Composer John Murphy opens up about the joy and challenges of scoring for James Gunn, sharing how their musical shorthand has evolved and how he approached iconic themes in ‘Superman’.
“It was exciting because I wanted to hear the theme, too,” said Murphy of working with the iconic John Williams theme. “People sometimes forget that the composers are often fans of what they’re working on. I grew up with DC all the way over in Liverpool, and I started reading comic books probably when I was about seven or eight. It was always part of my growing up, even before the first movie came out.”
In conversation with Awards Focus, Murphy reflects on his long-standing collaboration with Gunn, noting the ease and honesty that comes from shared musical backgrounds and repeated projects. He describes starting compositions from the script, a process he finds creatively liberating, and how he and co-composer David Fleming divided cues based on their strengths. Murphy details his inventive approach to the John Williams ‘Superman’ theme—experimenting with tempo, key, and instrumentation while respecting its iconic DNA—and highlights cues that evolved significantly during scoring, including the Ultraman and love themes. He also shares personal insights from his Liverpool upbringing, including how hearing the Beatles live inspired his first steps as a musician, and the formative experiences that shaped his passion for music.
‘Superman’ is a character-driven story about identity and purpose, following Kal-El as he grapples with being both an alien from Krypton and a man raised in Smallville. While navigating his dual heritage, Superman is supported by determined journalist Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), a band of fellow metahumans known as the Justice Gang, and his loyal dog Krypto. Together, they must face Luthor’s sinister plans, which include Angela Spica/The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), and prove that even in a cynical world, hope and kindness still matter.
Written and directed by James Gunn, ‘Superman’ stars David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, María Gabriela de Faría, Wendell Pierce, Alan Tudyk, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Neva Howell
‘Superman’ is currently available on home video.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you today. How are you doing?
John Murphy: I’m doing good. How are you?
AF: I’m hanging in there. You’ve been working with James Gunn for a few years now. How has the shorthand evolved in your professional relationship?
Murphy: It was always very honest between us. It was quite close from the get-go. We both have similar backgrounds. We were both in bands when we were younger. We were both in punk bands and we come from that side of film music, if you like. There was always a very easy dialogue between us. When you work with a director a few times, definitely after a few movies, you can cut out the politeness. You can just get straight to stuff and be very economical with your words. I think we definitely got there quite quickly. So yeah, we have a very, very easy, very honest dialogue between us. It doesn’t always feel like work.
It’s often a lot of fun with James. He’s very intuitive musically and that helps a lot. But yeah, it’s been five or six years now, so it’s a long time in this town. But yes, it’s been great.
AF: At what point in the process do you begin composing, as soon as you get the script or as soon as you’re able to start watching footage?
Murphy: Before I started working with James, it was always, I would get the movie once there’d be some kind of rough cut or sometimes even close to picture lock, depending on how late they’d bring the composer in. But with James, it’s very different. He will send me the script before he starts shooting and because he likes to shoot with music from the score, I will write the main themes from the script, which is something I personally love doing.
We’ve gone through different versions of the main themes and there may be some emotional scenes in the movie that James wants me to write up front. There might be anywhere between 16 or 20 themes already locked in to the score that he will then shoot to. Sometimes that will be on set for the actors to hear the music and sometimes it will just be for him to have in his earpiece to give him a better idea of the speed of the scene and just give him more of an idea of what the end result might be.
It’s been very different with him. And to be honest, it’s a process I actually love. There’s something very pure when you’re writing from the script. You’re not concerned so much with, oh, I’ve got to make that cut or this is an action scene so this has got to hit that planet exploding. You’re just writing in a much more pure musical way.
I think that’s how Ennio Morricone would write, too. He would read the script and then he would write a lot of these suites, which is unusual for a director, but it’s the way he works and it works great for him. It’s the way that I love working, too.
AF: There are two composers on the film. How did you all decide to handle who does what in the composing process?
Murphy: Dave was brought on in the court. We both have different skill sets. Dave’s a great composer and he’s a great guy. It was really down to James, who would be picking up which cues. It was really left to him and we just got on with it. There was so much music we had to write for this. It was whatever we were given, we were doing.
AF: Yeah. The character of Superman has been linked to an iconic theme by John Williams since 1978. The theme is almost always expected to pop up at some point as a composer. What went through your head as you were beginning the writing process and realizing that fans are going to want to hear this theme at some point?
Murphy: It was exciting because I wanted to hear the theme, too. People sometimes forget that the composers are often fans of what they’re working on. I grew up with DC all the way over in Liverpool, and I started reading comic books probably when I was about seven or eight. It was always part of my growing up, even before the first movie came out.
