12 Monkeys Found Its Composer By Flipping A Coin

Paul Buckmaster was a well-known presence in the rock world, having worked on orchestrations with David Bowie, The Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Guns N’ Roses, Taylor Swift, The Rolling Stones, Celine Dion, and several others. In film, Buckmaster had performed songs for Roman Polanski’s “Macbeth,” Harry Nilsson’s terrible oddity “Son of Dracula,” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” “12 Monkeys” was to be his first film composition work for a project that wasn’t a musical or starring a musician. 

Thomas Newman, meanwhile, was already a prolific composer by 1995, having written the scores to notable films like “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Real Genius,” “The Lost Boys,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “The Player,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and dozens of others. He was nimble, prolific, and talented. It was Madeleine Stowe who mentioned Newman to Gilliam, as she heard he was having trouble deciding on a composer. Gilliam loved Newman, which posed an issue as to whom he should hire. Stowe tells the story thus:

“We were discussing who he wanted to score it. I said, ‘Please, please look at this fellow named Thomas Newman.’ I was a huge Thomas Newman fan. Terry said, ‘Well, I’ve already kind of committed [to Buckmaster],’ but he met him. They flew him to London, and he fell in love with Thomas. So he didn’t know what to do. The way he had to choose between the two men, was he flipped a coin.” 

Given the off-kilter tone of “12 Monkeys,” perhaps a composer from the non-film world was more appropriate than a more “traditional” film composer. Apologies to Stowe, however, who lost her preferred composer in the coin flip. Buckmaster would only compose one other movie, and it was, curiously, “Most Wanted” in 1997. Newman, meanwhile, went on to score films for Pixar and the James Bond franchise.