James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, set to release on July 11, 2025, will explore Clark Kent’s journey as he reconciles his alien heritage with his human upbringing. Composers John Murphy and David Fleming took time off to share their experience of working on James Gunn’s Superman film exclusively with Filmfare.
They shared their insights on how they approached the iconic Superman theme, balancing the legacy of the original theme and also creating something new and fresh with it. A huge responsibility at hand, the duo also explained the process behind composing the soundtrack thanks to the rich legacy of the Superman franchise and shared how they went about their creative process which had its own set of challenges. Scroll down to read the full interview…
John Murphy: James is a DC fan, and when you know him, you realize you can’t have a conversation with him without him suddenly getting excited about something that he’s just thought of or that they’re about to do. He’s just a very infectiously enthusiastic guy and he loves this stuff, so any conversations we had were always animated. Just to be doing another movie with him was enough of a reason to do this anyway, but the fact that it was Superman, I mean, it doesn’t really get any bigger than that. Your head’s spinning thinking, it’s gonna be a James Gunn movie, but it’s a Superman movie, what’s this magic? Then you start thinking about the music and the history, that beautiful, iconic John Williams’ score, and there was a lot to take in on the first call. But soon as you know it’s happening, then you go into that preparation mode and there’s no time to get nervous about it. The excitement is spilling over. The conversations we had were all very creative and, “Can we get away with this? Could we try that? What if we…” It was very exciting.
David Fleming: It’s a crazy honor and very cool, especially as somebody who grew up really loving comics. The first comics I can remember reading were actually the Death of Superman graphic novels. I used to just read those front to back all the time and they really opened the door into both Superman and the superhero world in general. James’s take in particular was so exciting because I could tell he truly understands the magic of the comics, and this film really gets to the core truth of the character of Superman.
John Murphy: That was the thing that was always at the front of my mind, because we knew quite early on that it was an amazing opportunity to start a whole new story and a whole new world, especially knowing that it was going to be borrowing more from the actual comic books rather than previous movies. That’s what the beautiful thing was, that I knew James was going back to the well. And we both had this love of John’s original score. For our generation, those themes are baked into our DNA. And James was incredibly respectful, but he was kind of testing the water, which I loved him for because he didn’t have to. And I was like, yeah, we should do that, you know, let’s try it. Because we just wanted to show our love for it. It’s, it’s an amazing, iconic score, and we both were on board from the get-go. But the challenge then obviously is when you have something that precious, let’s not overuse this. Let’s find the perfect moments, let’s be respectful. That was the difficult thing, because the amount of times I thought, are we over doing this now? Or should I be really playing that on electric guitar? Am I going to composer hell for this? [LAUGHS] There was a lot of second guessing and wondering if we were being respectful enough.
