John Paesano


John Paesano is an American composer, working primarily in film, television and video games. He is known for collaborating with director Wes Ball on the Maze Runner film series, as well as composing for the Marvel television series The Defenders and Daredevil, with the latter garnering a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. He has also contributed the music to the acclaimed video game titles and Spider-Man.

Life and career

Paesano was born in Detroit. He first studied classical music at Conservatoire de Paris located in Parc de la Villette, France before continuing his studies at Berklee College of Music pursuing a major in musical composition and film scoring. He then worked under composers Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams providing additional music for the former, and orchestrating for the latter. Paesano cites Steven Spielberg's 1987 film Empire of the Sun as his motivation for getting into film scoring.
In 2014, Paesano was hired to compose the music for The Maze Runner. Speaking of the job, he recalled seeing Wes Ball's 2011 short film, Ruin and was intrigued by it, composing a short demo for Ball. He visited the sets in New Orleans, observing the "environmental soundscape" and tried to incorporate the natural sounds into his score. He recorded the score with an orchestra at the Newman Scoring Stage with sessions running for 2 weeks. Paesano would later return to score the 2nd and 3rd film of the series, ' and '.

Filmography

Film

Television

Video games