The New York Times on Trent Reznor, Film Composer
Trent Reznor and his programmer partner, Atticus Ross, are among the most sought-after composers in Hollywood right now. The New York Times had this profile.
Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman and music industry polymath, calls his gig as a go-to composer for Hollywood film scores an “accidental career.”
Known for two decades as a transgressive industrial rocker prone to loud, punishing darkness, Mr. Reznor, with his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross, fell into a subtler role beginning with David Fincher’s “The Social Network” in 2010. Their score won an Academy Award.
Since then, they have balanced composing — their recent work can be heard in the climate-change documentary “Before the Flood” and the film “Patriots Day,” set during the bombing of the Boston Marathon — with writing new Nine Inch Nails material (an EP, “Not the Actual Events,” came out last month) and Mr. Reznor’s job as a hands-on executive at Apple Music.
Yet when the long-form filmmaker Ken Burns (“The Civil War,” “Baseball”) and his co-director, Lynn Novick, approached Mr. Reznor’s manager more than three years ago about an even more ambitious project — scoring his 10-part, 18-hour documentary about the Vietnam War — the musicians gamely added it to their pile of disparate responsibilities.
