Guitarist Hits Big Time In US Films

For most of his life the film music composer Bryce Jacobs has called St George and Sutherland Shire home, but now the pull of Los Angeles has him firmly anchored there, and loving it.

Holding a coveted “green card” allowing him to work legally in the US, Jacobs, 33, has reached a career high after being called upon to “write a lot of the music” for the new Ron Howard film Rush.

The action movie, due for release in September, is about the 1976 formula one season and the rivalry between drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda.

“It is a guitar-driven score,” Jacobs said in a phone call from America, where he has been living now for the past five years.

In 2008 as a newlywed and often separated from his wife, Jacobs started off in the US as an unpaid intern making coffee for the German film music composer of The Lion King fame, Hans Zimmer.

On the 89th day of his 90-day tourist visa and just five hours before his planned flight out, he landed a job as an assistant composer working 17 hours a day seven days a week.

Jacobs eventually went on to become Rush’s featured guitarist and additional music composer under Zimmer.

In Australia he had worked as a guitar teacher in schools, and in 2005 designed a new type of guitar based on the range and capabilities of the piano, featured on the ABC’s New Inventors the next year.

He also completed two degrees at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music but became more and more drawn to film music composition.

Today he is a composer and has performed most of the guitar on Puss in Boots, and Oliver Stone’s Savages.

Before Rush he wrote the songs for the joint Australian-US thriller, Bad Karma, starring Ray Liotta.

His links with the US were forged when the special guitar Jacobs designed was featured in his Rush work.