It’s generally a big deal when Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross work on a score together, even if they usually just do variations on moody bleeps and ominous droning (listen, it’s December 26, nobody’s gonna stop us from getting real today). The good ones have really good moody bleeps and ominous droning, sure, but they’re not all good, as Reznor himself recently explained to Revolver (via Pitchfork). In the interview, Reznor said that working on Netflix’s Bird Box was a “fucking waste of time,” because an editor with “bad taste” ruined the audio mix.
Reznor says that it seemed like “some people” working on Bird Box were “phoning it in,” and since he was on tour when they put together the final mix, he wasn’t there to stop this person with bad taste from making the music so low that “you couldn’t hear it anyway.” The only consolation was that Reznor figured that nobody was going to see “this fucking movie” anyway, but “of course, it’s the hugest movie ever on Netflix.” Still, the fact that his score is mixed so low means that Reznor and Ross got away unscathed from working on a movie that is, to be honest, pretty lousy. So that’s cool.
Elsewhere in the Revolver chat, Reznor talked about him and Ross deciding to step away from Amy Adams’ The Woman In The Window. Apparently, the response at test screenings convinced the studio to change the film in ways that Reznor and Ross didn’t like, so—even though their score was complete—they decided to quit. “There’s no animosity on our end,” he noted, adding that “we were proud—and they were proud—of the movie that it was.”