Alexandre Desplat

“Philomena” marks the fourth collaboration between director Stephen Frears and composer Alexandre Desplat, after “The Queen” (which earned an Oscar nomination for music), “Cheri” and “Tamara Drewe,” so their starting point has become a familiar one: “He picks the people that he thinks are right and lets them bring their own ideas, their own personality, to the project,” says the Paris-based composer.

So when Desplat chose a surprising approach to the fact-based story about an Irish Catholic woman (Judi Dench) who goes looking for the child she was forced to give up as an unwed mother 50 years earlier, Frears supported him.

“I wanted to write a melody that was memorable, simple without being simplistic,” Desplat says. It’s a waltz based on the fairground pipe-organ sound heard by the title character at the moment she committed the sin for which the convent nuns would punish her for years to come. “This tune comes back as a haunting flashback all along, until the very end.”

Frears made one suggestion, however: Something “Hitchcockian” for the investigation conducted by the former BBC journalist (Steve Coogan) who agrees to help her. Desplat added an urgent, rhythmic strings motif that helps propel the story along. But feelings of warmth and delicacy dominate most of “Philomena.”

— Jon Burlingame

Dhani Harrison

Let’s get this out of the way: Dhani Harrison is the son of George Harrison — Beatle, guitar legend, cultural icon.

As a composer and songwriter, the younger Harrison clearly owes a debt to the eclectic, genre-bending approach of his late father, but the similarities feel more inherited than imitated.

In collaboration with his longtime band thenewno2, Harrison crafted the score for the teen witch drama “Beautiful Creatures.” The resulting music is an accomplished stew of bubbling electronica, orchestral swells and brooding rock ’n’ roll. The panoramic, self-assured score belies the fact that it represents Harrison’s first outing as a film composer.

“I grew up spending a lot of time around my father’s friends — all of these musicians, the members of Monty Python, and especially Michael Kamen,” says Harrison, whose father founded HandMade Films.

Kamen, a successful film composer in the 1980s and ’90s, encouraged the younger Harrison to experiment with recording technology and expand his palette for composition.

“Growing up around (Kamen) really got me thinking that I didn’t have to just make songs. That I could make long cues of music without words” says Harrison. “It was a new way of looking at making music for me.”

Harrison previously focused primarily on songwriting, performing and production work in his career — until he was asked to meet with director Richard LaGravenese about scoring “Beautiful Creatures.”

“When I got to meet Richard, I think that it really clicked,” Harrison says. “I think he hired us (thenewno2) that day. So I went in the studio and started recording for the film right away. And two months later we were in Abbey Road Studios, doing the whole thing with a 60-piece orchestra.”

— Matt Kivel

John Williams

For the first time in eight years, composer John Williams decided to score a movie that was not directed by Steven Spielberg: “The Book Thief,” directed by Brian Percival, based on Markus Zusak’s novel about a girl’s experiences with a foster family in Nazi Germany and their dangerous decision to conceal a young Jewish man.

“When I read this, I jumped at the chance to do it,” says Williams, 81, who won two of his five Oscars for films about children (“E.T.”) and the Holocaust (“Schindler’s List”). “What I found very powerful was the idea that this girl’s life could be saved by her passion for letters and for literature. It was a chamber piece for actors, beautifully managed by Brian, almost like a Brahms quintet.”

Percival first met with Williams last year in Los Angeles. “John’s known for these huge signature pieces,” says the director, “and my worry was that if he adopted that approach it would be too big for this small, humble, honest film. We shared the same sort of vision — a much smaller scale.”

Adds the composer: “Small pieces can deliver very forceful and powerful ideas, musically and dramatically.” A generous string section, piano and a handful of woodwinds including oboe and clarinet, comprise the main voices in Williams’ score; there is no brass.

Unlike the current wave of film scores that eschew melody or symphonic arrangements, “The Book Thief” (like most of Williams’ 100-plus film scores) embraces both. There are four main themes: a minor-key theme for the voice of Death that narrates the story; a joyous one for the concept of books and reading, one for the girl Liesel and the refugee Max, who hides in the basement; and a piece for harp that denotes the passage of time.

“At times it’s so delicate and poignant that it’s just right emotionally for our story,” says Percival, who recalls sitting with Williams at the piano during the writing process

and being “moved to tears” by his playing. “He just

enhanced everything.”

— Jon Burlingame

Mark Orton

Searching for an authentic folk sound for “Nebraska,” helmer Alexander Payne turned to Portland-based composer Mark Orton, whose Tin Hat trio of guitar, violin and accordion has been wowing music critics for years.

Music editor Richard Ford’s placement of old Orton tracks (especially from the 2005 film “Sweet Land,” set in 1920 Minnesota) in an early cut of “Nebraska” led to the notion that, as Payne says, “this temporary music should become permanent.” So Orton tailored the existing music to the film and wrote new material specifically for “Nebraska.”

(Because so much of the score is not original to the film, it’s not being entered for Academy consideration, although it will be submitted for the Golden Globes, Grammys and other awards.)

