X-Men

Singer approached John Williams to compose the film score, but Williams turned down the offer because of scheduling conflicts. Then Singer set on his usual composer, John Ottman. However, once Fox pushed X-Men from December to July, Ottman’s commitment to direct Urban Legends: Final Cut made him unable to work with Singer. Michael Kamen was eventually hired.

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Given the film was only completed shortly before its premiere, Kamen wrote the score to the finished scenes, which were sent to him just as work was done on them. Singer asked him not to use any songs in the soundtrack as he “didn’t want to date the movie”.

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Due to Kamen’s unfamiliarity with the comics, he only tried to “represent Bryan Singer’s filmic tone that he’s made, for a comic book, a quite serious movie, which is about the capacity of humanity to categorize people by race, religion or type, and prejudice people against them based on their innate characteristics”. Character-specific themes were written to “identify these characters, as you go through the film, because they’re not always clear.” For instance, Mystique’s motif, focused on the cello as Kamen found it “a very erotic-sounding instrument”, played in the soundtrack as she was disguised as Wolverine. Due to time restrictions, the producers scrapped their original plan to record the score in London and did it in Los Angeles.

Kamen’s first draft of the score had been described as having an abundance of themes and rich orchestrations. During early recording sessions, producer Lauren Shuler Donner expressed her dissatisfaction with Kamen’s music and forced him to rewrite the entire score by using fewer themes and more electronic elements.