Interview with James Newton Howard
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About James Newton Howard
Film composer who began as a keyboardist with Elton John, known for Pretty Woman, The Fugitive, The Sixth Sense, The Hunger Games films and Batman Begins.
Source: Score: The Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from #1 | James Newton Howard (Hunger Games) | Full Episode on Score: The Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
When a movie's not working, I find it just drives me more. I like being the white knight. I like being the hero to save this $200 million movie. Everything's on the line. It's going to be a worldwide huge movie or not, and they come to me. So that is a big ego deal, maybe, but it works, because I just like taking on the responsibility. I like sitting in the hot seat. I think having a time limit and having those kinds of pressures is something one either responds well to or sort of collapses and folds, but I've always been pretty good.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
There was a couple years, I think just before the first Batman Begins. I'd done The Interpreter with Sydney Pollack, and when I'm working for Sydney Pollack, I get writer's block. I think I've had it twice in my life. Right in that period, it wasn't fun anymore. I think I was getting divorced on top of that, so it was just a difficult time, and I kind of decided to take a long breather, not because I thought it was healthy but just because I was so depressed. And that's when I got a call from Hans saying, hey, why don't we do this movie together, Batman Begins. He had said to Chris, "Yeah, I'll do the movie as long as I can do it with my mate James Newton Howard." And Chris said, "Yeah, cool." So we both went over to London and spent six or seven weeks writing the score, and it was a blast. I had fun again. Hans really taught me that if it's not fun, why are you doing it, or how do you make it fun.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
Strategically, I have tried to do various kinds of projects whenever it was possible. When I did Pretty Woman, I was the romcom guy, and then I did The Fugitive, I was the action guy. So if I just kept trying to pepper it all with different kinds of challenges, it would be good and keep me very interested. I just love composing for movies.
I worked with Elton John back in the middle '70s, and Elton gave me the opportunity to do synthesizer work and work with an orchestra.
When I started, almost 40 years ago, on Head Office, I was quite arrogant. I was a relatively good pianist and I was a decent synthesist. It took me a while to stop being a diva pain in the butt. I had no reason to be a diva, because I hadn't succeeded. I just came in with a very kind of "I know what to do with your movie more than you know what to do with your movie."
What advice do you have for new composers?
Every A-list composer knows what the music is supposed to feel like, from Desplat to Hans to Tommy Newman or certainly John. I think that's intuitive. I don't think you can really learn how to do that. I think one can learn more technique about the things not to do, in terms of being early on a hit, things like that that are very simple. And I've also learned: whose emotional point of view are we in, in any given moment?
I say to young composers that one of the things you have to do to succeed is feel sorry for the director. Even though I want to kill them sometimes, I get over that quickly, and I remind myself they are carrying such a huge burden: a giant bunch of money spent, testing not so good, running out of opportunities to change the movie. So they come to us in the last stretch. Some people refer to it as the final rewrite, and I think that's really accurate. We have an opportunity to help the film or ruin the film.
I've had many, many opportunities to fail, so I've had a lot of time in the saddle to learn. It's instincts combined with experience combined with technique that has really worked for me.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
In any relationship with a director, the composer is ready to accept criticism and rejection from the director. I submitted many things to Night that he very politely and collegially said, I don't think that's what works. I remember one moment in Signs, I had written something and I was really so enthusiastic about it. I make very elaborate demos of all the work I do, and I sent it to Philadelphia, where he was, and I got a call the next morning saying, "James, it's great, but it's just not working." There was this pause, and my response was, "That is profoundly disappointing." And I meant it. He just started cracking up, because it was such an overblown response. I'm used to doing 30 or 40 rewrites of certain things occasionally, which is a horrendous thing.
I think I am a pretty strong-headed composer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to lock horns and go nuclear with the director. I will defend my point of view in a sort of collaborative way, and then I have to just take a deep breath, and if it's still not working, muster up the actual physical energy to do it all over again, which is hard.
Has your career as a composer progressed the way you expected?
It's a moment of, I guess, overwhelming gratitude for me: wow, I get to write all that music and I get paid for it, and work with these great, talented people.
