Many things in David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo get expressed without dialog. They're communicated by the looks on characters' faces and, more subtly, by the sound textures behind the action.
Through the echoes of Lisbeth Salander's boots, the hum of a floor-waxing machine and the tapping of a furious hacker's keystrokes, the sounds of Dragon Tattoo take you into author Stieg Larsson's Swedish underworld before your brain has a chance to recognize why your ears are already nervous.
To get that level of intensity, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as well as sound mixers Michael Semanick and Ren Klyce had to pull off some interesting audio magic. In the video above from SoundWorks Collection, they talk about how intricate that work was and what they did to get it right.
"Without using the orchestra as an instrument we can kind of break down the walls between sound design and music and it's role," Reznor said. "[We could] see if we can bleed the music right into the sound of the world a bit."
Reznor, who won an Oscar with Ross for his score of Fincher's The Social Network, also talks about his initial reticence about doing a cover of a classic recording -- in this case Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song." Though covering well-loved rock cuts is "usually a recipe for disaster," Reznor said, he began to understand why Fincher wanted it when he saw how it was going to be used for the trailer and opening credits.
Learn more about the sound of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo above, then hit the comments to let us know what you think of the film's soundscapes. The film is currently playing nationwide.
