Composer Marco Beltrami says he originally became a fan of Lois Lowry’s original children’s novel The Giver when “both my kids had to read it in school.” His first collaboration with director Phillip Noyce was unique in several ways: “He was editing in New York and I was in L.A., so most of our communication was via Skype,” Marco says of the logistics. More unusual was Beltrami writing a few themes based only on a script reading, which he calls “a horrible way to do things! So much is dependent on the visual cues and the way it’s shot or the way a scene is portrayed and acted. It makes a huge difference in the way you score a scene.” Yet Marco was extremely gratified to find that having sent “three thematic ideas, they actually used two of them in the picture. [Noyce] actually used [the theme] music for Jeff Bridges to learn on piano, and they filmed the movie to the music. So, in terms of deciding what type of music, some of that work was done ahead of time by us before shooting the film.”