There are times in movies when not everything goes the way it should and some aspects get a bit screwed up or don’t perform the way that the people in charge want. But that wouldn’t just be putting it mildly when describing how Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor spoke of his time scoring the movie Bird Box. The musician laid down a scathing rebuke of the experience by stating that it was a waste time and that no one was ever going to watch the movie anyway. But of course the movie did get watched by a record number of people only to fall to Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston’s Murder Mystery only a short while later. You could say that Reznor was likely wishing that he’d never agreed to score the movie at some point since it sounds as though the lackluster performance he received and the use of their tracks later on for the premier were simply horrific, and not in an ear-catching sort of way. Some might want to think that Reznor is being too much of a stickler and not at all forgiving in any sense, but considering his accomplishments and what he’s done in his career it does feel as though those working with him might be expected to give their best or just get out.
Trent had this to say, as per Hoai-Tran Bui of SlashFilm:
“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 s**t 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 … [Laughs] That was a f*****g waste of time. Then we thought, no one’s going to see this f*****g movie. And, of course, it’s the hugest movie ever in Netflix.”
That’s pretty cut and dried when it comes down to just how he felt and what he had to say concerning the whole affair, but when you listen to this guy’s music on other tracks you can’t help but be blown away since he’s created award-winning tracks that have manage to elevate him to his current position and justify making him this strict about what he does. The movie itself was widely popular since people were talking about it even after Murder Mystery had gone on to surpass it. For a while the internet was abuzz with ideas of just what the creatures were, why they’d come, and many other theories about the show that people either didn’t know or didn’t know enough about. But during that time obviously Trent was stewing, just waiting for something, anything else to come along and take up his time. One has to think that it might be kind of frustrating to have the kind of talent he possesses and not be able to let it drag whatever it’s attached to into the light when needed, but it’s also a wonder just how many people noticed the score that much when they were so focused on the story. A great soundtrack can elevate a movie in a big way as it’s been seen throughout the history of cinema, but there are those times when music either doesn’t do much except add some interesting elements to the overall production or goes unnoticed completely since the movie is fully capable of taking care of itself.
With all due respect to Trent this appears to be the case when it comes to Bird Box since the movie pulled down so many viewers that it didn’t really matter that the soundtrack was, in his estimation, garbage. He’s still the musician, there’s no debate there, but even a musician needs to understand now and again when a movie can stand on its own and doesn’t need the overabundance of a heavily-laden score that might ramp up the tension or simply overdo things. I can just feel the live wires that are those musically-inclined individuals out there that would highly disagree with this statement, no doubt ready to state that a movie isn’t anything without its soundtrack. In some cases it’s definitely less, there’s no doubt about it, but in others the movie needs a moderate soundtrack that follows and does not lead, that accentuates but doesn’t seek to explain what’s going on through an overreaching amount of sound that could very well drown out the finer points trying to be made. Is this what happened in Bird Box? It’s hard to say, but what is easy to say is that the music, the story, and the effects are all parts of the movie that need to come together in order to create a worthwhile movie, and even if Trent doesn’t like it, the score for Bird Box was obviously what it needed to be.
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