A biography for Michael Giacchinohasn’t been written yet.
“My dad had these great Benny Goodman albums that I was obsessed with, and Louis Prima's another guy I loved, and Peter Niro the jazz pianist. I loved international music: Irish music, Mexican music. I love the different colours that they all have.”
“On 'Lost,' I write a score and orchestrate it on days one and two; I record it on day three. In animation and film and videogames, you have a little more time to work things through.”
“I used to do puppet shows as a kid - me and my brother would do them - and then any poor soul who came into the house had to sit and watch our puppet shows.”
“I think that to capture food in music, you really are capturing an emotional response to food.”
“I think my writing has an old-fashioned feel to it for whatever reason. I'm just so influenced by the music that I listened to growing up, a lot of it out of the '60s, so it has a natural tendency to feel like it's from another era.”
“I always thought of 'Lost' as a psychotic opera. Because there were so many characters, it was important for me to track them with themes.”
“It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing. I was in a lot of the school plays and musicals, and there was a lot of down time during rehearsals. I would go into the orchestra pit and mess around on the grand piano.”
“When I was a kid, there was no DVD, no VHS. The only way to re-live a movie once it was out of the theater was to listen to its film score.”
“'Lost' is such a thematic show that I'm always afraid that if I know something's going to happen at the end, I'll subconsciously write something in where someone who's astute will go, 'Oh, he used so-and-so's theme: that must mean so-and-so is coming back!'”
“I try to keep a regular work schedule.”
“I started out as a producer. and I used to work at Disney. and I worked with a lot of the animators and went on to become great friends with a lot of these guys and worked on a lot of projects together.”
“There's so much fun you can have with your instruments that no one ever taught you.”
“I grew up listening to 'Planet of the Apes' and other scores, and it was fun for me because you weren't just listening to those scores, but you were also questioning what you were listening to. What are those sounds?”
“I love Glenn Gould. Max Steiner. John Williams. Louis Prima. Benny Goodman. Miles Davis. John Philip Sousa.”
“Most television, the music is very much the same from show to show.”
“I lived in New York City for six years, and I was always amazed at how diverse everything was.”
“Scoring animated films, I have the exact same approach and philosophy as I do for a live action. It's all story- and character-driven. I don't care if it's a mouse or Tom Cruise.”
“There are a lot of guys who do this job, and they have tons of assistants. They all kind of write together, and for me, it's basically me here in this room, and that's it.”
“I've been pretty lucky in that I'm not a big writer's block kind of person.”
“Nothing can grab you by the throat - or heart or soul - like an orchestra. It's undeniably the most engaging and exciting way to bring a score to life.”