Clint Mansell tells the sto­ry behind his favourite film scores

Like so many musi­cians of his gen­er­a­tion, Clint Mansell had mind split wide open by watch­ing David Bowie per­form ​‘Star­man’ on Top of the Pops in 1972. Years lat­er the for­mer Pop Will Eat Itself front­man end­ed up try­ing to con­vince the late rock icon to col­lab­o­rate on a sound­track he was work­ing on with direc­tor Dar­ren Aronofsky.

It’s with Aronof­sky that Mansell has become syn­ony­mous, hav­ing scored each of the writer/director’s fea­ture films since Pi. This month Mansell is tour­ing the UK, per­form­ing a selec­tion of film music from his rich and var­ied career. Here he talks us through some of his most cel­e­brat­ed scores, includ­ing Ben Wheatley’s JG Bal­lard adap­ta­tion, High-Rise.

“Com­pos­ing for film always felt like a job that oth­er peo­ple did. I don’t real­ly con­sid­er myself a musi­cian, com­ing from an elec­tron­ic, punk-rock world. It’s more about son­ic col­lage, that’s what a lot of my ear­ly stuff was like. It was a chance meet­ing that brought me into this world. I could tell Dar­ren [Aronof­sky] was seri­ous about this film, but I wasn’t sure if it would ever lead to any­thing because it was being made total­ly inde­pen­dent­ly. As a first timer with no idea what I was doing, I had time to play around and fig­ure things out.

“We bond­ed over a shared dis­like of mod­ern film music. The film music that I didn’t like then is the same film music that I don’t like now. It’s just wall­pa­per – it’s bull­shit. Just look at some­thing like Paris, Texas: Wim Wen­ders cre­at­ed space in the film for the music and peo­ple rarely do that any more. We’d go back to some­thing like John Carpenter’s Hal­loween, which is just an amaz­ing piece of music.

“Orig­i­nal­ly they were only look­ing for me to do an orig­i­nal title piece, the idea being that Dar­ren was going to license elec­tron­ic music for the rest of the film [Aphex Twin, Autechre, Mas­sive Attack fea­ture on the film’s sound­track]. A lit­tle like how Kubrick would do stuff with clas­si­cal music, Dar­ren would use elec­tron­ic music. The film had no mon­ey so the artists were reluc­tant; when he couldn’t get a track Dar­ren would ask me to write a piece and that’s how we dis­cov­ered that a bespoke piece of music for a scene could work. As a result I end­ed up doing a full score.”

“After Pi I nev­er thought I’d do anoth­er score. I was quite sur­prised when Dar­ren asked me to do Requiem for a Dream. He grew up in Brook­lyn and Coney Island and the music of his youth was hip-hop; he want­ed to explore that and reflect that in the score. I wrote a lot of stuff for him pri­or to shoot­ing, as I usu­al­ly do. It wasn’t hip-hop itself, but it had that feel.

“Dar­ren sent me the scene where Ellen Burstyn’s char­ac­ter takes the diet pills and gets all speed­ed up and it’s all fast as she’s clean­ing up. He had placed ​‘She Watch Chan­nel Zero’ by Pub­lic Ene­my under it and it was fan­tas­tic, but it wasn’t much beyond cool. It didn’t real­ly say any­thing and we need­ed more for it to work. I was liv­ing in New Orleans at the time and he came down for the week­end to spend some time just going through the music with me. I’d giv­en him a CD of 20 ideas and num­ber 17 on that CD was ​‘Lux Aeter­na’, which became the main theme.

“We put this demo on the scene when Jen­nifer Con­nel­ly has slept with her psy­chi­a­trist to get mon­ey for drugs, and she comes out of his apart­ment and we’re look­ing at her as she’s stag­ger­ing up the cor­ri­dor of her apart­ment build­ing. There’s been a thun­der storm brew­ing for about the last 20 min­utes by this stage and then the storm breaks and you have this crack of light­ning and she throws up in the waste paper bas­ket. We put ​‘Lux’ under­neath it and some­thing mag­i­cal hap­pened. That was when we knew we had something.”

“This film had a long ges­ta­tion peri­od for a num­ber of rea­sons. Dar­ren was liv­ing in LA for a while and I took him to see Mog­wai play one night. I’d only recent­ly dis­cov­ered them at the time but they and God­speed You! Black Emper­or were chang­ing the music I was lis­ten­ing to. When I first start­ed doing the score Dar­ren was a bit thrown, I think he thought it sound­ed a bit like Pink Floyd and wasn’t sure. But he’d always say, ​‘Let’s see where it goes.’