In the very first conversations with James, when I knew we were doing this, it was always in his mind to explore that possibility. It’s very exciting for a fan and it’s very exciting for a composer to know that you have the opportunity to work with such an iconic theme.
It’s one of the most iconic themes ever composed for film, as far as I’m concerned. When James first brought it up, I said, “Well, yeah, let’s try it. It would be amazing if we can create our own version of this.” We were never going to just copy it, it was always in James’s head to see where we could take it and make it our own.
I went away and I tried all these different versions of how we could rework this amazing theme. There were slow ethereal versions, there was a doom version. The first thing I did was, for some of these versions, was to change it from a major key to a minor key to see what would happen, and that was really interesting. Then I slowed it down a lot and then that became interesting because it became a little more epic.
We tried all kinds. There was even a punk version at one point, which, I thought, Okay, I’m going to go to composer hell here if I do a punk version of the John Williams theme. We didn’t do that one, but there was some really cool—there was a kind of brooding, laconic Radiohead-type version, which we loved, which actually appears at the very end of the movie.
I think it’s called Metropolis on the soundtrack. We experimented with different things. It was a lot of fun and what was amazing and eye-opening for me was no matter what you did with that motif, it still sounded like the ‘Superman’ theme. It was just in its DNA that no matter how much you slowed it down, putting it to a major and to a minor, how much you changed the instrumentation—as soon as you heard it, it was always that theme. For me, that’s the test of a truly great motif. So, yeah, we just experimented a lot and we just went with our gut.
AF: Now I really want to hear the punk rock version!
Murphy: (Laughs) Yeah, I think maybe another movie. We’ll see, but yeah, it was a lot of fun.
AF: How did you all decide when and where to incorporate the theme and also feel like it’s not being overdone?
Murphy: That was one of probably one of the hardest challenges, really. Because you have the motif, you have the hook, the thing that everybody remembers. We had to be very careful with where we brought that in. We saved the most featured part of that motif for when the boy is holding the flag and you hear it start on guitar, and then it goes to—Dave did a great job of weaving it more subtly in some of the earlier moments as a teaser.
Dave also used the answer to the motif really well in some of the more emotional moments. We were mining it. It wasn’t just the main motif we were working with. There are definitely moments where we use some of the answer parts or some of what I call the B section part to it. But yeah, you never know if you’re overusing it. It always keeps you up at night though. You don’t want to give it too much, but you don’t want to pull your punches either. Hopefully, I think we got it right, but we just have to see.
AF: Well, I loved the work on the score.
Murphy: Thank you. Thank you.
AF: Was there a cue that evolved the most during the composing and recording process?
Murphy: They all evolve. Sometimes, the version that I or Dave will give to James will change quite a lot, just when we get his feedback. But from my own cues, I think one of my favorites that got to evolve and stay evolved was the theme for Ultraman quite early on when he returns to the base and then we realize it’s actually the Luthor Corp theme. That was one that made me smile because it began with a huge, big, dark, grandiose, epic, classical theme really.
My daughter added a lot of trip-hop elements to it, synths, some cool filtered beats and stuff. Once she’d done that, I put some kind of a Pablo Honey type guitar riff to it. That kind of evolved in its own way outside of the movie. It just became—sometimes you’ve just got to get out the way. When a piece of music wants to be something, you’ve just got to let it do that and then see how it works for the movie. That evolved in a cool way because I liked the idea of, yeah, Lex is this huge, grandiose figure, but he’s also incredibly high tech, he’s cool, he’s modern, and he’s got all this other side to him.
It made sense to bring the two worlds together of having something that was very electronic and more cool with the huge epic side of his personality. It’s nice when cues evolve that way so that was one of my favorite evolving cues in the movie.
AF: And was there one that had the, provided the most challenges?
Murphy: I’ve always erred towards the darker side of film scoring and movies. To be honest, I always, pause when I have to do a love scene because it’s not what I naturally get up in the morning and write. That was something I had to really think about. It worked out great in the end because I think I wrote two very different versions for James quite early from the script.
I’d written a very golden age Max Steiner huge epic theme because it just felt like that’s what the film would need. I was sure that that was going to be the one James would go for, but I thought, well let’s do a cooler option so I did this little filtered guitar thing with piano and it was a bit more (inaudible), not what you’d necessarily say, oh, that’s a love scene. I sent that to him, too.
He went for the guitar one and I remember at the time I was disappointed thinking, Oh G-d, no, the other one was way better. The other one was epic. It was beautiful. It was like ‘Gone with the Wind’ or something. I was quite proud of myself for having written something that felt to me like a big love theme, even though it’s not really what I’m known for. But he went for the cooler and more minimal.
