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Henry Jackman explains how ditching classical for raves led him to score The Gray Man

Captain America: Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, all the Kingsman films, Ron’s Gone Wrong — this is only a cursory glance over Henry Jackman’s brilliant career so far as a film composer. Headliner finds out how a choral childhood, followed by a love of the UK’s rave scene somehow lead to a chance meeting with Hans Zimmer and working with him at Remote Control Studios in California. Jackman opens up about working on Netflix blockbuster The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas, and why he decided to spend six months composing a 17-minute suite for the movie before he had officially been asked to start.

Born in the suburban London borough of Hillingdon, Jackman’s upbringing was about as classical as you could get musically — he learned choral singing at one of London’s great landmarks, St Paul’s Cathedral, had music lessons at Eton College, and eventually attended the University of Oxford. But despite all these opulent surroundings and learning from some of the most in-demand teachers in the world, Jackman felt a strong yearning for the contemporary.

“I did have a very strict classical upbringing,” he says. “I was in St Paul’s Cathedral singing Tallis and Palestrina. It was all very disciplined with very exacting choir masters. 

"My music teachers might have considered this going off the rails, but I went in a completely different direction when a friend of mine showed up with a little eight-bit sampler. I just completely abandoned all classical education and spent all my time going to raves.

“I was listening to breakbeat and hardcore, going from endless studying and piano practice to non-stop Fabio & Grooverider, which led to a whole career in the record industry. But at no point was I really thinking about film music.”

I completely abandoned all classical education and spent all my time going to raves.

Indeed, Jackman suddenly found himself working in studios alongside the likes of Seal, Elton John, Gary Barlow and many other artists in this period, in which he reinvented himself into a record producer. As much as he enjoyed this rollercoaster, he did feel a pull back to the world of orchestration and classical harmony.

“Around this time I was always trying to squeeze in interesting chords and string arrangements, I think I was getting a little bored,” he says. “I made this weird music for an album called Transfiguration, which was my poor man's rip-off of Björk’s albums, Homogenic and Vespertine, and Hans Zimmer got to hear it one way or another. Which is a great piece of luck, because you can imagine how many CDs were being sent his way then.”

It was not only film music mogul Zimmer, but also fellow Brit-composer John Powell who discovered Jackman, plucking him from his studio work and essentially throwing him into the film industry. 

In their early conversations at Zimmer’s Remote Control Studios in California, the veteran German musician told Jackman he was “wasting his time” as a producer with his wealth of both early and contemporary music knowledge, and that he was far better suited to scoring to picture.

Yet another abrupt U-turn saw him assisting these two composers on some of the biggest films being released at the time, including The Dark Knight, several Pirates of the Caribbean films, Kung Fu Panda and many more. Eventually stepping out of Zimmer’s gargantuan shadow, Jackman’s first solo endeavor was for Monsters vs Aliens (2009), and then quickly ramping up his credits as many more films like Kick Ass and X-Men: First Class followed.

Like several UK-born composers such as Lorne Balfe, the Gregson-Williams brothers and the aforementioned John Powell, Jackman is very much established as one of the top, go-to composers for some of biggest films to come out in the last two decades, whether they be Marvel hits such as the second and third Captain America films, or beloved animations including Puss In Boots and Ron’s Gone Wrong.

I spent ages making handcrafted percussion sounds, distorted breakbeats, recording clocks and slowing them down.

Having written some excellent music for those Captain America flicks for the director brothers Anthony and Joe Russo (whose Marvel winning-streak continued when Avengers: Endgame became the world’s highest-grossing film at the time of its release), it’s not surprising Jackman was called upon by the pair for their Netflix commission, The Gray Man, which was watched for a total of 88.55 million hours in its first week of release.

In the build up to starting work on the film, Jackman had several months of downtime to spend with his partner and newborn son, but kept being drawn to doing bits and pieces of preparatory work on the Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas-starring feature. 

The Russo brothers told him to enjoy his time off, however they “gave me a heads up that, as well as all the action and big setpieces, they’d need some music for the flashback scenes for Six (Gosling) and his childhood trauma.

I ended up spending six months on this 17-minute track and I was terrified they’d tell me none of it was usable.

“But then new themes and ideas kept coming out. I spent ages making all these handcrafted percussion sounds and distorted breakbeats and recording clocks and slowing them down. The track got to eight minutes, and then 10 minutes, and then 12 minutes, and I kept all this secret from Joe and Anthony. I ended up spending six months on this 17-minute track and I was terrified they’d tell me none of it was usable.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d written a suite of different music and themes to lay the groundwork for a film, he did so also for Captain America: The Winter Soldier among other films. But it’s astounding that this 17-minute suite was created in such a spontaneous and unplanned way. Most wonderful of all, it’s the opening track on the soundtrack album, and its various themes and motifs can be heard throughout the movie. So, suffice to say, the directors were very pleased with what they heard.

To achieve these wonderful sounds on the electronic side, Jackman turned to his older gear, experimenting around and using minimal amounts of digital processing to cover up some of the “crusty” sounds.

He explains: “I'd be throwing it back into the analog world and shoving sounds through a Roland SH-5 or a properly old Korg MS-20 where the circuitry is not quite as it should be. I'd be getting a bit of break up and distortion. Not using too many plugins, I’d just bake it and bake it over and over again through different bits of old gear until it sounded the way I wanted it to sound.”

Understandably, he has to remain tight-lipped regarding upcoming projects (he’s probably up to his nose in non-disclosure-agreements for upcoming films), but the good news is, the full soundtrack, including that masterpiece of an opening suite, are available to listen to and stream now. 

And, of course, The Gray Man is streaming on Netflix now — it’s the ultimate film for switching your brain firmly onto the off-position, sitting back and watching the mad, glorious action unfurl in front of you.

The Gray Man image credits: Paul Abell/Netflix © 2022