Words by Emma Warren

Esteemed film composer John Debney is sitting in his LA studio in front of a huge mixing desk. Until just over a week ago he was still finishing the soundtrack to Hocus Pocus 2, almost thirty years after composing for the original Disney film.  

“It was quite a wonderful experience,” he says. “It was rather emotional. How often does a composer get to rework material that they wrote so many years ago, to try to make it fresh, and pay respect to its lineage” It was a ‘gargantuan’ score, with more than eighty minutes of music recorded with an orchestra over the course of six or seven double sessions at Sony and Fox sound stages in LA – which itself provided a few sonic challenges, simply in the sense of each room having its own distinct tone.

His careful archiving of the original 1993 sketches allowed Debney and his team to re-record the original score along with new themes and original music. It was an interesting education, he says, to replay original cues and to find that they still sound great. “I sort of realized, ‘I guess I knew what I was doing back then’” he says. “But I've also grown as a composer in different ways. The new material, the new themes for this film, they're for a more contemporary audience that likes darker sounds. It’s the encapsulation of new material, the old material, and then the blending of the two, and it worked out really well.”

Getting these dark sounds requires opening his bag of tricks, using the Bernard Hermann toolkit among other contemporary orchestra packs. He imagined it as akin to Sorcerer’s Apprentice, ‘a kind of magical witchcraft score from the classical world’, adding in his own style and techniques. “The original score had female voices, a choir of ladies. On this one, I use some solo ladies to – I think – great effect to give it a more personal, almost childlike sound that evokes a much darker palette. There are a lot of contemporary techniques – we’re using the strings and manipulating them and having them do glissandi, and do trimming things; a lot of tonal things with choir getting tonal textures here and there.”

He pauses: “I’ll let the readers a little bit under the hood: our demos are sounding so good these days that many times my demo sounds bigger than the orchestra. That can be good - and it can be bad. In this case, the orchestra was big-sounding, but I really needed some of the darker colours and basslines of the synthetics to really make it fill up the screen, as it were.”

Hocus Pocus revolves around the trio of witches known as the Sanderson Sisters, played by Bette Middler, Sarah-Jane Parker and Kathy Najimy, Debney wrote some new themes for the characters, specifically what he describes as a ‘sing-songy dark waltz… a very strange melody with an octave leap in it’. “It’s in the lighter moments, sometimes you'll hear it as Sarah's waltz or there’s a great scene towards the end of the film when I get a very dark version with the horns and the Wagner tubas.”

Debney recently posted the original sketches for Hocus Pocus on his Instagram, to fans’ delight. The sketches contain a great deal of personality and they reflect the urgency of the task. Soundtrack heavyweight James Horner – he later did Titanic – was booked, but was called away on a family emergency two weeks before the first session. Horner recommended Debney to cover. “I had two weeks to write over eighty minutes of music, to come up with themes. He had written one thing, which was lovely. I was a man in my thirties when I did that one. I didn't sleep much for two weeks, I just burned the midnight oil, as we say, and drank lots of coffee – I couldn't do that today.”

He remembers exactly when he switched from pencil to digital. “In 1997, I did two movies. Liar Liar, I sketched. I Know What You Did Last Summer I did it on the keyboard and all on synthetics. I forced myself to learn how to do that. Ever since then I've been writing, I would say, 99% of the time on my rig.”

Conducting is an essential part of the process, he believes. “One of my biggest pet peeves is that fewer composers these days are conducting their own music,” he says. “I love to conduct. There's an empathetic relationship that I have with the orchestra when I'm up on the podium, and I can immediately get feedback. So for me, it's rather essential."

Part of his preference is to do with balance. Most of the time he doesn’t stripe, mainly because they prefer to do the work of ensuring sonic cohesion in the room before the music hits a DAW. “Part and parcel of me being on the podium is that we can really massage the sound in the room. Plus, the immediate rush of the performance is much more apparent to me when I'm on the podium, and therefore I can manipulate it from there. I can change balances, I can raise sections and point at people and all the things that we do as conductors.

It is, he says, ‘a very important part’ of what he does. “When I'm speaking to younger composers, I often invite them to consider conducting their music because I think there's nothing better than having the composer on the stand, he or she and really trying to get the best performance they can. So that's why I do it, and that's why I advocate for it.”

Conducting also makes the mixing process much shorter – his frequent collaborators like Shawn Murphy or Simon Rhodes (with whom he worked on The Jungle Book 2016 remake) can turn mixes around in a day, he says, because it’s almost all there. Although in reality, there are also times when he needs to be working more closely with the director. “If it's someone that I'm really familiar and comfortable with, I can stay on the podium most of the time. Other times there’s value to me being in the booth.”

