Don Davis

Davis studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and Los Angeles's California Institute of the Arts, and spent years as a working orchestrator and arranger for other film and television composers, including extensive work on various Star Trek productions, before landing his own major composing assignment.

The orchestrator turned composer's shimmering, brass-heavy post-minimalism gave The Matrix its sense of reality glitching at the seams. He spent years working as an orchestrator for other film composers before the Wachowskis, impressed by his experimental concert-hall compositions, gave him his breakout assignment scoring their ambitious original feature.

His score deliberately avoided a hummable main theme, built instead from shifting minimalist string and brass patterns meant to evoke a simulation subtly coming apart at the seams — a structural choice that mirrored the film's themes rather than simply underscoring its action. He scored all three original Matrix films, cementing an unusually close creative partnership with the Wachowskis.