Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter admits scoring ‘Tron: Legacy’ was “depressing”
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter has admitted the experience of writing the score for Disney’s Tron: Legacy was not what he hoped it would be.
The famed French electronic duo were responsible for penning the soundtrack to the 2010 sci-fi film directed by Joseph Kosinski, as a follow-up to the 1982 classic Tron.
However, when appearing on the latest episode of the A24 Podcast hosted by Dev Hynes, otherwise known as Blood Orange, Bangalter revealed how the movie was less than fruitful for Daft Punk, instead calling it “depressing” and “limiting”.
The musician explained that “initially”, Kosinski’s vision was for the duo to create a “full electronic score”, but they had other ideas.
“By that time, I’d done that music for 15 years, [so I said] ‘No, we’re going to Hollywood, we’re going to use Fantasia, like it’s Disney, a full orchestra!’”, Bangalter recalled, via DJ Mag.
Although Daft Punk’s idea was to combine a symphony orchestra with various electronic elements, this ended up falling flat when it came to pairing the music with the movie itself.
“When we started to experiment with the picture, anything that was in the medium range frequentially would conflict with dialogue, [so] then we ended up only using this pulsing bass,” Bangalter explained.
In turn, this meant that synths in the lower frequencies, as well as a vintage modular system, had to be scrapped from the score, leaving Bangalter disappointed in the overall experience.
“It was so limiting to feel like I had all these ideas, but the whole thing about film score music is [you have to] take a step back for the performance, and not be in the way,” he said.
Likely expressing the feelings of many musicians who have been in this position, Bangalter added, “It’s always very depressing when you have all these ideas, and then you end up having to go back to a more traditional way of doing it.”
Ultimately, having spent 19 months scoring Tron: Legacy and not feeling as though they reaped the rewards from it, Daft Punk never returned to write the soundtrack for another film again.
For his own part, Bangalter has been focusing on his solo career since 2022, subsequently ruling out a Daft Punk reunion last month upon the release of his latest album, Mirage: Ballet for 16 Dancers.
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