Interview with Thomas Newman
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Thomas Newman
Film composer and son of Alfred Newman, known for The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty, Finding Nemo, Skyfall and 1917.
Source: Rick Beato on YouTube
These answers are taken from The Thomas Newman Interview | Where Does THIS Music Come From? on Rick Beato's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
When did you start writing music?
Never when [my father] was alive. I think the summer after he died, my mom made me go to ISOMATA, which was a USC-run camp in Idyllwild. You were in cabins, and there were three other kids in my cabin, one of whom wrote poetry. And it was like, you're our age and you write poetry? Wow. I'd never thought of being creative. And I went home and started kind of messing around with words and realizing that there was an outlet in it.
How I drifted into writing music was just very gradual. It was not like I have to do this, I have to hit the ball hard and I have to succeed. It was never this kind of blind ambition.
What drew you to a career as a composer?
I studied music in college kind of because I didn't know what else to do. My dad was a composer. He died when I was 14. So there was this music, obviously, in the Newman family, my cousin Randy, all these things were long, tall shadows. And I guess slowly I just started to emerge with a sense of who I was, and a sense of having an imagination, separate from a technique necessarily to support the imagination.
It was rigorous: theory, history of music, counterpoint, which I never felt like I could quite master. A lot of it was just daunting, all of this stuff that had gone before, not only in my own family but just in the huge canon of music. It was like, wow, what does that mean, and where do I fit in? So I was kind of bobbing along, but I don't think with any sense of confidence in having a voice or anything meaningful to share with anyone.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
I think if I let myself go, oftentimes it'll be sitting down and doing anything at a piano, and taking things into Ableton and just messing around. It's a sense of how do I get to a sense of having fun playing around with ideas, and surprising myself. Ableton is a big experimenting instrument for me, and it is a little like Hansel and Gretel: whatever crumbs you leave behind, I have no idea how I got to these great places.
It really makes time pass, and it's involving, and at its best moments I'm just in it and the world is a simpler place. Because the world is such a complex place, it's nice to focus energy toward something that's abstract on the one hand, but just deeply rewarding on the other.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
[Shawshank]: if you follow it, this was a big moment in my creative life, which is how do you put this extroverted moment next to this really introverted one? You have those low booms next to this very tinkling, psychological, interior thing. Just that juxtaposition of huge next to quiet was a moment for me, in terms of what music could do.
I still have a pretty vivid memory of being on the podium, and it being night, and I remember putting this together in a single day. It was one of these 4 a.m. mornings where we had to pull it off. I knew the theme, but how could I get through a five-minute cue? It had to be turned over to the orchestrator and then copied for a performance that evening, on the same day, if I'm remembering correctly. It sounds kind of unreal, but as I remember it, we were just out of time.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
Synthesizers and sequencers started happening in the early '80s, and that was an open door that I could kind of get in. I felt like I was a good programmer, and eventually I think my training in college caught up with my opportunity, and I was able to start standing in front of an orchestra.
In the '80s, when I was doing a lot of teen comedies, I'd have a group, drummer, bass, guitar, and they would just start jamming, and the jams were so loose. And then they'd start playing my stuff, and it was just not nearly as loose. I thought, how can I get to that looser place? So I hire these guys. There's maybe four or five guys that I've worked with forever: Rick Cox, who does prepared guitar, sound programming, saxophone if you need it, and George Doering, who is an amazing player of all kinds of instruments. I think I met [George] in 1983 on my very first movie. I clicked on many levels. Mostly I thought, I can work with these guys and try to get places without thinking I'm on a podium: here's my chance, here's what I wrote, play.
Think about a demanding director, producer or collaborator. What made them difficult, and how did you work with them successfully?
I remember on Road to Perdition with Sam Mendes, we got to the end of the movie, and the issue was, okay, here's Tom Hanks in his character, and he's in a different space, he's come through all this, therefore it should be a different tune. And I remember Sam kind of said yes, but no, and said see you later, and I think that was the last I saw of him. I had to kind of make a decision about what that theme would be. It ended up that it was a repeat of a theme that we had heard earlier.
If I asked Sam for an adjective, he'd say, if I wanted an adjective I'd write an essay, something like that. He's an incredibly bright guy with an incredible set of ears, but it was clear that he was going to have to hear it to know he liked it.
There's a moment, I think, for all directors when they have to abide the newness of a new idea. I think a lot of what separates good from average directors is an ability to say, I need to be open to this being better than I think it is at the moment I hear it.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
How much time do you put into a mock-up, which you can ultimately discard, and you don't want the director to get used to what that sounds like either. This is where it's the salesman part of it. If you don't sell it, then it's over, and if you oversell it, then you're kind of screwed in another way. So part of it is you think about the ears of the director that you're working with and say, how sophisticated are those ears? And I kind of do talk through it and say, this will be bigger, imagine this, or this area may bore you for a few seconds. Whatever it is that you say to give context to your idea ahead of it being rejected or accepted.
When I think they're wrong, the only way out of that one is to write your way out, I think. To say, okay, let me do something else, because it's going to be easier for a director to know if they're right about an idea if I play another one. There have definitely been times when I'm grateful for the rewrite.
Describe your musical style.
I don't know why I'm triadic, but I end up being triadic. I guess because it's basic, and it is like primary colors, and then the variations that come are more in contrast. My mom's from Mississippi, and there is a sense of congregational... I was raised in church, not that it means much to me, other than I enjoyed hymns and I enjoyed congregational singing. Not singing myself, but listening to it. I like the simplicity of how it communicates. It's not overly adorned, and maybe that's just my nature, one of non-adornment. I think my adornment has always been color, and this notion of saying, when does color become compositional?
