Fincher is looking for more from these greats.
It’s been a great year for soundtracks and scores, and nearly every great movie from this year had a great set of music to go with it. Hell, even a particularly disappointing movie had one of the most interesting scores of the year! The Social Network though, was a perfect marriage of sound and image in service of an excellent movie –one that ended up topping the overall CHUD Best of 2010 list— and will now be remembered as the beginning of a wonderful friendship. During a Q&A session hosted through The New York Times, Trent Reznor revealed that he and Atticus Ross would be returning to the lab to generate the score for David Fincher’s currently-filming adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
The audio from the aforementioned live chat session was sent to The Playlist, and while there’s not a transcription up yet they did pull out the highlights, including the Tattoo news. Reznor also said he and Ross have already generated two hours of music based on their impression of the book and conversations with Fincher, which will be used as temp music in the editor’s rough cuts of scenes (which are turned around only a few days after filming). He had this to say about the process-
“This one’s a bit different. Well, different in some ways. The film is coming out Christmas of this year and they’re still doing principal photography. So, I had read the book, I had not got the script yet and I heard a few buzz words like ‘ice’ and Fincher writing, ‘I can’t write anymore my fingers are frozen.’ And we spent—Atticus and I are going to work on this again—three weeks generating, with a new set of rules, it was completely blind with no feedback from David, stuff that I though would be helpful for them to have. Because the David work is that he’s the hi-tech guy of filmmaking and when he’s shooting digitally it’s also being sent back to his editors, and within a couple of days he can see mock-ups of scenes he just shot. And those guys are always looking for temp music to put in there, so I thought it would be a nice present to have—we sent them two hours of music.”
Reznor namedrops Blade Runner as an example of a film with a iconic score, notable not just for its actual arrangements but the texture of the sound as well. Fincher is looking to achieve something similar with the scores for his films, a challenge that is taking Ross and Reznor to new places.
“We started recording things in a different way that was all based on performance, nothing programmed. And that would be my limited skills at stringed instruments, and trying passages that we would get that and then we would process them in a way that would give us a real organic, layered feel that felt like something we’d never done before.”
I’m an easy lay for the work of both Fincher and Reznor, so to think that this trifecta might become a long-term collaboration that spans many projects is exceedingly exciting. That said, I think most would agree that the pair’s work helped give The Social Network a distinct, haunting, yet upbeat tempo that augmented Fincher’s ability to tell the story as well as he did. If any other interesting bits emerge from the full transcript of the talk I’ll be sure to note it, and I’ll definite toss in a link when I catch on that it’s out there- so watch for an update.