An Emmy-winning composer, Javier Navarrete launched his film-scoring career in his native Spain during the mid-1980s. Two decades later, his Romantic-styled orchestral music for the international art-house sensation Pan's Labyrinth (2006) earned Academy Award and Grammy nominations and introduced him to a wider public. Subsequent assignments included the large-scale adventure-fantasy Wrath of the Titans (2012) and the independent thriller Greta (2018).
Born in Teruel, Spain, Navarrete first experimented on his sisters’ guitar around age twelve and soon joined friends in informal improvisation sessions. At seventeen he presented an electronic composition in Barcelona; the following ten years were devoted to creating and performing avant-garde concert works. In his late twenties a friend commissioned the score for Tras el Cristal (In a Glass Cage), which premiered at festivals in 1986.
Steady assignments in Spanish cinema followed throughout the 1990s, among them the science-fiction feature Atolladero (1991) and the horror film 99.9 (1997). His first collaboration with Mexican director Guillermo del Toro arrived with the latter’s third feature, The Devil’s Backbone (2001). After scoring the thrillers Trece Campanadas (Thirteen Chimes, 2002) and Dot the I (2003), Navarrete rejoined del Toro for Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006, securing an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score the next year. The soundtrack also brought a 2008 Grammy nomination in the category of Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
The success of Pan’s Labyrinth expanded his opportunities abroad, leading to American productions such as Fireflies in the Garden (2008), The Hole (2009), and The New Daughter (2009). In 2012 he scored the U.S.-Spain co-production Wrath of the Titans as well as Neil Jordan’s fantasy-drama Byzantium, and he received an Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special for the HBO biographical film Hemingway & Gellhorn. Further credits include the 2015 action-fantasy Zhong Kui: Snow Girl and the Dark Crystal and Neil Jordan’s Greta, which debuted at festivals in 2018 before its worldwide theatrical release the following year.
