Here, John Ottman not only continues one of Hollywood’s most unusual hyphenate careers (composer-film editor) but also returns to the burgeoning X-Men film universe for the first time since 2003’s X2. Ottman says he was excited at revisiting the franchise, “especially since musically I had themes that I always wanted to go back to but wasn’t able to because we didn’t stick around.” The composer/editor says he was also attracted by the scope of narrative and characters in Days of Future Past: “With the story being focused on a young and broken Charles Xavier, I was given a musical opportunity to underscore his journey of rekindling the hope he’d lost. Charles Xavier finally gets his own theme.” The score’s biggest challenge? “Time travel!,” Ottman muses of the film’s decades-spanning story. “It wasn’t that difficult,” he says, “because the score actually set the difference between the two time periods. In the '70s, I got to infuse some analog synthesizer sound, some electric piano and guitar, and so forth. The trick is to make it all cohesive.”