and "Gone Baby Gone"; Joel Schumacher on "Twelve," "The Number 23," "Veronica Guerin" and "Phone Booth"; Tony Scott on "Unstoppable," "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," "Déjà Vu," "Domino," "Man on Fire," "Spy Game" and "Enemy of the State"; Ridley Scott on original scores for the upcoming "Gladiator II," "The Martian," "Kingdom of Heaven," "The Last Duel" and "House of Gucci" and themes for Prometheus," "Exodus: Gods and Kings," Bille August on "Return to Sender" and "Smilla's Sense of Snow"; Andrew Adamson on the "Shrek" series, the first two "Narnia" movies and "Mr. Pip"; as well as with Antoine Fuqua on "The Replacement Killers," "The Equalizer," The Equalizer 2" and "Infinite." Some of his other recent film projects include Disney Nature's feature film "Polar Bear", and "The Ambush" directed by Pierre Morel, "Life in a Day 2020" directed Kevin Macdonald, "The Meg" directed by Jon Turteltaub, Aardman's "Early Man" directed by Nick Park for which he received an Annie Award nomination and Disney Nature's "Penguins." His television credits include "Whiskey Cavalier," the miniseries "Catch-22" for George Clooney and two episodes of the anthology series "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" for which he received an Emmy nomination for the episode titled "The Commuter."
Gregson-Williams has scored three of the five games in the highly successful "Metal Gear Solid" franchise for Konami and scored "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" for Activision, which became the top-selling video game of 2014 and earned him various music gaming awards. Throughout his career, Gregson-Williams has collaborated with a diverse array of recording artists such as Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap, Tricky, Peter Murphy, Flea, Hybrid, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Trevor Horn, Trevor Rabin, Lebo M., Perry Farrell and Tony Visconti and most recently Gregson-Williams co-wrote the original song "Loyal Brave True" for "Mulan" performed by Christina Aguilera.