shook magazine

2
T he town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands is hardly the epicentre of the world of film, music or television but this is where the story began for this unlikely Hollywood film score composer. Clint Mansell began his road to notoriety during the late ‘80s, when acid house, hip- hop and ecstasy were all the rage. At the time Mansell was fronting the infectious pop punk-cum-industrial electronic band Pop Will Eat Itself which wanted nothing more than to ‘Sample It, Loop It, Fuck It, Eat It’. Despite occasionally crashing the pop charts with a string of successful releases such as ‘Def Con One’, ’Wise Up! Sucker’ and ‘Ich Bin Ein Auslander’ the band parted ways in ‘96 when Mansell, the dreadlocked revolutionary, tired of taking centre stage. Broke, directionless and disillusioned with writing, Mansell found himself in New York City for no other reason than that his girlfriend was living there. “After PWEI I had this idea that I’d do something different and my ego thought it was something that would change the world (laughing).” Still in New York, Mansell had a fortuitous encounter with an ambitious director just out of film school. “I remember that he really wanted to use all this pre-existing electronic music, but he didn’t have any money and nobody had heard of him. So every time he couldn’t license a track, I had to write a piece of music to replace it and in the end I did the whole score.” That fresh-faced director turned out to be Darren Aronofsky, one of the film industry’s most creative and important directors working today. The collaboration on Aronofsky’s debut film π (Pi) gave the Midlander a new lease of life and the opportunity to indulge in a fresh approach to writing music, trading the megaphone he wielded in PWEI for the more refined baton of the orchestra. “I thought if I could combine the orchestral with the electronic and the modern approach, it could be kind of interesting.” Mansell proved that this was more than just a one-off with his next project, conjuring a magical score for Aronofsky’s second feature Requiem For a Dream. The film was epitomised by the track ‘Lux Aeterna’, which was used and reused for several film and TV trailers. “I remember going to see Punch Drunk Love and a trailer for the second Lord of the Rings film came on using my Requiem track. It blew my mind and I kept looking round to see if anyone else was listening to it (laughing) but they were all talking.” Despite the initial success, life was still not easy for Mansell. “After I did the first two films with Darren I knew he was gonna do The Fountain, which ended up taking five years. But if the film had moved forward the way it had been intended, there’s no way I would have been given the score because I was still so inexperienced. So I had to go out and kiss every frog there was in order to learn my trade for when it came to doing something bigger.” The experience on several, lesser-praised productions such as The Hole, Sonny and even Doom paid off, as Mansell was given the nod for The Fountain. The third collaboration between the pair proved so successful that Mansell was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a World Soundtrack Award. “Saying that, I did see on the IMDB message board that some guy called me a one-hit wonder, as nothing was ever as good as ‘Lux Aeterna’. Oh well.” “One of the best things though about winning the World Soundtrack Awards is that they ask you to come back the following year and perform some of your music. I’d always wanted to perform with a live nine-piece band, the way Godspeed You! Black Emperor performs – sorta neoclassical – but until then, I’d never really had any impetus to do it.” Mansell took his nine-piece orchestra out on the road last year, playing a packed Union Chapel in London and performing a variety of arrangements from his film scores with the Sonus Quartet. “I really enjoyed it. I’m 47 and when I was 25 I wanted to run around being drunk out of my mind, jumping up and down, which was brilliant; but now I’ve got this an it suits me. Also now (laughing) I get to sit down.” As if performing to sold-out crowds wasn’t enough, Mansell rounded off 2009 by composing for six new film releases. This included Duncan Jones fantastic debut sci-fi film Moon, which was beautifully complemented by Mansell’s haunting and melancholy composition. “Oh Duncan was fantastic because he just let me go about it and he trusted me, which was great. Half the time the problem when writing a score is that people keep changing their minds and say like ‘we want it purple, now we want it black, now we want it to sound like a cascading river’. You know, it’s just so bloody annoying.” So what lies on the road ahead for Mansell? “Well I’ve been working on Darren’s next film Black Swan. One of the ideas floating around is to build the entire score out of elements from Swan Lake, albeit vastly screwed with.” “Me and Darren have had ideas before and then we put them into practice and they just suck. So until I’ve had a chance to put some of my ideas against some of the scenes, I won’t know if it works. When I first started, I would panic and I’d try to get as much done as quickly as possible, but now I’m more relaxed about it because I’ve got more confidence. It’s only when Darren says he don’t like it that I’ll start head butting the wall (laughing). For now though, it’s all very embryonic.” Throughout his career, Mansell has consistently proven himself within a genre that many would be right to believe has become stale, repetitive and dominated by mediocre, mainstream scores by the likes of James Horner or Hans Zimmer. His decision to switch career paths might not have necessarily ‘changed the world’ exactly as he envisaged it, but it has made Mansell one of the most successful, sought after, intriguing and emotion-inducing composers of the last decade, which comes a close second. words: JaMes Wright CLINT MANSELL, THE LOCKSED FRONTMAN OF ‘80S AGIT- RAVERS POP WILL EAT ITSELF, WAS WAITING FOR A BOLT INSPIRATION WHEN AN UNLIKELY ENCOUNTER IN NEW YORK WITH A YOUNG DIRECTOR CALLED DARREN ARONOFSKY CHANGED HIS WORLD. INFINITE JEST 36

