James Newton Howard — Movie Scores, Soundtracks & Filmography

The essay

Reading James Newton Howard

Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.

Why this filmmaker matters

James Newton Howard has 0 scores in the Nutevio catalogue. James Newton Howard (born June 9, 1951) is an American film composer, orchestrator and music producer. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and nine nominations for Academy Awards. His film scores include Pretty Woman (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Dinosaur (2000), The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel The Dark Knight (2008) (both composed with Hans Zimmer), Michael Clayton(2007) and the Fantastic Beasts trilogy (2016–2022). He has collaborated extensively with directors M. Night Shyamalan and Francis Lawrence, scoring eight of Shyamalan's films since The Sixth Sense (1999) and all of Lawrence's films since I Am Legend (2007). He has also worked with other directors such as Edward Zwick, Michael Hoffman, P.J. Hogan, Andrew Davis, Lawrence Kasdan, Joe Johnston, Taylor Hackford, Ivan Reitman, Joel Schumacher, and David Yates. Description above from the Wikipedia article James Newton Howard, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Signature style

The recognisable elements are rewatchability, visual style, originality. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same eye, re-tuned for different registers. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is staged.

Legacy

Howard set terms other filmmakers now work against: the structures, the pacing and the refusal to explain. Awards bodies have often been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.