20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Green Mile
4. Always The Bridesmaid, Never The Bride
Legendary composer Thomas Newman crafted a haunting, elegiac score for the movie, the second he'd worked on with Darabont after The Shawshank Redemption.
Incredibly, Newman has been nominated for a musical Oscar fifteen times without a win in the last 25 years - in 1995, he was nominated twice for Best Original Score (for Little Women and The Shawshank Redemption) and in 2009 he was nominated twice for WALL-E (for Best Original Score and Best Original Song). His latest Oscar nomination is this year: Best Original Score for the marvellous 1917, which he has to be front runner for.
The Green Mile was the longest soundtrack Newman had worked on at that point, and he spent six months on the project. His aim wasn't necessarily to write catchy tunes, but rather to find “a kind of hyper-reality to intensify the sense of mysticism".
Darabont described Newman's score "a rainbow of music and emotion", and he's not wrong.