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Clint Mansell Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: SHOOK Magazine

The town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands is hardly the epicentre of the world of film, music or television but this is

where the story began for this unlikely Hollywood film score composer. Clint Mansell began his road to notoriety during the late ‘80s, when acid house, hip-hop and ecstasy were all the rage. At the time Mansell was fronting the infectious pop punk-cum-industrial electronic band Pop Will eat Itself which wanted nothing more than to ‘Sample It, Loop It, Fuck It, eat It’. Despite occasionally crashing the pop charts with a string of successful releases such as ‘Def Con One’, ’Wise up! Sucker’ and ‘Ich Bin ein Auslander’ the band parted ways in ‘96 when Mansell, the dreadlocked revolutionary, tired of taking centre stage. Broke, directionless and disillusioned with writing, Mansell found himself in New York City for no other reason than that his girlfriend was living there. “After PWeI I had this idea that I’d do something different and my ego thought it was something that would change the world (laughing).” Still in New York, Mansell had a fortuitous encounter with an ambitious director just out of film school. “I remember that he really wanted to use all this pre-existing electronic music, but he didn’t have any money and nobody had heard of him. So every time he couldn’t license a track, I had to write a piece of music to replace it and in the end I did the whole score.” That fresh-faced director turned out to be Darren Aronofsky, one of the film industry’s most creative and important directors working today. The collaboration on Aronofsky’s debut film π (Pi) gave the Midlander a new lease of life and the opportunity to indulge in a fresh approach to writing music, trading the megaphone he wielded in PWeI for the more refined baton of the orchestra. “I thought if I could combine the orchestral with the electronic and the modern approach, it could be kind of interesting.” Mansell proved that this was more than just a one-off with his next project, conjuring a magical score for Aronofsky’s second feature Requiem For a Dream. The film was epitomised by the track ‘Lux Aeterna’, which was used and reused for several film and

TV trailers. “I remember going to see Punch Drunk Love and a trailer for the second Lord of the Rings film came on using my Requiem track. It blew my mind and I kept looking round to see if anyone else was listening to it (laughing) but they were all talking.” Despite the initial success, life was still not easy for Mansell. “After I did the first two films with Darren I knew he was gonna do The Fountain, which ended up taking five years. But if the film had moved forward the way it had been intended, there’s no way I would have been given the score because I was still so inexperienced. So I had to go out and kiss every frog there was in order to learn my trade for when it came to doing something bigger.”

The experience on several, lesser-praised productions such as The Hole, Sonny and even Doom paid off, as Mansell was given the nod for The Fountain. The third collaboration between the pair proved so successful that Mansell was nominated for a Golden Globe and won a World Soundtrack Award. “Saying that, I did see on the IMDB message board that some guy called me a one-hit wonder, as nothing was ever as good as ‘Lux Aeterna’. Oh well.” “One of the best things though about winning the World Soundtrack Awards is that they ask you to come back the following year and perform some of your music. I’d always wanted to perform with a live nine-piece band, the way Godspeed You! Black emperor performs – sorta neoclassical – but until then, I’d never really had any impetus to do it.”

Mansell took his nine-piece orchestra out on the road last year, playing a packed union Chapel in London and performing a variety of arrangements from his film scores with the Sonus Quartet. “I really enjoyed it. I’m 47 and when I was 25 I wanted to run around being drunk out of my mind, jumping up and down, which was brilliant; but now I’ve got this an it suits me. Also now (laughing) I get to sit down.” As if performing to sold-out crowds wasn’t enough, Mansell rounded off 2009 by composing for six new film releases. This included Duncan Jones fantastic debut sci-fi film Moon, which was beautifully complemented by Mansell’s haunting and melancholy composition. “Oh Duncan was fantastic because he just let me go about it and he trusted me, which was great. Half the time the problem when writing a score is that people keep changing their minds and say like ‘we want it purple, now we want it black, now we want it to sound like a cascading river’. You know, it’s just so bloody annoying.” So what lies on the road ahead for Mansell? “Well I’ve been working on Darren’s next film Black Swan. One of the ideas floating around is to build the entire score out of elements from Swan Lake, albeit vastly screwed with.” “Me and Darren have had ideas before and then we put them into practice and they just suck. So until I’ve had a chance to put some of my ideas against some of the scenes, I won’t know if it works. When I first started, I would panic and I’d try to get as much done as quickly as possible, but now I’m more relaxed about it because I’ve got more confidence. It’s only when Darren says he don’t like it that I’ll start head butting the wall (laughing). For now though, it’s all very embryonic.” Throughout his career, Mansell has consistently proven himself within a genre that many would be right to believe has become stale, repetitive and dominated by mediocre, mainstream scores by the likes of James Horner or Hans zimmer. His decision to switch career paths might not have necessarily ‘changed the world’ exactly as he envisaged it, but it has made Mansell one of the most successful, sought after, intriguing and emotion-inducing composers of the last decade, which comes a close second.

words: JaMes Wright

cLint mAnseLL , the LockseD

frontmAn of ‘80s AGit-

rAvers pop wiLL eAt itseLf ,

wAs wAitinG for A BoLt

inspirAtion when An unLikeLy

encounter in new york with

A younG Director cALLeD

DArren Aronofsky chAnGeD

his worLD.

INFINITE

JEST

36

Page 2: SHOOK Magazine

37