Gone Girl

23 September 2014 | 5:11 pm | Anthony Carew

Without giving anything away, Atticus Ross skirts around the subject of his latest film scoring gig

"I don’t want to give it away,” says Atticus Ross, the 46-year-old English producer and programmer most famous, these days, for his ongoing collaborations with Trent Reznor, and their work with filmmaker David Fincher. Having previously scored 2010’s The Social Network and 2011’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the pair returned for Fincher’s tenth feature, Gone Girl, the film about which this interview is based – or, y’know, around. “I don’t want to say too much about it,” he offers, later, and again. “I don’t want to spoil the surprise.” And so goes a strange conversational dance: talking to a composer about a score that is, itself, being kept under wraps, before the spoiler-phobic film has even been publicly screened.

It’s rare for composers to be handling a film’s press, but the relationship between Fincher, Reznor and Ross isn’t your standard scoring work. Ross describes their process as “one of refining and refining and refining and refining and refining and refining,” ideas swapped from the beginning of the film’s production to its end. Ross see the musicians’ backgrounds – he of 12 Rounds, Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, both in How To Destroy Angels – as giving them the same sense of “storytelling”, of wanting the score to be both a whole work unto itself and yet indivisible from the film. “To me, what’s exciting about film music is that there are no goal posts,” Ross explains. “It can be whatever you want it to be. But for some reason, film music has become just as conventional [as Top 40 radio] when it needn’t be. If you go watch a lot of movies, all the big orchestral scores start to feel completely interchangeable.”

Ross and Reznor’s work on Gone Girl – an all-is-not-what-it-seems thriller in which Ben Affleck plays a husband whose wife, Rosamund Pike, disappears on their fifth anniversary – is, by its makers’ estimation, “definitely the most experimental” of their scores for Fincher. With their collaborative relationship entrenched, Fincher began talking concepts and themes before he’d picked up a camera. “He was interested in the idea of the social façade, of this presentation that everything is great, that people present as happy, successful couples. And how that can curdle, and turn sour. That’s what he wanted reflected in the music. The first reference he gave us was at a day spa, that benign new age ambient music that plays. He wanted to hear what that sounded like when falling apart.”

So, assembling their “arsenal of instruments,” Ross and Reznor set about exploring the world of handmade, homemade and boutique-level synth builders. “That hands-on quality, seeing what sounds you can get out of something, is really important, especially in this day and age. In the digital era, you can sit on your laptop and have a digital version of every synthesiser ever made, of an orchestra, whatever drum-machine. It’s a limitless thing and the problem with limitless is ‘Where the fuck do you start? Where do you end?’ We like to work with a set of rules because, to us, it isn’t a hindrance, but an inspiration.”

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In cinemas 2 Oct