The Sandra Bullock movie Trent Reznor hated with a passion: “The final icing on the shit cake”
After a long period of success in Nine Inch Nails, releasing hit albums like Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor began a new musical endeavour that would take him down another incredibly fruitful avenue. Approached by David Fincher to score The Social Network, Reznor teamed up with Atticus Ross to make the acclaimed soundtrack, marking the start of a new impressive career as a composer.
Reznor and Ross took home the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Score’ in 2010, bringing The Social Network to life with their ambient and electronic sounds. Ten years later, the duo won another ‘Best Original Score’ Oscar for the Disney animation Soul, proving their versatility as musicians. However, they’ve routinely gone back to Fincher, scoring many of his films, like Gone Girl, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Mank.
While Reznor and Ross are best known for their Fincher collaborations – and more recently their work with Luca Guadagnino, most notably Challengers – they’ve also lent their musical expertise to movies like Patriot’s Day, Mid90s, Empire of Light, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and Bird Box.
The pair certainly have an impressive resumé, but not every film was a positive experience for Reznor. He found himself dissatisfied with scoring Bird Box, starring Sandra Bullock, a movie that unexpectedly became a huge Netflix sensation. Playing into the horror trope of sense deprivation that was popular at the time, in this case, the loss of sight via blindfolds, the 2018 movie follows Bullock’s Malorie as she attempts to survive in the face of mysterious creatures that can cause people to commit suicide.
Directed by Susanne Bier, the post-apocalyptic horror film became the most-watched movie on Netflix upon its release, although it has since been overtaken by Don’t Look Up and Red Notice. Still, Bird Box was the movie on everyone’s lips in December 2018, but, for Reznor, he couldn’t wait to erase the experience from his memory.
He simply wasn’t happy with the way the film turned out, explaining to Revolver, “When we got immersed in it, it felt like some people were phoning it in. And you’re stuck with a film editor who had real bad taste. That’s kind of our barricade to getting stuff in the film.” The musician was shocked to discover that the score can hardly be heard properly in the film, boldly stating, “And the final icing on the shit cake was we were on tour when they mixed it. And they mixed the music so low, you couldn’t hear it anyway.”
The movie divided critics, with Reznor appearing to be in the same camp as those who disliked it. Still, Reznor and Ross released their extra recordings for the film under the title Bird Box/Null 09 Extended, but even that felt like a pointless endeavour for them. “That was a fucking waste of time. Then we thought, no one’s going to see this fucking movie. And, of course, it’s the hugest movie ever in Netflix.” Unfortunately for Reznor and Ross, the experience wasn’t the greatest, but they didn’t let that deter them from scoring again, following it with one of their most celebrated soundtracks of all time, Watchmen.
