In a basement in Edgewater Park Township, New Jersey, a ten-year-old Michael Giacchino was making stop-motion animations and scoring them himself. The future composer of 'Up', 'Ratatouille' and 'The Batman' was born on 10 October 1967 in nearby Riverside, and that childhood habit of building tiny worlds with homemade soundtracks turned out to be the foundation for one of the most surprising careers in modern film music.
From Delran to art school
Giacchino grew up with an Italian-American background: his father had Sicilian roots and his mother came from Abruzzo, and he holds dual American and Italian citizenship. An art teacher at Holy Cross High School in Delran saw something in him and suggested he apply to the School of Visual Arts in New York. Giacchino enrolled there, specialising in film production with history as a minor, and financed his studies with an unpaid internship at Universal Pictures and night shifts at Macy's.
After graduating in 1990 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he kept studying: music lessons at Juilliard, then film music courses at UCLA. But the break that changed everything came from video games. In 1997 he composed the score for 'The Lost World: Jurassic Park', a PlayStation title that was one of the first games to have its music recorded by a live symphony orchestra.
Abrams, Lost and The Incredibles
That orchestral approach caught the attention of television producer J. J. Abrams, who brought Giacchino in to score the spy series 'Alias' in 2001. Three years later, Giacchino wrote the music for 'Lost', and for that show he used pieces of an airplane fuselage as percussion. The same year, director Brad Bird hired him for 'The Incredibles' after John Barry turned the project down, and Giacchino's superhero score earned two Grammy nominations.
The Pixar partnership deepened with 'Ratatouille' in 2007, for which Giacchino wrote the song 'Le Festin' and received his first Oscar nomination. Two years later, 'Up' won him the Academy Award for Best Original Score. It was the first time Pixar had won in that category, and the win marked a shift: a composer who had started with video games and stop-motion basements now stood at the centre of Hollywood's animation golden age.
Giacchino's personality shows up in his track titles, which are full of puns and running jokes. His albums often include pieces called 'World's Worst X', such as 'World's Worst Beach Party' and 'World's Worst Parking Valet'. This playful streak exists alongside a serious work ethic and a family thread: his son Mick is also a composer, and in 2009 Giacchino conducted the orchestra at the 81st Academy Awards, reimagining famous film themes in new arrangements.
He has also stepped behind the camera. Giacchino directed the short film 'Monster Challenge' in 2018 and the Marvel special 'Werewolf by Night' in 2022, writing the music for the latter himself. Now 59, Michael Giacchino has announced his feature directorial debut with a remake of 'Them!' for Warner Bros., a project that brings his childhood instinct for building worlds full circle.