Moviegoers got an early taste of Michael Giacchino’s score for The Batman when director Matt Reeves dropped the first camera test featuring Robert Pattinson in costume last month. Although only a minute of music was heard, Giacchino certainly sounds well-equipped to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with previous Bat-composers like Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer. It also helps that Giacchino doesn’t seem to feel any pressure to live up to any of these musical predecessors. In fact, Reeves and Warner Bros. aren’t getting in the way of his creative process at all.
Giacchino recently participated in a virtual sit-down with Collider in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. When The Batman inevitably came up, Giacchino painted a very enthusiastic picture of how the scoring is going.
“I felt total freedom to do whatever I want,” said Giacchino. “Matt always agreed, this is our Batman, this is our version. In the same way that I always loved, what I still do about Batman comics and graphic novels is that each of these artists, each of these authors, take their own crack at what they want this version to be. It’s their version of Batman.
“I love it when I see a graphic novel of Batman in the 1800s,” continued Giacchino. “To me that is cool. I love that. I’m not the kind of person that says Batman must always be this. It’s like no, why? It can be whatever the artist wants to be and it has over the years done that, many times over. I love the idea of taking something and just kind of doing our version of it.”
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Giacchino also shared that he came up with the piece heard in the camera test immediately after he finished reading The Batman’s script. Surprisingly, he revealed that this is only a rough version of what’s to come.
“Matt and I have been talking about this for a long time, obviously,” noted Giacchino. “And last year, after reading the script, I remember sitting down and going, ‘Oh, I have an idea, I have an idea,’ and I sat down and I wrote that piece that is in the teaser trailer. And Matt has had that. It was just a demo version of it, a mock-up. It wasn’t even done with the orchestra or anything, so then he had been using that in every single one of his presentations at Warner Bros. He would put it behind every [one] and be like, ‘Alright, here are the costumes,’ and you hear the thing; ‘Here’s the music,’ and you hear the thing. So when it came time to release the [camera test], he was just like, ‘Well, we have to put it with the music.’”
The Batman was recently forced to stop production due to the coronavirus. However, Warner Bros. still hasn’t said whether it will postpone the film’s June 25, 2021 release date.
Are you excited to hear the rest of Michael Giacchino’s score for the reboot? Let us know in the comment section below!
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