"I put more hours in than President Bush, and I have no personal life to speak of. It's difficult. I just want to think about Hawaii, laying around doing nothing for a while."
- John Ottman in 2003, on juggling editing and composing duties

Born on July 6th, 1964 in San Diego, California, John Ottman was raised up the coast in the San Francisco Bay Area. From an early age in San Jose, Ottman began writing and recording radio plays on cassette tapes with his neighborhood friends serving as extra cast members. Film music would always play a dominating role in the projects, as many of the stories were often written to accommodate his favorite film scores. By the fourth grade, Ottman was playing the clarinet, and he continued doing so throughout high school. But his real concentration turned from his audio productions to film, and his films evolved to hour-long productions complete with large casts, big sets, and lavish scores edited together from his favorite soundtracks. Once again, much of his favorite film music often inspired the scenes he shot.

After these efforts were featured in a major local newspaper, Ottman was encouraged to enroll in the USC film school in Los Angeles. Receiving accolades for how well he edited his performances in post-production, a graduate filmmaker asked him to re-edit his thesis film. In so doing, he won the Student Academy Award, and a production assistant named Bryan Singer noticed what Ottman had done. With the reputation of his talents now spreading, Ottman began editing films and doing sound design regularly. At this time, he built a makeshift music studio in his house with used equipment. Frustrated with incompetent film scores on his friends' student films, Ottman re-scored them as practice, and as an experiment to see if he had the ability to score films. Realizing he had found his true passion (aside from directing, which he chose not to pursue for a while), he began scoring industrials and short films. He graduated from USC's School of Cinema-Television in 1988.

Bryan Singer, only familiar with Ottman's editing skills, asked him to edit a short film starring Ethan Hawke, who was a childhood friend of Singer's. Ottman ended up co-directing the film, Lion's Den, as well as editing and executing the sound design. On Singer's first feature, Public Access, Ottman edited the picture in three months while simultaneously holding down a full-time job. Ottman's effective sequences and editorial montages became the highlight of the picture; additionally in the eleventh hour, the film lost its composer, and Ottman's opportunity as a composer had arrived. The film received the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, with the score and editing applauded in reviews. With The Usual Suspects in 1995, and all future Singer films, Ottman promised to retain the title of editor foremost on the projects, with composing duties ranking second in priority. That collaboration would prove to be fruitful.

His breakout achievement, The Usual Suspects, received widespread acclaim, invariably mentioning the sweeping score and the inspired editing. He was nominated by the American Cinema Editors and won the British Academy Awards for his editing, as well as a Saturn Award for his score to the film. In 1997, he was declared one of Daily Variety's 50 People to Watch. By 1998, Ottman would be regularly employed on projects produced by the studio Phoenix Pictures, and his regular Hollywood career had been born. After raising eyebrows with his creative orchestral scores for Incognito and Apt Pupil, Ottman suddenly became an artist in high-demand. The used music equipment in his living room was replaced with a modern recording studio. Concurrently, Ottman became the first studio director to also edit and compose the music for his picture on Urban Legends: Final Cut in 2000. While this effort conflicted with the schedule of Singer's first X-Men film, Ottman would edit and score the subsequent films in the X-Men series and later scored several other superhero-genre films. Typically working on complicated thrillers, Ottman's career in Los Angeles continues to keep the composer and editor in demand.