Jack Dolman has had a long and varied career working with music and film, beginning as a Technical Score Engineer at Hans Zimmer’s renowned Remote Control Productions, to a freelance career as sound editor and Supervising Music Editor – most recently for the blockbuster films Wicked and Wicked: For Good.
LV spoke to Jack about his career, and working with movie musicals like the blockbuster series.
Jack Dolman
Jack Dolman was born in Toronto and raised in Los Angeles. He’s the son of comedian, actress, and musical theatre star Andrea Martin, and it’s from her influence that he credits an early love of theatre.
He studied jazz piano at a young age, and played in a high school jazz ensemble as well as several bands throughout high school, continuing while attending Vassar College. Somewhere along the way, a love of mathematics took over his bent for music, and he graduated from the University of Toronto with a Master’s degree. Jack worked as a business consultant for several years before the siren’s song of music lured him back.
His career in music and film began in 2008 when he began working at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions as the assistant to film composer Henry Jackman. His credits from his time at Remote Control include working as Technical Score Engineer on Monsters Vs Aliens, It’s Complicated, Gulliver’s Travels, and Kick-Ass, among others.
In 2011, he switched his focus to music editing, and continued collaborating with Hans Zimmer and Henry Jackson, which led to working on scores for films like Rush, Captain Philips, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Chappie, and Captain America: Civil War over the next five years or so.
That body of experience, in turn, led to working with filmmakers like Ron Howard, Matthew Vaughn, The Russo Brothers, Paul Greengrass, and others.
In 2015, he left Remote Control to work as a freelance music editor for a range of project that include indie features as well as major blockbusters, including working with composers John Powell (How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Solo: A Star Wars Story), Harry Gregson-Williams (Early Man), Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Bones and All), Junkie XL (Point Break), Matthew Margeson (The King’s Man), and Dominic Lewis (Money Monster). He continued his working relationship with composer Henry Jackson and in turn the Russo Brothers, working on films such as Cherry and The Gray Man.
Over the last several years, he’s tended to focus on movie musicals, inspired by his exposure to theatre through his mother Andrea Martin, who has won multiple Tony Awards for Broadway productions. Jack has worked on films such as Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, and Better Nate Than Ever.
His most recent projects include acting as Supervising Music Editor on the film versions of Wicked, collaborating with director Jon M. Chu, composer Stephen Schwartz, and producer Marc Platt, and its sequel Wicked: For Good, released in theatres on November 21. He garnered his first Academy Award nomination for Best Sound for the original Wicked at the 2025 Oscars.
Jack Dolman: The Interview
Did he have movie musicals in mind when he began working in film?
“Well you know, it was a long progression in starting from film music,” he says. Working with so many different people in the movie industry led to more opportunities over time. “Music editing is a field that encompasses a lot of different kinds of films.”
He mentions growing up with the influence of his mother. “She introduced me and my brother to musical theatre when I was very young. So, in my career as a music editor, when the opportunity presented itself to pivot into movie musicals, [I took it],” he says. “The other thing about this opportunity is that working with [composer] Stephen Schwartz is another kind of dream to me.”
That dream again goes back to his early years. Dolman mentions Andrea Martin’s early credits in Godspell, and her Tony Award winning work in Pippin in 2003, both of which were also scored by Stephen Schwartz.
“For me it was a lot of things coming together.” It was a way of carrying on a family legacy.
Working on Wicked
“The work of the music editor usually starts early on in a movie musical,” he explains.
Dolman was involved with both Wicked and Wicked: For Good from the time filming began in London, UK in December 2022. “My role in the film started quite early.”
As the Supervising Music Editor, putting the music for the film began in the early stages of development. The sequences were put together as filming progressed. He worked closely with director Jon M. Chu and editor Myron Kerstein. Once the project hits post-production stage, the individual music editors, who work on the details of each scene, are brought into the picture.
“The world expands quite a bit.”
Supervising the work of individual music editors means being conscious of the overall vision for the entire movie.
“When you’re working on a musical that has preexisting material from the Broadway score, and in this case with Stephen Schwartz. you’re working with a lot of [different elements],” he says.
Clearly, the film would work with elements from the original Broadway score, incorporating the various character themes, and weaving them together with music written especially for the film to create a kind of roadmap for the film score as a whole. That’s the first step towards the final product.
He points out that the Broadway production used a pit orchestra of 22 musicians. “When we do a film, we have the luxury in this case of an 80-piece orchestra.”
It means scaling the original music upwards, with larger arrangements.
“They were able to take the roadmap I had created with Myron and Stephen, and expand on it.”
John Powell is the co-composer of Wicked and Wicked: For Good. “One of the great things about John Powell, is, if he wasn’t a film composer, he’d be writing music for orchestras,” Dolman says.
The result is a lushly orchestrated soundtrack that hits many different moods and genres. “That was one of the things he wanted to do, and we all wanted to do, was to take the world of Wicked, and not only expand on it […] but also acknowledge the original 1939 [film].”
Dolman’s role was to juggle all of those elements into a coherent full-length soundtrack. “And make it feel new and fresh for audiences today.”
While making movies is necessarily a collaborative project, considering how to put things together also resulted in a lot of time working on his own. “I spent a lot of time thinking about that. And a lot of that is alone,” he explains. The results need to be seamless from the audience perspective.
“You’re using the music to weave in and out of songs, and the underscore, in a way that the audience doesn’t notice,” he adds. “You’re dealing with so many elements.”
The role of background music in the film is to provide the emotional underpinning of the story, augmenting the expression of character, but also their actions.
“You’re hoping that music in general in a film establishes the emotional heartbeat of the story itself in a more omniscient way, and you’re also hoping that it allows you to see the intimate details of a character.”
Sometimes, that involves playing with two different perspectives at once, expressing character, but also the audience’s point of view of the story. “So that the audience is being just pulled along,” he explains. “I think the best version of film music is when it is subtly pulling the audience along,” he adds.
“Especially in the case of Wicked: For Good, the relationship between these two women, Elphaba and Glinda, reaches a kind of heartbreaking climax.” The film asks the audience to share in the moment even as it expresses the connection between the two characters, an element particularly crucial to Wicked.
“You really want to music to slowly draw a line that takes you through the movie to the end.”
From Jazz Bands to Movie Music to Bach
“Early on, as a young person I always played piano, but I fell in love with improvisation,” Jack says. That led to the road to jazz. “The harmonies and the endless infinite possibility of that form was so alluring to me. So I was definitely seduced by jazz as a young musician. I suppose it was also rebellious.”
That’s what he first studied at university. “I studied it for a long time, but then I got distracted by a love of mathematics of all things,” he laughs.
Working with Hans Zimmer brought his love of music, and his own music making, back to the fore. He still plays the piano.
“Now as a musician, I’m playing Bach more than anything,” he says. “I’m trying to learn the Goldberg Variations before death.”
Working in film, he sees it as an extension of the classical music tradition. “Film music really is the current most viable form of orchestral concert music in the scene that it is commercially viable, but it requires the same kind of prowess that concert music has always required.”
He looks at movie music as a kind of steward of the orchestral music tradition, particularly with films like Wicked and Wicked: For Good.
“You could take these pieces and perform them at a great concert hall with an orchestra,” he says. “It would be beautiful and magical as a stand alone piece of music.”
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