Interview with John Debney
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About John Debney
Composer of Elf, Liar Liar, The Princess Diaries, Iron Man 2 and The Jungle Book, Oscar-nominated for The Passion of the Christ and a four-time Emmy winner.
Source: Score: The Podcast on YouTube
These answers are taken from Score: The Podcast S1E1 | John Debney, Behind the Score: James Cameron & Name That Score on Score: The Podcast's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
Our hope was that it would touch a chord in everyone's hearts, because the movie is about acceptance, it's about inclusion, it's about love, and it's about be who you are. So our hope was it would catch fire, and it has. The coolest thing for me has been the sing-alongs. I invite all of you that are listening: go see The Greatest Showman in a sing-along, because it is the biggest party on the planet. Most of the people that go to these have seen the movie three and four or five times, so they know every song, and the studio has printed the lyrics out, so it's a true sing-along. It's become kind of a thing, which is cool.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I have to be honest with you, everything scared the heck out of me. When you're starting out you kind of go blindly. Musicians are gloriously, blissfully ignorant of business usually, and the whole business part of it is strange for us, because we want to play and write songs and jam and be out there in the world. As a film and TV composer it's the same dynamic. We throw it out there blindly, and sometimes we hit a home run and sometimes we don't. But when I work with people that are so good and so kind and professional, it makes it all okay, and you learn over the years by doing.
In the beginning of my career it was much more nuts and bolts. There are certainly different tentpole areas of a film or TV show that you have to hit and acknowledge, but now it's a feel thing for me. I jump into some of these things just trying to vibe it out and play a little on the keyboard and come up with an idea, which leads, like writing a song, to the bridge or the chorus.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
A man I greatly admire, and I've had a great time working with, is Mel Gibson. Mel is such a great actor and such a great director, but he's nonverbal. If he doesn't like something, he'll hem and haw, look around, walk around. It's very difficult for him to verbalize why he doesn't like something. But I got to know him well enough that I know when he doesn't like it.
Sometimes maybe it might be too much, and I then would trust the director or the head of music or someone on the show to say, we're pushing it a little bit too much.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
There's usually a first impression, I think, that I give and I get back, and I think I can gauge at this point in my career what that might feel like or where it might go. With Garry Marshall, I met him for the first time on the set of The Princess Diaries. I was brought into this little classroom scene, and in the front row was this young girl with glasses on, [Anne] Hathaway. They rolled, she did a scene, and I remember thinking to myself, oh my god, this is a major star. Then Garry came over and goes, music! And I go, hi Garry, I'm such a big fan. And it was an immediate love, an immediate connection. There were no walls. I'm thankful to say I did seven or eight movies with him, and every one was a joy, a treasure. Even if he didn't like a piece of music, he'd say, I don't know if I like the flutes. The flutes, they get in the way.
Describe your musical style.
I think I have a predilection, a knack for writing comedic music. I don't know why. Maybe because my dad worked at Walt Disney Studios for 40 years, and I grew up listening to Mary Poppins music and all those great scores and songs from the day. That would perhaps be why I like to do comedy writing and why I enjoy it.
There are certain chord changes and progressions or sounds that work with horror films that put you in that place. Comedy is a little different. It depends on what the comedy is; it depends on the actors. Jim Carrey in Liar Liar: no one had ever seen a comic like him, maybe since Jerry Lewis. Jim was frenetic, doing something every moment with his facial expressions or his wit or his physical comedy. So my comedic take on Liar Liar was different. You have to see the pace and the timbre and the frenetic quality of the performer, and that does dictate it. Comedy writing is timing, after all, and therefore timing based on the performance.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
It's a funny gig to score a musical. It can be challenging. That was a very challenging movie, in that originally there were more areas for original melodies, and that was the intention from the director at the very beginning: John, in these areas where we're not dealing with the songs, write themes for the different characters. What happened is that movie changed greatly after the first preview. They decided to do reshoots and restructuring, so some of those score moments ended up going away. So in the main you ended up with these glorious Pasek and Paul songs, and I was given the task of arranging them.
They're very melodic and contemporary, and one of the discussions early on with the director was: if the score becomes too song-like, it'll become a music video very quickly. So I really dug in a little bit and said, let me do this a little more traditional way, with those song trappings on top. And that's what we ended up doing.
John Debney's Full Biography
Throughout his legendary career, composer John Debney has seen himself in equal demand for holiday classics such as Hocus Pocus and Elf, tentpoles like Iron Man 2, The Jungle Book, and The Greatest Showman, and the powerful epic The Passion of the Christ, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. Debney's key to success is his immense versatility, composing for comedies (Bruce Almighty, Liar, Liar), action (Predators, The Scorpion King), horror (End of Days, Dream House), romance (Marry Me, Valentine's Day), and family films (Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dora and the Lost City of Gold) with the same confidence and panache. Debney is also known for his work in such films as Princess Diaries 1 & 2, Sin City, Spy Kids, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, No Strings Attached, The Emperor's New Groove, Chicken Little, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Ice Age: Collision Course, Isn't It Romantic, Come Away, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, Home Sweet Home Alone, and The Beach Bum.
His more recent projects include Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kids: Armageddon for Netflix, Paramount Pictures' Tom Brady-produced 80 for Brady, Apple+ and Skydance Animation's Luck, Universal's Jennifer Lopez starrer Marry Me, and Disney+'s Hocus Pocus 2.
Upcoming projects include Kevin Costner's 2-part western epic Horizon: An American Saga for New Line Cinemas, Columbia Pictures' animation Garfield starring Chris Pratt, Paramount Pictures' Under the Boardwalk, Netflix's In Your Dreams, and Amazon Prime's Space Cadet.
Born in Glendale, California, Debney studied music composition at the California Institute of the Arts, and afterward began his career orchestrating and composing scores for Walt Disney Studios and various television series. He won his first Emmy Award in 1990 for the main theme for western series The Young Riders, and has since won three additional Emmy Awards and received nominations for a total of seven, with his latest being Disney+'s smash hit Hocus Pocus 2 in 2023. Debney has also worked with industry titan Seth MacFarlane on numerous episodes of his sci-fi space series The Orville, utilizing nearly 100-piece orchestras to record his bombastic adventure scores. His first foray into video game scoring, Sony's 2007 medieval adventure Lair, resulted in a BAFTA nomination and a Best Videogame Score award from The International Film Music Critics Association.
Debney has collaborated with acclaimed directors as diverse as Jon Favreau, Kevin Costner, Robert Rodriguez, David E. Talbert, Harmony Korine, Kat Coiro, Brenda Chapman, Mel Gibson, Peggy Holmes, the late Garry Marshall, Adam Shankman, Kenny Ortega, and the late Ivan Reitman. In 2005, he was the youngest recipient of ASCAP's Henry Mancini Career Achievement Award.