Young filmmaker Richard Kelly loves him some music. His debut, “Donnie Darko” featured an 80s’-centric line-up of Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Joy Division and Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” (which went on to become quite a hit afterwards, several times over because of the film).
While that’s a lot of pop music, it effectively worked in the sci-fi, psychological thriller. In his follow-up, the largely disastrous “Southland Tales,” from 2007, he began to lose the plot wholesale and musical slathered the film with an overwrought use of ’90s alt-rock including The Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, the more-indie side of Blur, Radiohead, Muse, etc. etc. (plus a Moby score from various ’90s and ’00 albums). Suffice to say it didn’t work.
Maybe Kelly is just learning about music in public, because his next film, the “Twilight Zone”-ish sounding thriller, “The Box,” is set to tap artists from the 1970s. According to a recent interview with AICN, Kelly says that on top of an score already written by members of the Arcade Fire and Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy, the movie will feature songs by Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead, Wilson Pickett, Scott Walker and The Marshall Tucker Band.
Kelly reiterates that the augmented Arcade Fire-members score (Win Butler and Régine Chassagne of AF and Pallet are three people who actually composed it) is a whopping 80 minutes long — which sounds like they’ll be plenty leftover for a long-ass soundtrack score disc — and has a Bernard Hermann [‘Psycho’ composer] feel. Apparently there’s a lot of music and score used throughout the film as well. Hopefully he’s not slathering again.
“There’s a sequence in the library with no dialogue for four minutes that’s all music. It’s a very score-heavy film. And there’s pop songs in it, too. We have Eric Clapton, Grateful Dead, Wilson Pickett, Scott Walker and The Marshall Tucker Band. It’s Virginia 1976, so I wanted to have that Southern Rock flavor,” he said.
Kelly also notes, don’t expect to hear the “Arcade Fire” score in the upcoming trailer which will be more generic stuff. “You’ve probably heard the trailer score before. But in a weird way, when you’re trying to broadly market a film… I don’t question the science of it. Because they do have it down to a science. I’m just grateful to have a film coming out on more than fifty screens with a marketing budget of more than $300,000.”
After the critical and commercial bomb of “Southland Tales,” we would totally agree with you, Richard.