Quite honestly, I don't know how I think about my work. It's just been going on for almost four decades. My son was just made a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and there's articles about him, and he's been very excited about that. And I said to him, remember a Jimmy Webb song called MacArthur Park? There's a line in there that goes, "I will win the worship in their eyes and I will lose it." So right now I'm getting the worship, and it'll inevitably go back down and flatten out, which is fine.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
I've missed that one many times, where I've written a cue, and the director will sit here and say, "I don't think it's about what you've written. I think you're blowing right through something that's really important." And so I think I've become a much better listener, and that helps.
Almost inevitably, every time I have a personal revelation in my own work, "oh wow, I really did good counterpoint there, that woodwind orchestration is really cool," that gets red-flagged by the director, because it doesn't sound like anything I've done before. But it is his or her show, absolutely, and it took me a while to learn that. Sure enough, going back and doing it again more often than not produces something that I like even more. In the end, I just don't allow myself to get steamed about it anymore. I'm very thick-skinned, and you have to be.
Describe your musical style.
Night and I worked so closely together, and those scores kind of came out uniquely correct in a funny way. They were more minimalist writing, much more minimalist: less embellishments, less orchestration, less interior stuff going on in the middle of the orchestra. Every one of these movies, you think you've done every kind of action movie, and you haven't. As soon as you get a new one, it's different.
The opportunities to write big romantic adventures with a 100-piece orchestra are few and far between, and I love doing that, but I also love doing electronic scores, in my own way. The synth thing has evolved in a big way to where it's just an acceptable part of the palette. Some people combine it with orchestra more successfully than others. I think I've always been good at that. Michael is incredibly good at bringing me a thousand new synth sounds, and once I get a sound, I can manipulate it. I work in Ableton to some extent.
I always use a lot of choir. My wife thinks I use too much boy choir, but I still like it.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
It takes place 64 or 65 years before Katniss comes into the picture, so it's all new characters except for one. It's the origin story of Snow. Initially my mandate from Francis was just: keep this in the world of The Hunger Games, feel free to use as many themes as you want. And I said okay. And then I saw the movie, and I realized I can't use a whole lot of anything that I've already written, because it's a completely different movie. It's a completely different sensibility. It's very substantive. It deals with a lot of intense issues about betrayal and about friendship and about love and about hate, and it's kind of more of an adult movie in a funny way. And then the next mandate I got was don't use any electronics, so the score is purely orchestral, which I loved. It was an opportunity to color this movie very differently, so I used a lot more woodwinds, kind of scary, creepy low winds. It was just a completely new movie and a new musical opportunity. So yes, I do quote some themes, but not a lot.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
The first Hunger Games I turned down, because I'd never heard of it. My then 12-year-old son said, "Dad, are you crazy? It's The Hunger Games. It's just amazing." Gary Ross directed the very first one. Gary had called me, and I said, with all due respect, I have to pass. I don't think it's right for me. Then some other people got involved with it composing-wise, and he offered it to me again. By then I kind of knew what it was about, and then he screened the movie for me, and I was all in. Then Francis took over, and Francis is just one of the best people on earth for me to work with. He gets it, and has specific and helpful notes.
When I hire an assistant, the last level usually comes down to about three or four people, and then I sit in a room with them and I just feel the vibe. That's all it is: am I going to be comfortable writing bad music in front of this guy? Because I do write bad music.
In which area would you like to improve as a composer?
Writing fewer notes usually helps, and I'm still struggling with that one.
I like to think I've gotten better, and I've gotten better at some things. I listen to older stuff from the '90s and I think, wow, I don't know if I could do that again, because it was younger, more exuberant, and just kind of coloring out of the lines. So I'm maybe a lot more thoughtful now.
James Newton Howard's Full Biography
James Newton Howard attended the University of Southern California's music school, but dropped out to tour with Elton John, and eventually compose music for film and television. He started with Head Office (1985) in 1985. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards. He currently is a songwriter, record producer, conductor, keyboardist, and film composer.