Henry Jackman interview: On ‘Battlefield 6’, memories of ‘X-Men: First Class’ and Hans Zimmer’s dojo of composers Latest Entertainment News

It’s been one battle after another for Henry Jackman. The British composer, best known for scoring X-Men: First Class, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Kingsman: The Secret Service, and many more, now finds himself behind one of gaming’s longest-running war machines. Battlefield 6, the latest installment in EA’s military saga, carries a legacy of heavy musical artillery. Since its debut in 2002, the franchise’s main theme — a brassy, march-like motif known to millions of players (for its much-alluded similarity to the Terminator theme) — is a defining part of its long history of pixelated warfare. Jackman’s task was to rebuild it for a newer generation. But when asked about any influences from past war epics, his first thoughts drift to childhood movie reruns.

“I guess the kind of war films I might have seen that would have been really formative growing up would be kind of old school — Bridge Over the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare,” he says. “And The Great Escape — they used to play that every Christmas in England.”

Those films, he says, belonged to more clear-cut expectations. “It was a morally simple war where everyone wanted to defeat the Nazis,” he explains. “They’re always very clear cut. The Americans and the UK and everyone who was an ally, including India, are the good guys. And it’s clear who the bad guys are.”

Modern war stories by contrast, occupy murkier terrain. “When you get a much more modern movie like Black Hawk Down, it’s not really simple,” he says. “It’s a messy situation in Somalia. It’s a much more visceral, complicated thing. In a way, that kind of movie is a little bit more like Battlefield, because it’s about the adrenaline and the almost physical impossibility of the situation you find yourself in.”

For Jackman, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down remains a touchstone — “great,” he calls it, because it refused any sense of triumphalism. He also mentions Sam Mendes’ 1917, admiring Thomas Newman’s score. “It almost has a spiritual quality,” he says. “It was doing a very different job in that movie.”

The music of Battlefield, he points out, carries its own historical freight. “The very first original theme is a little bit more like some of those traditional, stoic, rousing fanfares,” he says. “It definitely has a hint of patriotism about it.” The challenge then, was to honor that legacy without becoming hostage to it.

“When you’re lucky enough to be invited into a process, whether it’s Captain America or Battlefield, you’d have to be extraordinarily arrogant not to think about the heritage,” he says. “It’s not just all the work that’s gone into it. It’s the fanbase that have interacted with it. People playing the game are part of the culture of it and their reactions to it develop a sort of ecosystem of interaction. You ignore that at your own peril.”

To “cover himself,” as he puts it, Jackman began his Battlefield 6 soundtrack with its main theme, which was a bold deconstruction of the classic motif. “I just wanted to simplify the theme and come up with a new B section for it,” he says. “Knowing that some people would go, ‘Yeah, that was kind of interesting — but where’s the original one with every single note exactly how I remember it?’”

For those diehards, he offers a reprise in the Warsaw Theme. “It’s a really good example of what you might call ‘just play the theme down.’” And the result, he believes, finds a delicate equilibrium. “If you stick too much to familiarity, then you’re not really pushing the boat out enough,” he says. “But if you launch off in such a new direction that you leave everyone behind, then you’re just being arrogant. Somewhere between the two, I think we’ve done quite well.”

When Jackman describes the project’s conceptual cornerstone — destruction — he does so with a craftsman’s relish. He recalls “overdriving stuff, distorting stuff, crunching stuff,” letting that single word justify every sonic act of violence. “At first, I thought, that’s such a simple word,” he admits. “But it ended up being an amazing keyword when I was building all the textures, the synths, the drums.” 

The score’s stealthier stretches feature those tense, pulsing undercurrents familiar to anyone who’s spent too long crouching behind digital rubble, that came from a different set of instincts. “Stealth and espionage is definitely a strain in this franchise,” he says. “But it’s tricky, because video game gameplay is not the same as watching a movie. You need to hold the tension musically, but you can’t dissipate it by using a descriptive melody that makes you think, ‘Oh, we won’, or ‘Oh, we lost’”.

He also compares the structure to Lego. “You have to think of things horizontally. Elements can be added or subtracted, and the piece keeps going. Because a player could play for an indeterminate amount of time in a scene, whereas a movie has a fixed amount of time.”

Before he was put in charge of Battlefield, Jackman gave a generation its first taste of superhero melancholy with his evocative score for X-Men: First Class. It was the first time many of us had heard a comic-book film sound so wounded. The music carried a kind of evocative swagger laced with grief, especially in moments with James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier and Michael Fassbender’s Erik Lehnsherr. Those formative moments between the future rivals split the X-Men world in two, and it was Jackman’s almost mournful motifs that made it hurt in all the right ways. 

Jackman seems genuinely touched by the film’s continued following. “At the time, you’re just working super hard,” he says. “You don’t really have retro thoughts like that.” Still, he’s aware that something about that score resonated. “After I did First Class, that score kept turning up a lot in temps for other superhero movies around similar themes [of Cold War tension and espionage],” he says. “They’d go, ‘Well, why don’t we just get the guy who did X-Men: First Class?’”, he chuckles.

Jackman also credits Hans Zimmer for reshaping the sound of the genre. “Hans redefined the whole universe with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight,” he says. “He pioneered a completely different superhero way of doing things.” His own First Class theme, he suspects, struck “a little sweet spot” between melody and modernity (or the point between rage and serenity if you may). “Maybe it had some Philip Glass-y ostinato influence from the Dark Knight world,” he muses. “But it also had this kind of long, heroic melody that was a bit more fulfilled, because The Dark Knight was darker. Whereas in First Class, they were kind of teenagers trying to find their superpowers.”

Now, Battlefield 6 finds him in grittier terrain, though collaboration remains the through-line. One of the album’s most unexpected highlights is a track featuring Limp Bizkit. “It was just the coolest day,” he recalls. “They all showed up with immense humility. I was thinking maybe they’d want to do a brand-new track, but they went, ‘No, let’s work on the piece you’ve put together.’”

The resulting Aftermath Party is his favorite version of the main theme. “It made me really appreciate how you’ve got to listen and collaborate,” he says. “Because it’s not something I immediately thought of, it was someone else’s idea. And it worked out beautifully.”

That willingness to share space extends beyond music sessions. Jackman speaks warmly of the informal fraternity among composers who once passed through Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. I dubbed it “Hans’s dojo” and Jackman seems to agree.

“It was a remarkable education,” Jackman says. “Every day felt like a masterclass in storytelling through sound. People who are successful are quite often naturally rivals, but what Hans achieved at RCP means that Harry Gregson-Williams, John [Powell], Lorne [Balfe] or me — it doesn’t feel like that. Hans created this extended ‘dojo’ that continues that feeling of brotherhood to this day, which is quite a legacy to have.”