How to Train Your Dragon Composer John Powell Talks Scoring New Movie

It would have been a ludicrous scene if it hadn’t been so dangerous. John Powell, the composer behind Universal’s new live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked, was wearing an ill-fitting gas mask awkwardly over his glasses, not keeping the smoke out at all, and he fumbling around his property, trying to do anything he could to save it from the incoming inferno. 

And yet, the most present thing in his mind was modulating a certain musical cue for the Dragon score that he had been working on a few of hours earlier.

This was early January, and the Palisades fires in Los Angeles had just struck. Powell, one of the biggest composers working, was in the middle of Dragon and initially paid no mind to the warnings.  After all, he had lived in the Palisades for over 20 years, had seen fires start and be put out, warnings issued and rescinded. But this was different, the situation escalating by the hour, then by the minute. He covered vents and holes around the home, cleared paths around the house, and desperately tried to use pool pumps to spray the house, but couldn’t get them to work. 

Powell was exhausted, panicked. Yet he could not stop thinking about the score. “When I’m writing, it’s very hard to get me out of that brain set,” Powell tells The Hollywood Reporter. He admits he might be more than a bit neurodivergent. Probably most composers are, he thinks. How else can you work and rework one bar of music for hours at a time?

Only after persistent and increasingly alarmed texts and calls from his son did he snap out of it. “I can’t do this to my son,” he thought, “I can’t die up here.”

So, with only his two poodles and a 12 terabyte backup drive containing every single piece of music he had ever written, Powell hightailed it out of his hilltop home, down to Sunset Boulevard and past homes engulfed in raging fires.

Around 30 of the 60 homes on his street would burn down. His home was spared, although he still has not returned to live there as it is being remediated for smoke damage, burnt fences, and other property loss.

In the days after, Powell did not let go of the music in his head. By the weekend, he was ensconced in a Santa Monica studio run by fellow composer Hans Zimmer, working on the score. Afterall, he had only a month before an orchestra was scheduled to record the music. “It wasn’t like I could call Universal and say, can we move the recording dates and the mixing dates and the release date? I have a responsibility to make sure that I get the music done on time,” says the composer.

Apart from that, in the weeks that followed, working on the score became a balm from the horrific aftermath of the fire and his own housing situation, as he moved from Airbnb to Airbnb. “You’ve just got the work in front of you, and that becomes the most important thing at that moment, which is slightly sad to say, but it’s a useful thing under those sort of circumstances,” the composer says.

Powell, born in London to an exacting father who was a session player, has composed dozens of scores since 1997, when he moved to Los Angeles. Initially much of his work involved collaborating with other composers (he worked with Harry Gregson-Williams on the first Shrek movie and with Zimmer on the first two Kung Fu Panda movies). He also became a go-to scorer for filmmakers such as Doug Liman and Paul Greengrass.

But it was his score for Dragon, the 2010 DreamWorks Animation movie that has made a lasting impact with movie fans. The music, intimate and bombastic, grounded and soaring, was goosebump-inducing and transcendent, giving emotional resonance to the awe of becoming friends with a dragon or the raw thrill of riding one. (At the recent Los Angeles premiere of the live-action version, members of the audience erupted into cheers and claps when the cues “Test Drive” and “Astrid Goes for Spin” kicked in during beloved sequences.) Hollywood, too, noted in approval, handing him the first of his two Oscar nominations for his music in the original film.

So integral is he to the Dragon world that when filmmaker Dean DeBlois decided to tackle the minefield-laden job of turning his animated movies into a live-action film, Powell was the first he called.

“I told him to talk me out of it, if he thought the remake was a bad idea,” DeBlois recalled. “But John saw the same potential that I did; he believed that if we made a live action version with love and respect for the fan base, it could end up being a nostalgic hug for existing fans and a whole new experience for a new generation. So, he said: ‘If you’re in, I’m in.’”

For the new Dragon, Powell had the unique task of revisiting his own work, composed more 15 years earlier. Some would look at the job and think it would easy, just cut and paste. But it turned out to be incredibly hard, as he had to honor what director and writer Dean DeBlois was making, a live-action movie whose storytelling tones and filmmaking techniques — such as editing — were different than the first movie. 

“Everything from tempos, keys, orchestration threads through things slightly differently. Different pacing, different approaches, different emphasis in places,” he says. “It just took an awful lot of massaging and managing and chipping away at it. I feel like I did about three months of sanding.”

