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Graeme Revell

Graeme Revell took a fairly circuitous route to a career scoring films. The Auckland, New Zealand, native was conservatory trained as a youngster, but while working at a psychiatric hospital in the late '70s, he co-founded the radical post-punk band SPK. Named after (and lyrically inspired by) a group of radical German Marxists of the late 1960s and early '70s, SPK were one of the pioneering industrial bands of their era. They were particularly notorious for their stomach-churning live shows, during which Revell would impassively stand behind a bank of synthesizers and tape machines spewing forth dissonant, distorted noise while surgical training films played on a loop behind the band. By the mid-'80s, however, Revell had lost interest in assault for its own sake and the band's music started leaning in a more conventionally musical direction. This attracted the attention of Australian filmmaker Philip Noyce, who invited Revell to compose the score for his atmospheric horror film "Dead Calm." That 1989 art house hit brought Noyce, Revell, and star Nicole Kidman to a wider American and European audience, and Revell closed shop on SPK to move into film composing full time. His scores include Wim Wenders's "Until the End of the World," the psychological thriller "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," and cult favorites like "The Basketball Diaries" and "From Dusk Till Dawn," along with more commercial fare like "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" and "Daredevil."