"Music in movies isn't just music. It's storytelling," explains the composer Michael Giacchino. "You have to be a storyteller in order to be a film composer."

As a storyteller, Giacchino began cutting his teeth early on. "I grew up making movies," he reminisces. "That's all I ever did, from 9 years old all through college." Growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, his father also instilled in him a love for world music. "My dad had a great record collection — Martin Denny, Esquivel!, Arthur Lyman, albums from Mexico, from Russia, from all over the world — and I just loved it."

"At the time, I was not thinking that this would be a tool for me to use later on. It was just something I enjoyed listening to and using in the movies I was making," Giacchino says. "That was a left turn later in life, when music sort of took over."

Giacchino received his first Oscar nomination in 2008 — Best Original Score for Ratatouille — and won the Oscar in 2010 with his old-fashioned waltz score for Disney and Pixar's Up. (It was the first Disney film to win Best Original Score since 1995's Pocahontas, and the first Pixar film ever to do so.)

"When I got up on the stage, I remember that I thought about my friends growing up who I used to make movies with," he reflects. "I remembered how much fun we used to have doing that together, and also how some of my friends didn't have parents like mine. My parents were always like, 'You want to make a movie? I have no idea how to make a movie, but here's a movie camera that was sitting in your dad's drawer.' They were so supportive of all the crazy artistic things that I wanted to do."

Over the past decade, Giacchino has been one of the industry's most prolific composers, having written scores for The Batman, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and War for the Planet of the Apes, to name a few. (He has also stepped behind the camera to direct, and will make his feature debut with a new take on the 1954 monster movie, Them!) His latest film score is for Spanish director J. A. Bayona's survival thriller, Society of the Snow.

"As a musician, movies really are the one place where you can dip into all of the different variations and different cultures of music from around the world, because you never know what kind of movie you're going to be working on," he muses. "All those influences [from my childhood] eventually came flooding back to me when I started working on things like Ratatouille, or Up, or The Incredibles, or Coco. Even the classical music I listened to growing up influenced a lot of what I did in Star Trek and in Spider-Man."

Below, Giacchino shares with A.frame five of his personal favorite film scores.

This article was originally published on Oct. 27, 2020 and has been updated throughout.