Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Score for Gone Girl to Include Parts Done with An Orchestra

The Nine Inch Nails frontman worked with a live orchestra for the first time on Gone Girl. See the trailer and what Atticus Ross has to say about the project right here.

A live orchestra, with its warm, reverberating, organic sounds, might not conjure up images of industrial king Trent Reznor. After all, Reznor has made a successful career off of putting the cold, unforgiving, metallic-feel of modern society onto record. His band Nine Inch Nails are renowned for popularizing the soul-crushing sound of 1990s industrial rock.

It makes sense that Reznor would sign on to score film about a good neighbor with a twisted secret. Gone Girl, which is based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, is a thriller about a seemingly happy marriage that goes horribly wrong.

Rather than sticking with his usual electronic mastery, like he did with previous movie scores in The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, Reznor is trying something different.

In a new interview, Reznor said Gone Girl director David Fincher told him to create something that seems warm and fuzzy at first, then to imagine that sound beginning to “curdle and unravel.” Reznor describes his sound on Gone Girl as the artificial good feeling you get from a massage parlor or spa that slowly disintegrates into something devious.

To get your skin crawling a bit, Atticus Ross added that their goal was to make something “that feels so sick.” So if the movie’s score doesn’t make you feel slightly uneasy, you might want to make an appointment with your psychiatrist.

Fincher said working with the pair was a breeze, but they keep to themselves on the job.

“They don’t have time for a lot of bullshit,” Fincher said.

Since Reznor is working with a full live orchestra for the first time in his career, he can’t exactly afford a lot of it either. To get the warm, loving feeling of the first and final parts of the movie, they brought in the orchestra because it was the only way to bring this feeling to the screen.

Reznor and Ross aren’t new to the art of movie scores by any means. The pair scored themselves an Oscar for their musical work on The Social Network and were nominated for a Golden Globe award for their score for The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo. This new film will be the third time Reznor and Ross will work together on a major film.

Ross is best known for his work with Reznor, but he is a successful composer and audio engineer in his own right. He has worked as a producer for a number of bands, and even collaborated with Reznor outside of the film business for his project How to Destroy Angels.

Take a look at the newly-released trailer for Gone Girl here:

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