In a film exploring a recently widowed man’s daily grief, one might think of a soundtrack filled with Leonard Cohen or Michael Giacchino strings to accompany the story. But recently at Cannes, director Bill Purple revealed that one of the biggest pop music superstars on the planet will supervise and score his latest project.
THR reports Justin Timberlake will act as composer and music supervisor for “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” which stars Chloe Moretz, Jessica Biel, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, from a script by Purple and Robbie Pickering. The film, which takes place in New Orleans, follows Morgan dealing with the aftermath of his wife’s (Biel) fatal car accident, and in an effort to move on, helping an enthusiastic young girl (Moretz) in her dream of building a raft and sailing the Atlantic. Presumably, the film will also jump back and forth in time to establish Morgan’s relationship with Biel, although it’d be interesting if Purple just pulled a stunt casting move for the actress to vanish after the opening reel.
As much as a feature-length ballad on the process of loss would be intriguing from Timberlake, even Kanye West or R. Kelly seems more likely to tackle that goal first. No hints have been given on the style of Timberlake’s score, but the end result should hopefully be as surprising as how adept at film acting the artist (who'll next appear in The Coen Brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis") actually proved to be. That leaves many potential roads for the score to go down, but it doesn’t prove a stretch to imagine Timberlake at some point joining Trent Reznor and Jonny Greenwood as soundtrack mainstays down the road if this new gig suits him well.
Production on “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” will begin this fall.