Powell already had a leg up on animation versus live-action scoring division. He worked on the earliest of DreamWorks animation movies, including the first Shrek, and recalls then-head Jeffrey Katzenberg telling him and Gregson-Williams that they should treat animation as live-action.

“He didn’t want what was considered the cliches of animation at the time,” Powell recalls. “The cliches of animation music changes over the years, but at that time, he said he didn’t want us to be too, as he called  it, Disney,” Powell says. “I think that’s insulting to some of my favorite music of all time, but I knew what he meant. It needed to be just a bit more straight ahead.”

Still, it posed challenges. Every time a camera moves, and the why and when behind it, is a potential new cue, a new note. 

The orchestra recorded the music at Air Studios Lyndhurst in London, with Gavin Greenaway conducting. Composers rarely conduct their own recording sessions, but Powell did step behind the podium to conduct the choir sessions. For a three-day period in March on the Newman Scoring Stage on the Fox Studio lot in Century City, a 60-person choir sang choral texture while scenes played out on a big-screen behind it.

For reasons that have to do with economics, including what some call restrictive contracts with music union American Federation of Musicians and a strained relationship with studios, a good chunk of movie scoring work has fled Los Angeles not just to London, but Vienna, Bratislava and Sydney. Powell wishes the AFM would come up with new options that would give musicians and the studio choices of fee structure that could include buyouts instead of residuals. “Musicians here suffer the same thing that workers in other parts of America do: You can get their work done cheaper in other countries,” he notes.

He was able to do the choir work on the scoring stage thanks to conducing the session himself, thereby saving the studio from conductor costs, and having the performers fall under Screen Actor Guild rules. 

But he acknowledges that scoring orchestras are unique; you can’t just waltz into town and go to the nearest philharmonic. For one thing, sight reading, the ability to play at first or second blush with sheet music, is a must. So is the juggling of one ear in a headphone and the other being used to hear the rest of the ensemble. 

“It’s a whole different set of skills, and if we lose it in LA, it’s very hard to bring it back. So that’s what makes me nervous,” he admits. “I can’t wait until I’ve got another score to bring back here.”

Years ago on the Fox lot, Powell had one of his biggest professional highs, and most embarrassing moments, both involving scoring legend John Williams. 

Powell worked with the man behind Star Wars, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark on 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. While Powell scored most of the movie, Williams was brought in to work on a theme for the title character, who was one of the only leading individuals from the original movies that did not have his own musical theme.

He was thrilled to “spot” the movie with Williams and the filmmakers, spotting being a pre-composing time where one watches the movie, stopping it scene by scene to get a sense of whether or not music should be there, its purpose, where it would start and finish. Powell calls this process “the interrogation of the director,” as he wants to know why a director made the choices they did in the movie, in order to be more in tune, figuratively and literally, with what that person is trying to accomplish. 

“I had done it, what, 63 times before Solo but watching John do it as well, that became quite an education,” Powell says. “He’s much more elegant and subtle about it. He’s not as accusatory as I am, but he still picked out all of the important pieces of information that we needed.”

He pauses to reflect on what he said, then adds, “I mean, basically he was spotting it, and I was listening like a student. It was like spotting the movie with Yoda.”

He said working with Williams left him questioning his abilities as a composer but also with an understanding of the human being behind the legend.

“I realized how far away I was from what he was doing, and then I got to actually work with him and talk to him and see his generosity and kindness, and I eventually had to just come to the conclusion that he’s a composer, exactly like the rest of us,” Powell remarks. “He’s just better.”

Still, that didn’t make him feel any less embarrassed when a few years later, both he and Williams were on the Fox stages working on their respective movies, he on Call of the Wild, Williams on The Rise of Skywalker. Williams seemed to have decided on a spur of the moment visit to say hi to Powell and a recording engineer. Powell had been there days earlier working with a sizeable orchestra on majestic orchestral sounds. That day? He was recording 12 banjo players. 

“He said ‘So, what are you doing out there?’ And I said, ‘I’m recording 12 banjos.’ He didn’t say it, but I could see in his eyes, he looked at me and it was like, ‘why would you ever do that?’” Powell recalls. “I wish he’d been able to walk in while the orchestra was playing something giant and beautiful just so that he’d know that I wasn’t just the guy who did 12 banjos.”

Judging by Dragon’s box office and the fan base, banjos are the farthest things from audience’s ears. No offense to banjos.