KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES Composer John Paesano Brings A New Sound With His Latest Score And Pays Homage To Jerry Goldsmith’s Iconic Music From The 1968 Movie

By Michelle McCue | May 14, 2024

Photo: Todd Williamson

An all-new action-adventure spectacle, 20th Century Studios’ “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is directed by Wes Ball and stars Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon, and William H. Macy. The film is written by Josh Friedman, based on characters created by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver, and the producers are Wes Ball, Joe Hartwick, Jr., p.g.a., Rick Jaffa, p.g.a., Amanda Silver, p.g.a., Jason Reed, p.g.a., with Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping serving as executive producers.

Wes Ball breathes new life into the global epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously, and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all he has known about the past and make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.

The creative team on “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” includes two key creatives director/producer Wes Ball worked with on the “Maze Runner” films: director of photography Gyula Pados (“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”) and production designer Daniel T. Dorrance (“A Good Day to Die Hard”), both who would help envision and shape this brave new world with Ball. The team also includes film editors Dan Zimmerman, ACE (“The Omen”), and Dirk Westervelt, ACE (“Logan”), visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist (“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”), costume designer Mayes C. Rubeo (“Blue Beetle”), movement coach Alain Gauthier, and stunt coordinator Glenn Suter (“Mad Max: Fury Road”).

Scored by acclaimed composer John Paesano, the album, available on all digital platforms, captures the sound and fury of the all-new action-adventure spectacle of the summer. This past weekend the film came in over expectations with a $58.5M opening (Deadline)

Some of Paesano’s notable credits include Marvel’s “Daredevil,” (interview) and 20th Century Fox’s “The Maze Runner” Trilogy. His scores for PlayStation’s “Spider-Man” and “Miles Morales” have received seven best score nominations, along with a BAFTA win for “Spider-Man: Miles Morales” and BAFTA nomination for “Spider-Man 2”.

Paesano collected an Annie Award for best music for his work on the DreamWorks animated series “Dragons: Riders of Berk,” based on the Academy Award® nominated film “How to Train Your Dragon,” as well as a World Soundtrack Award for his score to the well-received young adult adaptation of “The Maze Runner.” He went on to complete the hugely successful trilogy, creating equally impressive scores for “The Scorch Trials” and “The Death Cure”. His recent scores for the Ethan Hawke-led “Tesla” and for the John Logan and Sam Mendes-produced “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” are a testament to his range and ability to craft scores to the project’s needs, whether for large scale franchise films or intimate character-driven dramas. He continues work on the critically acclaimed Amazon series “Invincible”.

We caught up with KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES’ composer after the film’s debut.

During our conversation, we discussed his hero Jerry Goldsmith, carving his own path forward for this next chapter, delving into Goldsmith’s techniques while honoring him, being schooled in the college of the famed composer and the ever present “what would Jerry do?”

LISTEN: SPOTIFY |  APPLE

WAMG: I’ve got ten words for you. “Thematic elements from Planet of the Apes by Jerry Goldsmith.”  The “Human Hunt” track from your score and then the return to the essence of the 1968, iconic Jerry Goldsmith score, and his track “The Hunt” were amazing. When we were at the fan screening, I could hear people react in the audience. For those of us who caught it, the horn section, the percussion, it put people over the edge. And I talked to people in California afterwards, they were like, did you hear the Jerry Goldsmith score? And nevermind, the winks to the original movie with the “scarecrows”. What made you and Wes Ball go in this direction?

John Paesano: It’s funny, it actually worked out the way we wanted it to. You know, there’s really only like a minute and 30 seconds that’s more directly quoting the actual Jerry Goldsmith.

JP: Jerry just created such a really cool sound for those films. And he also created an actual language for the music. I mean, he really did. I could get really technical with you about it. But what he did with the PLANET OF THE APES film, he wrote it in a style that was called serialism and what you do with this style is you basically create your own scale, a musical scale, and there’s rules that you have to adhere to. His PLANET OF THE APES scale is famously known as a Tone Row and basically what this did is it kind of created a framework for this sonic landscape that we could play in. So we didn’t necessarily have to really use his actual motifs, but we were able to kind of borrow from the language he created and write the score using that language. It was really interesting because it allowed us basically to kind of sonically play. We were able melodically to do what we wanted to do with the score.  And as long as we latched onto this language that he created, it gave us the best of both worlds, so we were really able to kind of capture the essence of what he created in 1968, but kind of bring it with arrangement and the sonic stuff that audiences are used to today into that world sonically. If you listen to the 1968 score, it’s incredible, but sonically, it just wouldn’t fit with everything we’re dealing with today in these films, with the giant sound effects and the visuals and everything. We still wanted to have that kind of big cinematic scope and for 1968, his score did that.

