This article was taken from the November 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Trent Reznor has always embraced technology, from his pioneering sonic outings with Nine Inch Nails to musical self-distribution.
Now, as the chief creative officer of Beats Music, he plans to take streaming services to the next level.
With collaborator Atticus Ross, Reznor is an in-demand film composer, having won an Oscar for the soundtrack to The Social Network and a Grammy for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Gone Girl (out October 3) reunites him with director David Fincher. Reznor spoke to WIRED about the film, Fincher and Beats' $3billion acquisition by Apple.
WIRED: What's your creative process when you start to soundtrack a film?
Trent Reznor: Our process would be, number one: become familiar with the material. Second: attempt to get inside [David] Fincher's head and figure out what he's thinking. Then three, translate into how that will sound.
**What did Fincher want from you for the soundtrack to
Gone Girl?** He explained that this movie is about façades, the backdrop of midwest America that attempted to present itself as a suburban wonderland and is now in decay. The kind of closed-down city centre that's been wiped out by Walmart. And applying that to this image of the marriage that, on the surface, might look like this seemingly perfect little life.
Where did you take that musically? We started out thinking about the kind of music that artificially makes you feel comfortable. What you might hear while having a massage, or in a spa; music that's meant to feel comforting and indicate that everything's OK. But what if that music is starting to curdle and you start to see this rotten interior behind it? That led us to a number of pieces in the film.
How electronic is this score compared to your previous two films? Ninety per cent of what you hear in the film would be something Atticus [Ross] and I created in our laboratory.Dragon Tattoowas very cold, and to me that contained bell-like textures and more digital synthesis. The music was part of the scenery; it made the film feel kind of icy.Gone Girlfelt almost the opposite.
There were a couple of passages where we used some samples of strings, but then we felt, "let's actually use a real orchestra and do it properly." And that ended up being a pretty interesting experiment. It was nice to expand on our palette of two guys in a room to 67 people all playing at the same time.
How does composing compare with performing with Nine Inch Nails? It's somewhat complementary to how I work on Nine Inch Nails material. When I'm in writing mode, I wake up thinking about it and it follows me around when I walk out of the studio. I have to keep a little recorder next to me, because if an idea comes right at the moment of going to sleep, thinking you're going to remember it and writing it down in the morning doesn't work. The role of the composer feels very similar to the part of my brain I have to use for my own music. I'm still essentially trying to convey some emotional feeling and establish that feeling with sound and texture and mood.
**You've previously experimented with self-distribution.
Now, with Beats Music, you're trying to make streaming more of a personalised and emotional experience.** Streaming in some form is here to stay. It's going to happen whether you want to bitch and complain about it or not.
And there are a couple of things I can affect in that process, or do better than how they have been. If the platform could treat the digital files as the art that they are, with a system that's less like a delivery system and more like a well-curated independent record shop. [Secondly] to elevate the experience of listening and discovering back to when the way that people got turned on to new music wasn't dictated by one corporate channel entity, but from people that love music. And for musicians, I thought we might be able to start carving out not just a better royalty scenario, but also start to help to create a fertile environment where they can flourish.
Do you think that's possible? It's been an eye-opening challenge. Things aren't going to just change on their own. I saw an opportunity with Jimmy Iovine (cofounder of Beats and legendary record producer) [and] the Beats platform. He was approaching things from a fairly similar position from his end, where he actually could make things happen on a business scale. I dedicated the last three years of my life to helping him develop that platform, got the attention of Apple, and now we're finding a way to make that happen. There's a chance to maybe start to implement some of those ideas in a way that will be meaningful. And I think that's a fight worth fighting.
Gone Girlis released on October 3
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
