Kris Bowers on finding honesty in music and the art of film scoring

“It always starts with the emotion,” Kris Bowers tells us.

“I usually try to read the script, watch scenes, or digest whatever material is available for me, just to see what emotions viscerally and involuntarily come up. I try to dig a bit deeper and see what else in my personal life connects to those emotions and ideas. Then, I go to the piano—because my background is jazz piano—and improvise to try to re-trigger those feelings, because I’m not a very emotional person in my life. But, I find in music and in movies, those emotions get triggered involuntarily, and I think there’s honesty in that. So, if I can re-trigger those emotions playing something on piano, then I feel like there’s honesty to whether or not it’s speaking to the idea.”

Kris Bowers is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker and an Emmy, GRAMMY, and Oscar-nominated composer and pianist. His genre-defying scores span some of the most celebrated film and TV projects of the last decade, including The Wild Robot, Green Book, King Richard, and Netflix’s Bridgerton.

In celebration of the release of his inaugural sample pack on Splice Sounds, we had the unique opportunity to sit down with Bowers for an extensive interview, where he covers everything from his compositional process and character-driven approach to scoring to how he uses Splice in his day-to-day workflow.

“I hope that it’s useful in a bunch of different ways,” he shares, speaking to how he hopes creators will use his sample pack. “It’s not necessarily about just using its sounds specifically, but if someone hears something and thinks, ‘I like the way this chord progression happens, but I’m going to do it in a different way,’ that’s great too. I also tried to write melodic and harmonic ideas that I thought might be interesting from a sampling perspective, thinking about how much hip hop producers love that noir, jazzy, orchestral kind of sound.”

For more from Kris Bowers, be sure to also check out our recent studio tour with him, where he breaks down his production setup, the gear he relies on, and more:

And there you have it! What was your favorite insight from the interview? Who would you like to see us feature next? Let us know in the comments section of the video, and subscribe to the Splice YouTube channel for more artist-led interviews, tours, and tutorials.

Incorporate Kris Bowers’ cinematic sounds into your own productions:

April 17, 2026

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Harrison Shimazu

Harrison Shimazu is a composer, content strategist, and writer who’s passionate about democratizing music creation and education. He leads the Splice blog and produces vocaloid music as Namaboku.