But today, it’s just such a different landscape visually and sonically that we needed to try to figure out ways, like… how do we capture the essence of what Jerry created but bring it into the 21st century? That was definitely the goal of the score, just in general. And then also, the one other thing we really had to think about in this process was we had this huge fan base that was coming over from Patrick Doyle’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and Michael Giacchino‘s DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES & WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES.

And we knew we had to figure out a way to honor that franchise and because we were coming off of this Matt Reeves canon, we knew that we wanted to bring along those fans as well. So it was kind of a delicate dance of, obviously, Wes Ball and I being such huge film score geeks and having so much respect with what came before us with Jerry’s score and then knowing that Wes is always so good at honoring the fan base and making sure that he’s always very close to the fan base.  He came to me with the assignment of, “hey, we need somehow to be one third Jerry, one third Michael, and the rest is yours” type of thing. And so it was up to me to figure out a way to thread this needle, and at the same time. 

This film, and I can’t stress this enough, more than anything, this film is so much different than DAWN and WAR. They were all about of apes living in a human world and this film is just about apes. It’s not such an internal struggle with Noa as it was with Caesar, you know what I mean? Michael’s score for those original films are incredible, but they’re so emotional and our score, it couldn’t operate on the same level. Wes was very, very adamant about making sure that the audience felt like they were there, living and breathing in this new world.

He was really conscious of the world building, so our score wasn’t going to be this kind of music forward, very emotive sound. It was more about creating. We didn’t want to distract, you know, scores have a tendency to kind of push the audience out and make them feel like a viewer. Sometimes films are very score forward, meaning the score is kind of leading the charge with the dialogue. Wes really wanted the score to live behind dialogue, behind the environment, because he wanted the audience to feel very immersed in this kind of world that he created. And it was hard for me at first. I love that Giacchino score and I wanted to get our score with all this emotive music really up front. And then Wes said, “you’re gonna have to do what’s right for this picture.” The funny thing was, it was totally the right choice.

As a composer,  if it was up to me, I want all the dialogue off and all the sound turned off, and I just want to hear music. That’s why directors are in charge of the film and not composers. Honestly, same with Wes, too. Wes loves scores. John Williams is a hero of his. It really showed, how for him, it’s not about what he wants. It’s about what the project is going to give us, so he was so good at making sure that not just me, but every single department knew where they needed to fit in this puzzle of his vision and it was tricky, because the other really crazy thing about this film that was interesting is that I almost had to score it like it was a 1968 film because I didn’t really have fully realized picture until the final weeks. Scores have become so visual these days because composers can sit there, they can see the film, they put it in their timeline and their computer, and they can kind of write to picture. And this film, honestly, it was like working on a 1968 film where we didn’t have the luxury of seeing all this footage and these final, realized shots because the visual effects process takes so long.  I almost had to write the score like Jerry probably had to write the score for the original film by looking at little pieces of footage. 

We really wrote the score more based on production art, based on conversations that I would have with Wes about the characters. That’s how the old film score process used to work. When John Williams scored STAR WARS, it’s not like he could just throw the footage into his laptop and look at it and write to it. He had to create that score, basically from conversations and themes and suites. If you notice on the soundtrack I have, there’s a lot of cues that are in there on that soundtrack that you don’t really hear in the film, but they’re the suites. I can think of some very specific ones, like “Memories of Home” and “Together Strong” and the opening cue, “Discovery” suite. All these cues, were cues that the score was born out of, but they were written based from an old school scoring process. 

It’s kind of interesting because in this day and age, where you’re working on such a technically advanced film, as composers, we almost have to kind of go back to a more primitive process when we’re doing these films. It’s an interesting kind of concept that you would think the further along we got, the process would become more technical, but you actually have to use your imagination more. And I think the one great thing that comes from that is it just makes the scores just more musical. At the end of the day, if you look on that soundtrack, it’s not like you see a bunch of 30 second cues.

They are six minutes long.

JP: They are really kind of drawn out musical ideas and that’s how old film scores used to be. They were very musical. And you look at a lot of modern scores day, you’ll see cues that are like, 50 seconds long, 30 seconds, and because people are just writing to the scene. They aren’t writing from a larger idea. It’s very, very similar process in video games. They’re very, very visual effects heavy as well.

