Following the success of Pi, Mansell began work on Aronofsky’s next feature – Requiem For A Dream – released in 2000. Another psychological drama, the film relates the tale of four characters and their individual battles with various addictions. Using the Kronos Quartet with arrangements prepared by David Lang, Mansell created intricate webs of sound with strings that were able to highlight the cold desolation of the relationships playing out onscreen.
While the film garnered numerous awards nominations for lead actress Ellen Burstyn, the haunting original score entered the collective consciousness as movie studios began to superimpose it onto trailers for other films. ‘Lux Aeterna’ – with its relentless rhythm and ominous sense of menace – can be heard on the promotional footage of Zathura, Babylon A.D, The Da Vinci Code, Sunshine, Lost, I Am Legend and The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. As further testament to its popularity, the soundtrack was also remixed for a separate album – ‘Requiem For A Dream: Remixed’ – and featured the work of Paul Oakenfold and Josh Wink, among others.
Director Darren Aronofsky would not release another film for six years, but Clint Mansell had plenty to do – scoring four films in 2001, five in 2002, and a further six by the end of 2005. During that five year period, Mansell also scored two films for director Bart Freundlich – World Traveller and Trust The Man – building another productive director/composer relationship that would later yield the score for Freundlich’s 2009 romantic comedy, The Rebound.
But, by 2006, Aronofsky finally had his Fountain happening. A complex romantic drama, The Fountain interweaves three storylines featuring the same actors, who may or may not be versions of the same people. The production had been fraught with difficulty, and the critical reception of the finished film was less than stellar. However, the notable exception was Mansell’s score, which received a number of awards nominations as well as favourable reviews. The composer had achieved the difficult goal of using his music to tie together three storylines that were tonally very different, by employing a combination of piano, strings and simple melodies to offset the complexities of the storytelling. Calling upon the Kronos Quartet once again, as well as Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, Mansell produced an original score that cemented his reputation as a world-class composer to watch.
Having followed up the success of his score for The Fountain with the very different composition of 2006’s Smokin’s Aces, Mansell rounded out 2006 and 2007 by scoring several short films for various directors, before providing the original composition for 2008’s Definitely, Maybe for writer/director Adam Brooks. On release, the film was generally well-received, with the score being characterised by music critic William Ruhlmann as “sweet, melodic numbers that often seem to lack only a lyric to turn them into pop songs”.
The trend toward a score made up of self-contained ‘musical numbers’ crystallised with Aronofsky’s 2008 triumph, The Wrestler – the soundtrack of which was predominantly comprised of pre-recorded songs by artists such as Guns N Roses, Ratt, Scorpions, Cinderella, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, who won Best Song at the Broadcast Film Critics Association for that year. In keeping with the overall tone desired by the director, Mansell had legendary rock star Slash perform the guitar-based contributions to the film’s original score.
The year 2009 brought with it a whole new collaboration, as Clint Mansell provided the original score for the feature length directorial debut from Duncan Jones – son of music icon David Bowie. The sparse independent science fiction drama, Moon, follows solitary Helium-3 miner Sam Bell has he experiences a personal crisis near the end of a three-year contract on the dark side of the moon. A critical success, this clear demonstration of superior filmmaking talent features – for the most part – only Sam Rockwell as its main cast member, with Kevin Spacey providing the voice of the artificial intelligence unit for the mining base, GERTY.
In a further example of his continuing ability to weave an original score seamlessly into the fabric of a film, Clint Mansell provided compositions for Moon based heavily on percussion and variously-paced piano tones. The result is a soundtrack that perfectly matches the emotional resonance of each scene – creating depth and atmosphere in close union with the cinematography of Gary Shaw. The modern feel to the music composed for the film has again led to its use in a variety of media – the main theme appearing many times on the BBC hit show, Top Gear.
