Jack Dolman has had an extended and various profession working with music and movie, starting as a Technical Rating Engineer at Hans Zimmer’s famend Distant Management Productions, to a contract profession as sound editor and Supervising Music Editor – most lately for the blockbuster movies Depraved and Depraved: For Good.
LV spoke to Jack about his profession, and dealing with film musicals just like the blockbuster collection.
Jack Dolman
Jack Dolman was born in Toronto and raised in Los Angeles. He’s the son of comic, actress, and musical theatre star Andrea Martin, and it’s from her affect that he credit an early love of theatre.
He studied jazz piano at a younger age, and performed in a highschool jazz ensemble in addition to a number of bands all through highschool, persevering with whereas attending Vassar Faculty. Someplace alongside the best way, a love of arithmetic took over his bent for music, and he graduated from the College of Toronto with a Grasp’s diploma. Jack labored as a enterprise marketing consultant for a number of years earlier than the siren’s music of music lured him again.
His profession in music and movie started in 2008 when he started working at Hans Zimmer’s Distant Management Productions because the assistant to movie composer Henry Jackman. His credit from his time at Distant Management embrace working as Technical Rating Engineer on Monsters Vs Aliens, It’s Sophisticated, Gulliver’s Travels, and Kick-Ass, amongst others.
In 2011, he switched his focus to music enhancing, and continued collaborating with Hans Zimmer and Henry Jackson, which led to engaged on scores for movies like Rush, Captain Philips, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Chappie, and Captain America: Civil Conflict over the subsequent 5 years or so.
That physique of expertise, in flip, led to working with filmmakers like Ron Howard, Matthew Vaughn, The Russo Brothers, Paul Greengrass, and others.
In 2015, he left Distant Management to work as a contract music editor for a spread of mission that embrace indie options in addition to main blockbusters, together with working with composers John Powell (Tips on how to Practice Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Solo: A Star Wars Story), Harry Gregson-Williams (Early Man), Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Bones and All), Junkie XL (Level Break), Matthew Margeson (The King’s Man), and Dominic Lewis (Cash Monster). He continued his working relationship with composer Henry Jackson and in flip the Russo Brothers, engaged on movies equivalent to Cherry and The Grey Man.
During the last a number of years, he’s tended to concentrate on film musicals, impressed by his publicity to theatre by way of his mom Andrea Martin, who has gained a number of Tony Awards for Broadway productions. Jack has labored on movies equivalent to Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, and Higher Nate Than Ever.
His most up-to-date tasks embrace performing as Supervising Music Editor on the movie variations of Depraved, collaborating with director Jon M. Chu, composer Stephen Schwartz, and producer Marc Platt, and its sequel Depraved: For Good, launched in theatres on November 21. He garnered his first Academy Award nomination for Greatest Sound for the unique Depraved on the 2025 Oscars.
Jack Dolman: The Interview
Did he have film musicals in thoughts when he started working in movie?
“Effectively , it was an extended development in ranging from movie music,” he says. Working with so many various folks within the film trade led to extra alternatives over time. “Music enhancing is a subject that encompasses plenty of completely different sorts of movies.”
He mentions rising up with the affect of his mom. “She launched me and my brother to musical theatre after I was very younger. So, in my profession as a music editor, when the chance introduced itself to pivot into film musicals, [I took it],” he says. “The opposite factor about this chance is that working with [composer] Stephen Schwartz is one other type of dream to me.”
That dream once more goes again to his early years. Dolman mentions Andrea Martin’s early credit in Godspell, and her Tony Award successful work in Pippin in 2003, each of which have been additionally scored by Stephen Schwartz.
“For me it was plenty of issues coming collectively.” It was a method of carrying on a household legacy.
Engaged on Depraved
“The work of the music editor often begins early on in a film musical,” he explains.
Dolman was concerned with each Depraved and Depraved: For Good from the time filming started in London, UK in December 2022. “My position within the movie began fairly early.”