This is your fourth film with Wes Ball. Oddly enough, when you and I talked about MAZE RUNNER, because I pulled up the old interview that we had done because you and I, everyone was so excited about Maze Runner, and you said, “it’s been one of the most previewed soundtrack on Sony’s Soundcloud page. It beat X-Men and it beat Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” which I thought was really exciting, looking back on your quote, what you said, and you also mentioned that you were such a big fan of Goldsmith.

When were you brought on the project?

JP: I think before the project, honestly, was even greenlit And it’s just kind of a collaboration. Whether it’s Michael Giacchino and Matt Reeves or whether it’s Steven Spielberg and John Williams, composers tend to pair up with somebody, and the film scoring process is such a time consuming endeavor just because oftentimes you really got to kind of go, you have to figure out what doesn’t work before you find what works. And it’s a process.

And I think directors and composers alike find the job much more creative and rewarding when you have that shorthand and when you have that comfort level. When Wes comes to me with an idea, it’s not like I’m sitting there going like, okay, well, let’s get a contract signed and let’s start. No, we’re just. We’re playing. You know what I mean?

We’ll sort that stuff on down the road at some point, or agents are dealing with it.  We’re just like kids who are just playing, basically. And that’s a huge luxury, not just for myself, but also for Wes, someone who’s so busy juggling 30 other things in the process.

When we did MAZE RUNNER, Wes and I spent tons and tons of time together in the studio and going through stuff and playing things and talking, and on APES, Wes was gone. He was in New Zealand, he was in Australia. He was in studio meetings. He didn’t have time for me. But it also gave him the comfort level that he didn’t need to spend time with me because 90% of our work was done before he went off and shot. I think that’s why you see those relationships starting to happen. I was on KINGDOM very, very early in the process. 

Some of my favorite cues from KINGDOM are the beautiful soft tracks, “The Climb”, “Noa’s Purpose” and “Eagle Clan.”

JP: Eagle Clan is another suite that was actually in the movie, that whole cue was born out of the cue called “Memories of Home”.  And then we also have a big heroic version of that cue in “Ape Aquatics”.

When you and I talked about MAZE RUNNER, you said you went out, you recorded natural sounds from the area. Once again, I could hear the big oil drums with this score, like previously, lots of brass, percussive. Did you take the same approach again? 

JP: It was more about delving into Jerry’s techniques. It was really important to me to make sure that I honored him. That original 1968 Planet of the Apes film was so groundbreaking and really broke the mold in my industry of film scoring and what you could do with film scoring. It was so avant garde in the time when he wrote that score, it was so untraditional for Hollywood at the time that, I mean, it was nominated for an Academy Award.

(Planet of the Apes garnered two Academy Award nominations including one for Best Original Score for Goldsmith – although he did win for THE OMEN).

It was just a very well respected, not just a great score, but also just a very groundbreaking score. It was important for Wes and I to really kind of understand what he did, why he did it, and what he used and he collaborated on that score with a world famous percussionist named Emil Richards.

They collaborated and really, really got heavily into avant garde percussion and extended, unique techniques.  I’m talking about a xylophone made out of turtle shells and lots of prepared piano things and very unique percussion instruments. As a matter of fact, when I started the process, one of the first things we did is we went to a warehouse here in Los Angeles called L.A. Percussion Rentals https://www.lapercussionrentals.com/  and they have his whole percussion collection there that he used on Planet of the Apes. We were really able to go there and research the instruments, listen to them played and how they sound, and then we were able to kind of extract a lot of that DNA.

When we went to Australia to record the score, we really had a good idea of the sound palette and that world that we wanted to use, so it was a lot of little things like that. It was the most research I had ever done on a score and when you work on these franchise films, you kind of have a choice to make. You either completely ignore everything that came before you and just do your own thing or you have to play the game of studying to find what it was that made it successful. And on a franchise like Apes, it’s just so hard to ignore that musical legacy just because it’s such a huge part of the film that I really wanted to make sure that we were really kind of buttoned up when it came to understanding kind of Jerry’s intention and kind of what he did in order to accomplish it.  It was a lot more of that, than trying to find the field recordings.

I think the trick on this soundtrack was really trying to figure out how we take what Jerry did, extract from it, do our own thing, and also bring it kind of into the 21st century here.

You’re in some really good company for this kind of iconic franchise. I mean, Danny Elfman did Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES. Michael Giacchino did DAWN and WAR. When I spoke with Patrick Doyle for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, he also realized the opportunity to work on such an iconic franchise.