Collaboration is an important part of his process, although this doesn’t mean rolling over whenever a director wants. “It can sometimes be very difficult. When somebody doesn't like a certain instrument, or it strikes their ear in a funny way, it's like telling a painter, you can't use blue, or you can't use green.” “Being collaborative,” Debney says, “means getting in a director’s head and trying to figure out this puzzle of what’s bothering them. What can I do to counter that? It could be as simple as doing a melody on a different instrument, or it could be as dramatic as redoing something … I don't take my own music so seriously that I'm not open to another idea.”

“I just learned a long time ago to choose your battles. None of us is Mozart or Beethoven. None of us are John Williams, quite frankly, or the great composers that we all know and love.”

There are, however, many directors who know and love Debney, including Garry Marshall, who he worked with for 15 years, including on The Princess Diaries. “He was the most loveliest man on the planet, and he would rarely give me a note, the only note that he ever gave me was, ‘I'm not so sure I liked the flute’. It said that we've got the ladies talking in this range, and the flute is in the same range. It was a great note because he was right.”

Disney has been part of his life since he was a child. His father was the producer Louis Debney who worked for the Walt Disney Studio for 40 years making classic shows including Zorro and The Mickey Mouse Club along the way. “He was there at the very beginning with Walt Disney. I grew up in that Hollywood, Disney family. I saw all the different roles that people played in the making of a theme park ride, a movie, a television show, and of course, now, video games that I dabbled in [The Sims Medieval, Madden NFL 19 and Lair) I've seen the nuts and bolts of it for so long. Over the course of years, I realized that music plays a role and sometimes it has to be a subservient role and sound effects have to take over.”

Often, he’ll get to know the sound effects people and the people on the dub stage. “You might laugh or think this is silly, but a lot of times I ask the dub stage people to lower the music because I think sometimes the music is played too loud all the time. You sort of tune it out. So a lot of times, I will look at the peaks and valleys and try to encourage the dubbing people to maybe sometimes play music softer. But then when there are other moments where it really means to be loud, then I can hopefully, entice them to play it louder.”

Voice notes he hums into his smartphone in the early hours tend to be quieter, dream-soaked affairs. “Two or three in the morning, if I'm deep into a project and I've got themes on my mind, I'll undoubtedly wake up in the middle of the night and then hum something in there. Sometimes it's really a great idea – not that often. Sometimes it's just gibberish, half asleep. Maybe 60% of the time it's a good idea.”

The theme for The Passion of the Christ fell into the top centile of the good idea percentage. “I was fighting to find a theme. He would be the first one to tell you I was failing miserably. It was either I’m gonna get fired, or I was going to quit, or one of both. So I woke up and I came up with a theme for Mary that represented the character of Mary and her son Jesus in that film. And it was what it was exactly what I'm describing. I woke up with it. And again, it was something in three, four. It was a lullaby. It was a waltz lullaby. That's the way I woke up with it. I am so grateful for that, honestly."

He worked with Mel Gibson on The Passion of Christ – ‘we’re like brothers’. “He’s one of the greatest directors and actors of all time. He's a great actor that doesn't love music maybe the way I do. He's looking at the visual, he's listening to the words, the inflection. Music is a necessary part of his world, but it plays a different role. Every director is different.”

Learning remains on the agenda. John Williams – ‘a big hero of mine’ – has offered gems over the years. “He has said it numerous times, he's actually said it to me directly, and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn – it's all about the journey. It's all about the process of writing. When I've run into him or speaking to him on the phone, I'll invariably try to compliment something he's just done. And he'll have nothing of it. ‘Oh, baby, I'll do better next time’ or ‘it's a nice little ditty, I think it worked out’. The point of that story is here's the man, a person at the height of what we do as composers, and he's the most humble, gracious man you'll ever meet. He’s constantly trying to make it better and he's constantly refining and revising. Over the years I have taken that kind of advice and it works, because with every score I do, I'm learning more. I am always striving to write better. I still love to write, and I still love to conduct and hear my music for the first time with an ensemble. When any of those things change, then maybe I'll retire like Michael Jordan or something. I'm not there yet.”

Right now, he’s working on a couple of animated films. Debney’s compositions for Disney rides including It’s A Small World and Phantom Manor at EuroDisney continue to play out and there are live performances of fan-favourite soundtracks including Elf coming up as well as a Hocus Pocus live show. He’s also just finished a major concert work for the inter-faith Abrahamic Symphony which will be premiered in Abu Dhabi in 2023. “I'm as busy as I can be and I'm so grateful. I was the young guy doing Hocus Pocus. Now I'm the older guy that's turning into the legend – somebody used that term the other day – and whilst I don't think I'm a legend, I'll take it.”