Because the Supervising Music Editor, placing the music for the movie started within the early levels of growth. The sequences have been put collectively as filming progressed. He labored carefully with director Jon M. Chu and editor Myron Kerstein. As soon as the mission hits post-production stage, the person music editors, who work on the main points of every scene, are introduced into the image.
“The world expands fairly a bit.”
Supervising the work of particular person music editors means being aware of the general imaginative and prescient for the complete film.
“While you’re engaged on a musical that has preexisting materials from the Broadway rating, and on this case with Stephen Schwartz. you’re working with plenty of [different elements],” he says.
Clearly, the movie would work with components from the unique Broadway rating, incorporating the assorted character themes, and weaving them along with music written particularly for the movie to create a type of roadmap for the movie rating as a complete. That’s step one in direction of the ultimate product.
He factors out that the Broadway manufacturing used a pit orchestra of twenty-two musicians. “After we do a movie, we’ve the luxurious on this case of an 80-piece orchestra.”
It means scaling the unique music upwards, with bigger preparations.
“They have been in a position to take the roadmap I had created with Myron and Stephen, and increase on it.”
John Powell is the co-composer of Depraved and Depraved: For Good. “One of many nice issues about John Powell, is, if he wasn’t a movie composer, he’d be writing music for orchestras,” Dolman says.
The result’s a lushly orchestrated soundtrack that hits many various moods and genres. “That was one of many issues he wished to do, and all of us wished to do, was to take the world of Depraved, and never solely increase on it […] but additionally acknowledge the unique 1939 [film].”
Dolman’s position was to juggle all of these components right into a coherent full-length soundtrack. “And make it really feel new and recent for audiences immediately.”
Whereas making films is essentially a collaborative mission, contemplating how one can put issues collectively additionally resulted in plenty of time engaged on his personal. “I spent plenty of time eager about that. And plenty of that’s alone,” he explains. The outcomes have to be seamless from the viewers perspective.
“You’re utilizing the music to weave out and in of songs, and the underscore, in a method that the viewers doesn’t discover,” he provides. “You’re coping with so many components.”
The position of background music within the movie is to supply the emotional underpinning of the story, augmenting the expression of character, but additionally their actions.
“You’re hoping that music usually in a movie establishes the emotional heartbeat of the story itself in a extra omniscient method, and also you’re additionally hoping that it permits you to see the intimate particulars of a personality.”
Typically, that entails taking part in with two completely different views without delay, expressing character, but additionally the viewers’s viewpoint of the story. “In order that the viewers is being simply pulled alongside,” he explains. “I feel the most effective model of movie music is when it’s subtly pulling the viewers alongside,” he provides.
“Particularly within the case of Depraved: For Good, the connection between these two ladies, Elphaba and Glinda, reaches a type of heartbreaking climax.” The movie asks the viewers to share within the second even because it expresses the connection between the 2 characters, a component significantly essential to Depraved.
“You actually need to music to slowly draw a line that takes you thru the film to the tip.”
From Jazz Bands to Film Music to Bach
“Early on, as a teen I all the time performed piano, however I fell in love with improvisation,” Jack says. That led to the highway to jazz. “The harmonies and the limitless infinite risk of that type was so alluring to me. So I used to be undoubtedly seduced by jazz as a younger musician. I suppose it was additionally rebellious.”
That’s what he first studied at college. “I studied it for a very long time, however then I acquired distracted by a love of arithmetic of all issues,” he laughs.
Working with Hans Zimmer introduced his love of music, and his personal music making, again to the fore. He nonetheless performs the piano.
“Now as a musician, I’m taking part in Bach greater than something,” he says. “I’m attempting to be taught the Goldberg Variations earlier than demise.”
Working in movie, he sees it as an extension of the classical music custom. “Movie music actually is the present most viable type of orchestral live performance music within the scene that it’s commercially viable, nevertheless it requires the identical type of prowess that live performance music has all the time required.”
He appears at film music as a type of steward of the orchestral music custom, significantly with movies like Depraved and Depraved: For Good.
“You may take these items and carry out them at an important live performance corridor with an orchestra,” he says. “It might be lovely and magical as a stand alone piece of music.”
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 many years, and a inventive writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
