Mothersbaugh, Trent Reznor, Stuart Braithwaite, and Dan Deacon

approaching music. Trent Reznor embodies this sentiment well. We spoke to him in August right before the flm Bones And All, which he and Atticus Ross scored, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and before Nine Inch Nails commenced their frst tour since 2018. “Usually I have a story I’m trying to tell as a songwriter, with an emotional response as the main goal. How do I help tell the story with music or sound so that you feel a certain way? Once I thought about flm scoring in that light, it made the process easier to understand.”

“Film scoring is me as a musician trying to collaborate and help tell someone else’s story. After I did a few, I realized it felt really good not to be the boss.” – Trent Reznor

We asked Reznor about what continued to attract him to composing following the score he and Ross did for David Fincher’s 2010 flm The Social Network, critical Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and awards success notwithstanding (Reznor and Ross won the Oscar for Best Original Score for the movie). “Film scoring is me as a musician trying to collaborate back. I wouldn’t have taken on that score had I not had those earlier years.” The and help tell someone else’s story,” Reznor says. “After I distinction inherent in the music of the most recognizable composers seems to be a did a few, I realized it felt really good not to be the boss. It felt liberating, product of idiosyncrasy as much as project-specifc necessity. Elfman’s love of flm in a way, to be like, ‘My job is to do the best I can over in this corner and scores translated into his flm work, specifcally what he termed “full-on, crazy, plastic see how I can enhance this thing and put my ego on the side.’” flm scores, none of this pop shit.” His collaborations with director Tim Burton (starting with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Burton’s debut feature-length flm) only emboldened that quality, though Elfman is a consummate professional and works in just about any mode you can interest him in, from genre-fare to serious drama. A more recent crop of musicians-turned-composers have, in the last decade or so, made their mark by virtue of how popular their original solo or ensemble acts were before they shifted into the movie business, people like Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. In a media landscape overstuffed with period nostalgia and pandering, obvious needledrops, there is a danger for a solo artist to attempt original music specifcally for flm and TV if that music isn’t a featured single. Part of this is the perception of vanity, the sense that an artist is overextending themselves beyond the bounds of their ability. Another is the simple fact that some who try wash out from their inability to play well with others. Stuart Braithwaite, guitarist and vocalist for the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, which has scored a number of flms and TV shows, most recently Apple TV+’s Black Bird, spoke of the need to not be precious with what’s put on offer for a project. “Sometimes you’ll be pushed in a direction that you would have never gone in. It doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing, but it can detach you slightly from it. It’s a collaboration.” To elaborate, Braithwaite is slightly more candid than other musicians we spoke to. “To be honest, we hand over music and if the director doesn’t like it, that’s fne. Maybe in the early days, we would get a little bit touchy about it, but at the end of the day, it’s their movie.” The nitty gritty of this process is almost never linear. Dan Deacon, the electronic Mogwai musician, whose solo work ranges from the bright and melodic to the atmospheric and dissonant, illustrated the back-and-forth nature of his work on Theo Anthony’s Some of the veteran icons like Elfman have historically felt that a 2021 documentary All Light, Everywhere. “I would be like, ‘Here’s 20 pieces of music tradeoff had to be made between solo work and scoring, especially that are 5 to 20 minutes each and here’s all the stems.’ Then Theo would go through given the all-consuming nature of each. In Elfman’s case, he describes and do these crude stem-level adjustments and send them back,” Deacon explains. how Oingo Boingo obviated his composing skills in the same way that “Then I would retranslate his automations and write a new piece based on that composing left him little time, until the pandemic, to focus on rock adjustment and send that back. He would do it again, I would do it again. It was sort music. But the unique position of the working musician who dabbles in of a call-and-response and meanwhile, the edit of the movie started to conform to flm is that one mode of creativity often enhances enthusiasm for the these changes as well. At a certain point, for a sequence, I was working on this super other. “I think it’s made us better musicians, able to work in different dense piece of music then Theo was like, ‘I cut 30 seconds out of this scene’ and I modes,” Braithwaite says. “We’d probably have done a lot more was like, ‘Fuck, man!’ But that’s the nature of it.” holidays if we didn’t have soundtracks.” Across each conversation with the musicians we spoke to, there was the As for Deacon, he says, “I’ll probably sit here in flm scoring more reiteration of a core appreciation for and love of flm as the primary factor in their than I do in the other world. I’m writing more music than I ever have in continued work. But there was also the fact that it’s a fundamentally different way of my life. It’s almost like me as a musician is my hobby.”