“As it took shape we talked about work­ing with the Kro­nos Quar­tet, who we worked with on Requiem. It’s prob­a­bly one of my favourite works; it turned out far bet­ter than I could have ever dreamed. We ini­tial­ly thought we want­ed a song at the end of the film and reached out to Antony and the John­sons to see if Anohni would be inter­est­ed in writ­ing some lyrics for it. We spent to days in the stu­dio and it turned out great but Dar­ren decid­ed he didn’t want to do it because he felt it was weird hav­ing the vocal come in. But that’s a filmmaker’s choice, if it was up to the musi­cian to make those kinds of choic­es there would be music every­where. Before that, Dar­ren had this idea of try­ing to get David Bowie to work with vocal­i­sa­tions or some­thing that would result in an end song. We met and talked about it a few times but it didn’t come to pass in the end.

“Popol Vuh’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God score was a touch­ing point for this film too – there’s an almost med­i­ta­tive feel to that music and the film­mak­ing is of a dif­fer­ent cal­i­bre. It cre­ates an expe­ri­ence you can join in with and I love that, it’s inspir­ing. Even when movie music is great, we still know we’re in a movie; it’s a bit of an emo­tion­al handrail at times. When music then comes from a dif­fer­ent angle it changes your expe­ri­ences of it. It’s not telling you what to think, it’s cre­at­ing a world and your expe­ri­ences are devel­op­ing with what you’re seeing.”

“Moon was a par­tic­u­lar­ly spe­cial project to work on, it’s still prob­a­bly the best script I’ve ever read. It spoke to me so much and I real­ly con­nect­ed with it, espe­cial­ly on its themes of iso­la­tion and what it means to be human. Sam Rockwell’s per­for­mance is just fan­tas­tic and Dun­can [Jones] was just great at let­ting you do what you do. It’s a lit­tle bit of that first film­mak­er thing again, I think, just about the thrill of doing it. It’s not about bums on seats – some­thing that inevitably enters the equa­tion as time goes on – the ear­li­er films are just about the thrill of doing it and explor­ing your ideas. That’s lib­er­at­ing. It’s like the free­dom of start­ing out doing music – it’s based around the feel­ing that you can do anything.”

“Dar­ren and I prob­a­bly hadn’t been in a club for about 20 years, so we reached out to The Chem­i­cal Broth­ers because we thought they’d know more about that world. There were about four or five dif­fer­ent artists that worked through that whole club night scene where Nina does ecsta­sy. It was more about not let­ting two grand­dads be in charge of a club scene.

“The idea to rework ​‘Swan Lake’ for Black Swan was a no brain­er as far as I was con­cerned. Nina would have been rehears­ing all day hear­ing this music, it must have been dri­ving her nuts. I don’t know if it’s my atti­tude or what but I didn’t see the point in being over­ly rev­er­ent to Tchaikovsky’s work. I mean, it’s fan­tas­tic work but the idea was to repur­pose it in a way that peo­ple weren’t famil­iar with. There are no rules in music as far as I’m con­cerned. I think it was hon­our­ing him, real­ly, offer­ing a new take on his great work. To me it was like remixing.”

“Ben [Wheat­ley] is one of those film­mak­ers who’s just of a dif­fer­ent cal­i­bre. That scene in A Field in Eng­land with the Blanck Mass music where the char­ac­ter jumps out of the tent is just mind-blow­ing. Every one of his films has giv­en me the most vivid night­mares I’ve ever had. When I got the call for High-Rise I was absolute­ly made up. When you look at the end­ing of Sight­seers or the genre twist in Kill List, these are things peo­ple just don’t do in cin­e­ma. It’s the same with High-Rise, it’s com­plete­ly auda­cious film­mak­ing. Just things like using Portishead’s cov­er of ABBA’s ​‘SOS’ – that’s exact­ly what I want to see in a film.

“The film is all about the build­ing. We talked about its mov­ing pres­ence and it’s the build­ing that dic­tates the behav­iour [of the char­ac­ters], it’s like the sea in Solaris. One thing I had to do was at least make sure there was some sense of opti­mism at the begin­ning of the film, cre­ate a Brave New World sort of vibe. Then sort of lay lit­tle East­er eggs of how things might quite not be what they seem.

“[JG] Bal­lard was some­thing of an enfant ter­ri­ble of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, and I read ​‘High-Rise’ when I was at school study­ing Eng­lish, even though it wasn’t on the syl­labus. When High-Rise with Ben Wheat­ley and Jere­my Thomas came along I thought, ​‘fuck­ing hell, this is incred­i­ble’, espe­cial­ly because some of the Nicholas Roeg films that Jere­my was part of, like Walk­a­bout and The Man Who Fell to Earth, were real­ly influ­en­tial in my ear­ly cin­e­ma viewing.”

High-Rise is released 18 March. Lis­ten to Clint Mansell’s orig­i­nal score below: