After writing an acclaimed and Golden Globe-nominated score for David Fincher's "The Social Network," Trent Reznor and his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross are teaming again with the director for the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson's insanely popular crime thriller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."
The duo have actually already worked up two hours of music for the project, and had Reznor not undergone a personal tragedy last week, you all would be listening to samples of it right now. The Nine Inch Nails leader dropped the news in a live chat hosted on the New York Times' website Friday night, which Blabbermouth has archived. "My plan this last week was to bring you some of that music in a deconstructed state to show you a couple new tricks we came up with. But unfortunately my mother died this past Sunday unexpectedly," Reznor told the Times' Jon Pareles, "so I'm just going to have to charm you with my wit."
Reznor said he and Ross had been working on the score for the past month, despite not having received a script or any instructions from Fincher. "I'd heard a few buzzwords like 'ice,' Fincher writing, 'I can't write anymore, my fingers are frozen,' " Reznor said. "The music is coming great for that. It was all based on performance, nothing programmed" -- he joked that involved his "limited skills at string instruments" -- which they'd then "process in a way that gave it an interesting, organic, layered feel. It felt like something we'd never done before." Reznor noted that he and Ross are striving to create their own sonic world for the film, "And the research we've done and the results we have so far really feel like it's like that."
Reznor and Ross took a similar approach to "The Social Network," which Reznor admits at first sounded unappealing: "When you hear that it's a movie about the founding of Facebook, it sounds like it's gonna suck." But after Reznor turned down the project and then reconsidered, Fincher gave the duo specific instructions, like, "He wanted it to be electronic, he didn't want to use an orchestra, he wanted it to have an iconic nature where it felt like it was from this movie, like 'Blade Runner' feels like it's from 'Blade Runner.' "
Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara are cast in "Dragon Tattoo," which is due in theaters in December. A Danish composer named Jacob Groth scored the original "Dragon Tattoo" film in 2009 -- hear a bit of his ominous-sounding work from the movie here:
[Photo: Bennett Raglin/WireImage.com]