Every now and then I come across a great piece over at the L.A. Times’ Pop & Hiss blog (which I sadly forget to check more often than not). Today I came across this nice item, an interview with composer Clint Mansell (criminally robbed of an Oscar nomination for “The Fountain”) and his collaboration with guitarist Slash on the score for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler.”
Here’s a bit about Mansell’s direction for the score as a reflection of the character and how the work of Bruce Springsteen, ironically, served as an early inspiration:
We knew there was no way we could judge the character,” Mansell says. “He sleeps in the back of a van after a wrestling match, and that might be a really horrendous way of living for some of us. But for him, he’s just doing what he wants to do. So we didn’t want to make the music maudlin or schmaltzy or anything that judges the character.”
Oddly enough, some of the music that inspired Mansell was by Springsteen, who composed the Golden Globe-nominated song in the film’s namesake — a cut that contrasts a plaintive melody with some street-tough imagery. Before the Springsteen song had been secured, Mansell had been trying to capture the stark, paired-down feel of the artist’s 1982 album “Nebraska.”
“I had talked to Darren [Aronofsky] about Springsteen’s ‘Nebraska’ album,” Mansell says referring to the film’s director. “It’s an emotional record, but it’s quite restrained — it keeps the emotion at a distance. I thought that this was the character that Randy Robinson was. That led me towards the guitar.”
Check out the rest here.
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One response to “Mansell’s collaboration with Slash saw prescient beginnings”
Is there a chance that the score could be nominated? I know that it is very subtle and that the music throughout the movie is ’80s rock, plus there have been other fantastic scores this years that are more noticeable, but does this stand a chance?