While Trent Reznor made his bones as the frontman for the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, he's also made quite the name for himself over the last decade scoring films with collaborative partner Atticus Ross. The pair have been nominated for Academy Awards in the Best Score category for 2014's GONE GIRL and 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK, nabbing Oscar gold for the latter. The duo also won a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for 2011's GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. However, any hope of golden statues for the upcoming film THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is now out the door.
In a recent interview, Reznor revealed that both his and Ross' score for the Joe Wright directed thriller has officially been scraped. The pair were originally hired to write an "avant-garde" score for the movie. However, due to poor test screenings the film underwent massive reshoots that pushed back the release date. Consequently, producers felt a new score was needed and Reznor and Ross decided to bow out. Despite the situation, Reznor expressed no hard feelings claiming, “There’s no animosity on our end. It’s frustrating when you did that much work and it’s gone. And we were proud — and they were proud — of the movie that it was.”
However, the same thing cannot be said regarding Reznor's feelings about Netflix's BIRD BOX. The decidedly bizarre horror film starring Sandra Bullock went on to become one of the most successful films ever for the streamer. Unfortunately, Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's score did not factor much into the tale and Reznor was extremely candid with his thoughts on the matter:
“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 shit 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*cking waste of time. Then we thought, no one’s going to see this f*cking movie. And, of course, it’s the hugest movie ever in Netflix.”
If you'd told me fifteen years ago that Trent Reznor would be one of the most acclaimed and sought after artists for movie scores, I would have called you crazy. Yet here we are, and Reznor, along with with Ross, have earned their reputations. Their score for the Watchmen television show is better than most of the film scores that were released in 2019. Why the people behind THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW would want to put a talented pair like Ross and Reznor on the sidelines, baffles me to no end.
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW starring Tracy Letts, Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Brian Tyree Henry, and Anthony Mackie hits theaters May 15, 2020.