The simpler the harmony is, or the voicings, the more expansive the listening experience can be. That's where I think repetitive patterns interest me, because the ear is no longer required to listen to the pattern and is able to listen to the deeper colors that are there but can be heard behind them. I tend to like repetition.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
[1917]: whatever idea I had, and I had many for this area, Sam would always be at a console with a fader, and whatever it was I was doing, he was making it louder and louder and louder. So clearly he needed something with volume and breath and scope to happen as the camera goes out the window. That moment had to deliver. It starts with rain dropping on his head, and it's gone black, so that tells you that it needs to start very quietly, and the celesta gives you that sound of rain and a sense of hush.
Sam and I, and maybe others, were worried that you just couldn't go back to dark, a guy with a gun running and getting shot at. It needed to have a different vocabulary, and it was really hard to know what that is. He's still running, he's still being shot at. It's more dreamy. Sam just knew it had to have a real sense of relief from the dramatic content of the music that had come before and would come after. Even though I'm using a lot of ambience and synthetic sample colors ahead of that, I couldn't go to that well. So okay, it's got to be big and it's got to be orchestral and it has to have muscle and it has to drive you forward. But gee, what does that even mean?
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
It was a bit of a bone toss, I think. John Williams is great friends with my uncle Lionel, and Star Wars was going down, and John asked me to orchestrate the death of Vader in Return of the Jedi. I don't want to say it was an uncreative job. It's just that John's manuscript was so complete that it was truly like, okay, here's the flute, there's the flute. I would be interested to see my penmanship, my pencilmanship, whatever. Not that I felt like I had any knowledge, other than abstract knowledge, of what it meant to orchestrate: what does orchestration mean, how is it different than piano, how does it expand, even though I'd done a lot of study throughout school.
In which area would you like to improve as a composer?
What I often find is dynamics. What is a two-bar phrase with a crescendo and a decrescendo? Where's the peak of that crescendo? Does it come before a downbeat? If it hits the downbeat, does it hit too hard? So you're constantly saying, okay, rise in this measure, but start to fall ahead of the downbeat, because I don't want a point to the downbeat. That's really tough for me, dynamics.
There were moments of real frustration and anger, like, why do I have to learn something new? What is an instance? That was a real tough thing. How many sounds can come out of this instrument before you have to have another instrument? All that stuff really confused me for a while. I have some people who help me navigate, because I'm not a person who wants to just explore libraries. I'd rather work with players.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
I can't imagine a life without music. I don't know what I would do. So yeah, I wouldn't rule out any of it. I guess it'll depend on physical energy, and this notion of involvement with others and what the stakes of that involvement are, because I think the stakes are way higher in the industry. Maybe they were always high. It wasn't like anyone would ever let you off the hook. But it seems like everyone has such access to all of these tools. Directors, editors, they can cut music. They just know so much about it. That can be exhausting.
Thomas Newman's Full Biography
Thomas Newman is an American film score composer. He was born in Los Angeles. His father was notable film score composer Alfred Newman (1900-1970). The Newman family is of Russian-Jewish descent, and includes several other well-known musicians. Thomas' mother Martha Louis Montgomery (1920-2005) wanted her sons to have a musical education. Thomas attended regular lessons in violin as a child. An older Thomas received his musical education while attending the University of Southern California and Yale University. Thomas Newman graduated as Bachelor of Arts in 1977, and a Master of Music in 1978.
Thomas originally composed music for theatrical productions in Broadway, working with his mentor Stephen Sondheim. His uncle Lionel Newman asked him to compose music for the television series "The Paper Chase" (1978-1979, 1986), which was Thomas' first credit in a television production.
In the 1980s, Thomas first worked in film. Composer John Williams, a close family friend, hired Thomas to work in the music department for space opera film "Return of the Jedi" (1983). Thomas' main work in the film was orchestrating the music in a scene where character Darth Vader dies. Afterwards, Thomas was approached by film producer Scott Rudin and hired to work as a film score composer in his own right. His first work in the field was the film score of romantic drama "Reckless" (1984).
While he worked regularly as a film score composer during the 1980s, Thomas reportedly felt he had to retrain himself for a hard and demanding job. It reportedly took him 8 years to not feel fraudulent in his efforts. In 1994, Thomas received his first Academy Award nominations, for the film scores of "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994) and "Little Women" (1994). He lost the Award to rival composer Hans Zimmer, who had been nominated for the film score of the animated film "The Lion King" (1994).
Newman was an established and increasingly famous composer in the 1990s. He received further Academy Award nominations, although he never actually won. Among his more notable works was the film score of the drama film "American Beauty" (1999), which earned Thomas both a Grammy and a BAFTA award. Newman had a good working relationship with the film's director Sam Mendes. Mendes has kept hiring Thomas as the composer for most of his films. The main exception being the comedy-drama film "Away We Go" (2009), which did not have a film score.
In the 2000s, Thomas continued working in high-profile films, such as "Road to Perdition" (2002), "Finding Nemo" (2003), and "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events". By 2006, he had been nominated eight times for an Academy Award, while never winning it. He started joking about his lack of victories in public.
In 2008, Thomas was nominated for two Academy Awards, for both the film score and an original song for the animated film "WALL-E" (2008). He won neither, though the hit song "Down to Earth" earned him a Grammy Award. He continues to work regularly in the 2010s. Among his more acclaimed works were the film scores for spy film "Skyfall" (2012) and period drama "Saving Mr. Banks" (2013). He has continued being nominated for Academy Awards. As of 2020, he has been nominated 15 times for the Academy Award. He is the most nominated living composer to have never actually won an Academy Award, tied with Alex North. He has won a total of 5 Grammy awards.