John Williams may be best known for his work with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but his theme for Superman be above all. It’s a theme that lives on well beyond Williams’ involvement with the character and has become almost as big a part of him as the S on his chest. James Gunn actually thought so.

“That soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks of all time,” Superman director James Gunn said in a press event recently. “When I was a kid, actually, the thing I loved most about the movie was the music. That’s the thing I took home more than anything else.”

So it is not surprising that, when the first trailer for Gunn’s interpretation of the character was released, Williams’ theme was there. That was the plan from not just one day, but long ago.

“I knew from the beginning what I wanted to do with music,” Gunn said. “I thought about it a lot. Are we going to do something completely different? Are we going to use the Williams theme?… I know we’re doing something that hearkens back to the past and also looks forward to the future. And so, it’s about finding balance. “

A balance between not only the past and the future, but John Williams and John Murphy.

“John Murphy is a composer I love working with and he started working on the music before the script was finished,” Gunn said. “He was one of the first people I gave the script to with Peter Safran and others, so he could start writing music for it. And I said, ‘I want to use a version of the Williams theme, but I want to do our own version of it.’ And so, that’s what you hear (in the trailer.)”

Gunn then teased how Williams’ new take will work throughout. “What’s really amazing is how that leads to so many other pieces,” he said. “Some of it goes back to the Williams theme, but some of it is just John Murphy. It goes into that, comes back, and it’s used beautifully throughout the movie. And John has been working almost non-stop for the last almost two years, which combine the score.

The dream, it seems, is that when children see Superman in July they had the same reaction that Gunn had in Richard Donner’s movie in 1978. Great movie, but better music.

Superman opens July 11.

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