My goth girlfriend in high school turned me onto Nine Inch Nails when I was an angsty teenager. While I had previously fallen in love with Trent Reznor in the 1990s when my mother would blare his sexually-explicit “Closer” while I was a child, his larger body of work eluded me. As I grew though, I gained more appreciation for the man and when he stepped into film composing, I followed closely. However, I missed his Bird Box score and, apparently, there’s not even that much to miss.
I never much cared to see the aforementioned Sandra Bullock thriller, as it was critically lambasted and I’d already watched A Quiet Place earlier that year. I was excited when I heard Trent and Atticus Ross were scoring it, but I guess it’s barely in the final product, something that has quite majorly irked the Nine Inch Nails frontman, especially after an apparently miserable time composing the dang thing in the first place.
Just check out his early-2000s level anger here:
“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. And the final icing on the s–t cake was we were on tour when they mixed it. And they mixed the music so low, you couldn’t hear it anyway. So it was like, that was a…that was a f–king waste of time. Then we thought, no one’s going to see this f–king movie. And, of course, it’s the hugest movie ever in Netflix.”
Hell yeah, get ’em Trent! I love the guy, I really do. I would argue to say that he never quite sold out, although that weird deal he made with Apple was kind of disheartening. He’s always been an indie music artist, though, establishing his own label, The Null Corporation, in the 2000s. Plus, he got ripped as heck after a hard time in his life, coming back bigger than ever. He’s like…awesome. And, I’ll say it, a hottie. And outspoken. And an amazing composer. What’s not to like?
I know what’s not to like: Bird Box. Yeah, it might be one of Netflix’s most watched original films of all time, but much like the movie’s editor, people seem to have bad taste these days. Oh well.
