Stereogum, Author at SPIN

Over this last decade, Trent Reznor has made some pretty impressive film (and TV) scores alongside his creative partner Atticus Ross, but not all of them can be winners. In a new interview with Revolver, Reznor talked about his experience scoring the Netflix thriller Bird Box, and he wasn’t very positive: When we got immersed in it, it felt like some people were phoning it in. And you’re stuck with a film editor who had real bad taste. That’s kind of our barricade to getting stuff in the film. And the final icing on the shit cake was we were on tour when they mixed it. And they mixed the music so low, you couldn’t hear it anyway. So it was like, that was a … That was a fucking waste of time. Then we thought, no one’s going to see this fucking movie. And, of course, it’s the hugest movie ever in Netflix. Reznor and Ross recently put out a collection of leftover music that they recorded during the scoring process for that film. Reznor also revealed that he is no longer involved with the Amy Adams movie The Woman In The Window, which went through reshoots earlier this year after test audiences found the plot twists confusing. Reznor said that he and Ross decided to “bow out” after those changes, adding: “There’s no animosity on our end. It’s frustrating when you did that much work and it’s gone. And we were proud — and they were proud — of the movie that it was.” A trailer for that movie, sans Reznor and Ross score, was released earlier this week. Reznor also talked about teaming up once again with David Fincher — they previously worked together on The Social Network and Gone Girl — for his new movie Mank, a biopic about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Because the movie is set in 1940, they’ll be using only instrumentation that would’ve been used in that time period. “We’re not gonna be using the modular synthesizer on that one,” Reznor said. “We think we’re gonna be period authentic, so it just creates a new set of challenges.” Elsewhere in the interview, Reznor talks about Nine Inch Nails’ plans for next year. They are “probably” going to play shows in the “last half of the year,” and their follow-up to 2018’s Bad Witch will revolve around collaboration: “We’ve got a list of people we like. And we thought, kind of playing on the newfound spirit of collaboration that scoring has forced us into, seeing what happens when we mix our DNA with some other people, with a no pressure environment.” He also once again addresses his unlikely commercial success via “Old Town Road”: “My only hope was that it would stay No. 1 forever. There’s 33 other tracks that people can happily sample away.” This article originally appeared on Stereogum.

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