On landing his first major scoring gig:
“My career seems more like a series of incremental steps rather than one or two big ones. There was no overnight success for me, it has just been a culmination of decades of perseverance, but I think the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I collaborated on with Hans Zimmer, was a turning point for me. Something clicked, you could say. Not just musically, although that rock-and-roll-orchestra approach suited me, but my process and my way of relating to filmmakers changed on that movie as well. I got along with Gore Verbinski, and I emerged from that score a much more marketable composer than I was before it.
That was in part because Hans was generous in telling people what I had written. There’s no mystery with him. He just said straight to his director “you can thank Geoff for that” if they liked something I wrote. Pirates exposed my talents to Gore, to Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, each of whom have hired me in my own right since then.”