The thematic sounds came from this organic source. He used a lot of, like you, lots of percussion, and he even went and listened to recordings of real apes. You’ve worked on franchises now with such devout fan bases like “Invincible”, like MAZE RUNNER and now APES. What goes on in your head when composing for such popular series? Does it ever cross your mind, I‘ve gotta get this right?

JP: This one did for me more than most of them because it came along with a hero of mine. Jerry Goldsmith is a hero of mine. He was somebody that I had grown up listening to when I was a little kid and I’ve had a chance to work on a couple projects now that are really heavily influenced by him. One of them was a film called My All-American , directed by Angelo Pizzo, who had written Hoosiers and written Rudy. He had a very close relationship with Jerry and he wanted Jerry Goldsmith to do his scores. But obviously, Jerry had been gone. And that was someone that I worked with that directly worked with him.

It was really interesting to work with him and go through that process. I had to delve into Rudy, I had to delve into Hoosiers and then another in the same kind of process that I did with Apes, the other series that I had worked on that was very heavily influenced by Jerry was “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels”, which is very heavily influenced by the Chinatown score that Jerry had done, too. So I feel I’ve done my masters on Jerry Goldsmith and this was my thesis to do this film. The trick on this film is we couldn’t go full straight Jerry on it. If it was up to me, I would have, honestly.

But it was interesting, sound and palette wise, we really had to carve our own path to a degree and try to, like I said, the trick was trying to figure out a way to bring as much Jerry along as we possibly could.  “Human Hunt” is a great example.  I extracted as much Jerry DNA as I could, but, like Patrick, the one thing that I had done prior to working on this film was I really studied primates and their relationship with music, and I stumbled across a study at Emory University that was about primates and music. The one thing from this study that I extracted was whenever primates listened, whenever they were exposed to traditional western music, music that had been done in 4/4 and 2/4, common time music, they hated it. It literally drove them crazy. They would go to other parts of the enclosure. They would try to get as far away from the sound source as possible. And then whenever they were exposed to music that was non-western music, let’s say, whether it be Indian music or African or music that was kind of done in non, and I’m using these time signatures, non common time, 4/4 or 2/4 time signatures that are very common in western music. They started getting this music that was non 4/4 and they loved it. They would gravitate towards it.

The steadiness of this 4/4 rhythm, they hated it. It just drove them crazy. When I went to do the “Marauders” theme, I wanted to make sure that I did it in a non-traditional time signature. Now, Jerry’s original time signature for “The Hunt” was traditional. It was 4/4. But when I did it, I made sure that we did it in 11/8. It had a different rhythmic element to it. Even though we were kind of borrowing a lot of, especially for the first 30 seconds, we’re really borrowing a lot of his structure. Besides, we’re beefing it up, but we also made sure that we were using different time signatures as well, so the “Marauders” thematic elements that you kind of hear when they’re trying to open the door or when they’re first riding into the village.

That “Marauder” scene is all done in 11/8, so that kind of became their thematic element as well, and that kind of came from this combination like you were talking about with Patrick, kind of listening to the vocalization of groups or what he kind of did with them, that was kind of our little thing that we brought to it as well. It was just trying to take Jerry’s creative spirit and trying to bring it into the process as well.

It’s hard to really work on a project like Planet of the Apes without trying to bring him along with you. My orchestrator and I came up with a phrase, whenever we would be doing something, I would say to him, I don’t know, this just feels a little bit odd. He would say to me, well, what would Jerry do? And that’s how we would work. And then there’d be times he’d say this isn’t working, but double back with what would Jerry do? It would always be the thing that I wouldn’t want to do.

Jerry just had all this confidence to write a score like that in 1968, I mean, you had to have a lot of confidence. I would say that with his scores, just in general, he always had this amazing bravery to kind of go and compose. And it’s probably the hardest thing as a composer… It’s not about the notes, it’s about having the confidence to do something different and sometimes just a single piano note in a scene is more brave than writing a big orchestral  movement. I’ll say this about Michael, and I’ll say this about Jerry. I’ll say it about John Williams. The one thing that separates these composers from just other composers, as I always say, they’re not just composers. They’re also filmmakers. These guys are so good at looking at picture and knowing what it needs.

In an interview, Goldsmith said, “Music is adding a character to the picture both psychologically and emotionally and for the composer to be in tune with the filmmaker it’s what we’re both trying to accomplish together is the major number one task the next one is to come up with a musical interpretation of our discussions and our ideas and how to make the music as a piece of architecture within the film itself this is not scattered pieces of music in the film but it’s all related thematically and it has to be tied together.”