The folksy score supplies a heartland tone for many of the outdoor scenes in Payne’s road movie about a confused Montana retiree (Bruce Dern) whose son (Will Forte) drives him to Nebraska to claim what he thinks is a million-dollar fortune.

Payne’s mandate, Orton says, was “to avoid a kind of overt Americana (or anything) overtly sentimental.” Orton played all the guitars in the score. Fiddle, piano, reed organ, bass harmonica and hurdy-gurdy add other quirky flavors.

“So much of what’s going on is unspoken,” says Orton. “These smaller instrumentations, and the more fragile and hand-made feel (of the music), allow for a kind of intimacy and inner life of these characters. This is a road movie and I (was given) a lot of freedom; it’s not like I’m sculpting quiet stuff around dialogue. I’m able to step out a bit.”

— Jon Burlingame

Alex Heffes

British composer Alex Heffes swears it’s just coincidence that he’s scored two films about larger-than-life African leaders — murderous dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s “The Last King of Scotland” and now Nobel Peace Prize-winning statesman Nelson Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.”

“Luckily they couldn’t be more different, as I hate to repeat myself,” says Heffes who’d previously teamed with “Mandela” director Justin Chadwick on another African project, “The First Grader.”

The challenge this time was to write a score “that could really stand up to Mandela’s incredible life story, and with the added responsibility of it being about a real person,” he says.

At Chadwick’s urging, Heffes visited South Africa where he recorded percussion, choir and a key theme with local singing legend Caiphus Semenya. “I wanted authentic sounds, but it also had to work for an international audience and reflect the big canvas and long time scale of the film,” says Heffes, who wrote more than 90 minutes of original music, played piano on the score and conducted the orchestra at Abbey Road in London.

“Alex has this great sense of modernity and forward motion in his work, which really complements the story and the man behind it,” Chadwick says.

— Iain Blair

Danny Elfman

Four-time Oscar nominee Danny Elfman previously collaborated with “Oz the Great and Powerful” director Sam Raimi on “Spider-Man” (1 & 2), and along with such credits as “Edward Scissorhands,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Alice in Wonderland” is obviously well-versed in the musical language of fantasy worlds and alternate realities.

“I love doing these kinds of films, and diving into this whole new world of Oz that Sam created was so much fun,” says Elfman, who was unfazed by the huge shadow cast by the original classic. “I grew up watching it and was always a big fan, but I just didn’t think about it that much, except for the bit with the Munchkins’ song where I had to tread lightly because of legal issues with the original song.”

Elfman reports that one trick to scoring big fantasy films “is starting as late as possible, because you’re waiting on all the vfx shots.” He wrote some 105 minutes of music over a two-month period, and used “a lot of reeds and bells” for the world of Oz. The highlight of the whole process came when Elfman’s traditional orchestral score was recorded on the Sony lot, on the very same MGM stage where they shot the original “Wizard of Oz.”

— Iain Blair

Thomas Newman

When “Saving Mr. Banks” director John Lee Hancock first approached Thomas Newman about scoring the behind-the-scenes Disney tale about the making of “Mary Poppins,” the nine-time Academy Award nominee was hesitant. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to work on a movie adapting the ‘Mary Poppins’ songs,” he says.

But Hancock assured him that wasn’t the case. Newman was given free rein to compose a wide-ranging original score that poignantly captures the adventurousness of “Poppins” author P.L. Travers’ childhood in Australia at the turn of the 20th century, the American can-do spirit of Walt Disney, and Travers’ taciturn adult personality as she tangles with Disney, composers Richard and Robert Sherman, and writer Don DaGradi over the adaptation of her book in 1961 in Burbank.

“There was the issue of transitions,” he says. “Music had to get you from one place and time to another. I also wanted to make sure we didn’t glut in any one emotional place.”

Newman felt it was especially important his music mirror Travers’ journey from innocent child to desperately unhappy grown-up. “My concern was this backstory and how to write a score marked by character development,” he says. “How did a young P.L. Travers meld with the old P.L. Travers?”

A bonus for Newman was hanging with Richard Sherman. “We all had lunch together and he told amazing stories,” he says. “To spend any time with him was one of the greatest parts of the project.”

— Melinda Newman

Rolfe Kent

Rolfe Kent’s music for “Labor Day” marks his fourth collaboration with director Jason Reitman. “This was a very different project, as Jason wanted the music to bring focus and intensity to the drama, but not emotion,” says Kent. “He wanted the audience to be unsure of exactly what’s going on, and to keep the score quite understated.”

To accomplish this, Kent, a veteran of more than 50 films (including “Sideways,” “Wedding Crashers” and Reitman’s “Up in the Air”), had to forget “everything I knew for over half the score, and discover a new language and new approach.”

After much experimentation, the British composer used a lot of organic, ambient elements that he created by playing various instruments and then processing them, “to disguise the original sources.” The unusual instrumentation included the South American charango and the chirping of crickets, along with more traditional guitars and ukuleles.

“I also used drums and then processed them backwards, to give Jason an element that was ‘heart-stoppingly worrying,’” says Kent, who wrote and recorded his hourlong score at home in L.A. and at the Warner lot over a four-month period.

— Iain Blair