It wasn’t till I got the first footage back that I understood. I went, oh, okay. Because their relationship—when we come into the movie, they’re at the beginnings of their relationship. There’s nothing grand about it yet. It is quite minimal, they’re both unsure of each other, they’re testing each other out, and they’re pissing each other off a little bit at times. It’s a very human, very grounded little portrayal of the beginnings of their relationship so it makes sense to me now that James preferred the more tentative, more minimal, and more modern version, because it’s also a very modern relationship, too. But that was a challenge. He asked me to write a love theme and it always keeps me up at night thinking.
I don’t really think that way. That’s always a challenge for me. But I think it worked out.
AF: Was there one that you were able to knock out the quickest?
Murphy: I don’t do anything quickly. (Laughs) I agonize over everything. What was quick? let me think. I mean, funnily enough, the love theme came quick once I’d sort of got the idea for it. I tend to write quickly, but I agonize for a long time before I do it.
I try to stop myself from writing until I’m sure about what I’m doing. When I do actually sit down and it’s time, the stuff tends to come quickly. But the agonizing and the worrying eats up a few days on each cue.
AF: Yeah. And is there a studio that you like to record at because of the way it sounds?
Murphy: For the main stuff—the guitars, drums, vocals and stuff like that—I record in my own studio, which is where I am now. I do all that stuff here because I love the sound of the rooms in here and I just know it so well.
But for the big stuff, for the orchestra, personally, my favorite studio is Abbey Road, and that’s all the way in London. We have three great studios in town in LA. We’ve got the Warner Studio, Fox and Sony. Because it’s a DC movie, we got to use the Warner Studio. The history of that place is outrageous. You always feel a bit blessed when you walk into that room and you think of the movies that have been scored there and the performers that have sung there.
Any of those big studios are great for me. There’s just so much history. It’s a bit of magic as soon as you walk in there.
AF: I couldn’t help but notice that you’re from Liverpool, and I was reading earlier that your interest in music was sparked by the Beatles cover of “Twist and Shout.” I don’t pick up my first guitar without the Beatles Anthology airing on ABC.
Murphy: G-d knows how you know that, but that’s actually true. Yeah, that was the moment where something just went off in my head and just that sound and that energy. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was like a buzzing in my head. It was like electricity going through me, and I’d never experienced anything like that before. That was the moment where I thought, I’ve got to know how they do that. How do they do that? What’s making this sound? I was lucky because my dad was a singer and he played the clubs in Liverpool and the pubs and stuff. There was always equipment lying around, and I’d never really been that interested.
But once I’d heard the opening to that track—it’s funny because it’s not even the recording that’s the famous recording. It was actually—I don’t know how I got this LP, but someone had given me ‘The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl’. That was my first introduction to the Beatles, was this live recording. I mean, I was aware of them, but I was just a kid so I didn’t really know what they were. But that was the moment for me where I didn’t really know what hit me.
As soon as I’d heard that, I think I asked my dad what it was, and he showed me how to play it on guitar, and that was the first dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, and then I played it over and over again. My fingers were red raw. Because when you first start playing guitar, it really hurts the tips of your fingers, till you get—after a few weeks you get calluses on your fingers, so it becomes much easier, but I remember being determined, sitting in the bathroom, just trying to learn this thing, and then, once you sort of go down that road or once you open that door and you experience that feeling of playing something for the first time, it never gets any better than that. I wanted to learn more. The first 20 songs I ever learned on guitar were Beatles songs. I think I learned “Satisfaction” as well because it’s kind of so easy. That was my upbringing and that was what I grew up loving musically with all that early Beatles stuff and stuff I could play myself on guitar.
AF: I saw it referenced on your Wikipedia page.
Murphy: Oh. I haven’t looked at that for a while.
AF: They linked to an interview. I think it was from 2024 or something.
Murphy: Yeah. No, that’s funny that they would add that. But what was great was from that, that was my first band, was a Beatles band. A few years later, when punk started to happen, the band kind of morphed into punk versions of The Beatles. It was these crazy 200 BPM versions of everything, which we used to play these little pubs in Liverpool. G-d knows what they made of us, but we thought we were cool. We were just still at school. They’re just the best times, no matter what’s happened since then with the movies and it’s been an amazing journey. Nothing beats that feeling of just being in a little pub somewhere in Liverpool with your three mates and you’ve got your cheap guitars and then you just launch into this raucous sound. It doesn’t get any better than that, really.
AF: Well, it’s been a pleasure getting to talk this afternoon.
Murphy: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.