It’s not so much about them showing everybody what they can do musically. It’s just about supplying what the picture needs. Hans Zimmer, same thing. It’s very easy for composers to go, that piece of music is so simple, but it’s because that’s what the scene needs. It doesn’t need anything else but that. All those composers, the greats, and there’s been plenty on this franchise, are all so good.

Michael’s score is a great example of that. Michael’s score is so simple and beautiful. What’s the one thing I noticed when I started working with these characters? That the minute you got too cute with them or too fancy with the music it just turned into THE JUNGLE BOOK. It turned into this over saccharine thing and I just kept having to simplify and simplify and simplify.  I understood why Michael’s brilliant score was the way it was.

It was still hugely cinematic and amazing, but it was so simple and it fits so well, and it was just so emotional, because Michael can write really, really intricate, complicated music, like THE INCREDIBLES or Ratatouille. He can write really intricate scores, but he made a choice on this, like a director would make a choice. It was a lot of fun to be able to write a score like this, but there’s so much history, not just with Jerry, but with all the other composers, whether it’s Danny or Michael or Patrick, and tobe able to lean on the legacy of all those guys and follow suit.

Scores have become their own characters in  films. Whether it was John Williams JAWS, you think of a shark. For me, Jerry Goldsmith will always be the starship Enterprise from STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The composer, and the score becomes their own characters. I like how you carved out your own path for this next chapter and I loved how you added these amazing vocalists, which was very different. According to the end credits, you had people out of London and Sydney and Los Angeles, and it added such depth. When did you decide to go with a choir? 

JP: Another interesting thing that Wes and I started really working on early was we had to figure out a way to have these apes singing to these birds. And it was really tricky and the first thing that I thought of was, we have to make this believable because this could get really corny really quick. First of all, these apes are talking more than they talk in any other Ape movie, besides the 1968 version. As far as the Matt Reeves canon goes, these apes are just talking so much and now we’re going to make them sing, too. We were so worried that this could turn into CATS if it gets too out of hand.  The one thing I really wanted to make sure of was that the “Eagle Clan” hymn was very, very, simple and that it was believable enough that an ape could vocalize it. 

The exact opposite of that as humans singing is our first musical instrument that we’ve ever developed, so the singing voice kind of became synonymous with humans. We kind of had this dilemma. We wanted to use the vocals as a way of apes being tied to us, but at the same time, too, it couldn’t be too crazy. But as the movie evolves and during the human hunt, and the scene that happens right before “Human Hunt” when all the humans are coming out of the woods, and she’s kind of seeing what’s happened and how they evolved over time, and she’s got this kind of look on her face like, oh, my God, what has happened to our beings? It’s mostly all choir there and so I really lean on the choir as those sound for the humans. But at the same time, too, the apes are kind of learning to use this voice, this new voice of theirs as well, where they’re singing to the birds, but it’s in a much more primitive style. It’s a very choir, hymnal type of sound and that’s our final cue of the movie. There definitely was an intention of using the voice to tie us to the humans.

I was so pleased when you won the BAFTA Game Awards for “Marvel’s Spider Man.” You compose for video games now, as well as tv and films. You’ve even done the Avengers campus theme for Disney. What else is coming up?

JP: I’m at a point in my career where I really am trying to do more and less. I feel like I went through a point in my career where I was just doing so much that in a weird way, when you start stacking project on top of project on top of project, you almost become less involved and you become more of an overseer. And I feel like the one thing I love about working with Wes and working on film is when I’m working with Wes, I’m not really working on anything else. I’m writing. I’m doing. I’m heavily involved with the whole process. I’m trying to find a kind of new balance where I’m taking on less, but working more intimately on stuff myself.  I think every composer kind of goes through that process, you know, when you’re younger, you’re really kind of churning away.  I feel like I’m at that point in my career now where I have the luxury of not having to do so much, but when I do work, I’m delving just deeper into it. 

There’s a couple things that I am doing. I’m doing Prime Video’s “Invincible” right now. One project, I can tell you, is in the video game world, and the other project is an episodic project I’m just starting on.

The score is amazing. Thank you for discussing your work on the movie and congratulations on the film. 

John Paesano attends the World Premiere of 20TH Century Studios’ “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” at the TCL Chinese Theatre IMAX in Hollywood, CA on Thursday, May 2, 2024 (photo: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)