Requiem for a Tour: Clint Mansell interviewed

If the notion of a job for life is a rather antiquated outlook in the everyday world of humdrum menial work, then it’s a modern dilemma multiplied by a factor of about ten in the music industry. Exacerbated by dwindling record sales, today’s pop hopefuls tend to have a shelf-life only marginally longer than that of a Ginsters pasty. Combined with a creative urge to forge pastures new, the average muso can often be found idly dreaming about that elusive project that will restore balance to their own personal equilibrium.

Or, sometimes, you’re just the right mopey guy, kicking your heels in the right place at the right time. So it was for Clint Mansell, at least the way he puts his transformation from goodtime frontman of ‘grebo’ hucksters Pop Will Eat Itself into celebrated soundtrack composer for films such as Black Swan, The Wrestler and Requiem for a Dream. “I moved to New York after leaving PWEI,” he says of the unlikely overhaul. “I had intended to write a solo electronic record but I couldn't finish anything. I was uninspired, I had a very negative frame of mind – still do really.”

With that view, it’s perhaps a little less surprising that Mansell found himself working on the soundtrack to Pi, a surreal, psychological and mathematical mindfuck written and directed by a then unknown Darren Aronofsky. “I met Darren through a mutual friend,” he continues. “He was looking for funding for Pi but he had no industry involvement and no real connections to the musical world. We talked about music that we liked and disliked and connected over our mutual appreciation of John Carpenter, hip-hop, anime and electronic music. I read the script and Darren asked me to write a piece of music based on that... we went from there.”

“Creative relationships are never easy, and maybe they're not supposed to be, but if you keep challenging one another and the results come then it’s worth the journey” – Clint Mansell

However, due to being an outsider to the industry, Aronofsky was unable to secure the rights to many of the existing electronic compositions he had hoped to use, and furthermore didn’t have the money to pay for them all in the first place. In lieu of this, Mansell ended up composing the bulk of Pi’s soundtrack with further tracks from the likes of Autechre, Orbital and Aphex Twin sprinkled throughout. “It was a huge learning curve for me but it was a great experience,” he says. “As we had no industry interference we just did what we wanted and responded to one another. I think it gave us a good shot at creating our own vibe.”

Though well received, it was Aronofsky’s follow-up feature Requiem for a Dream in 2000 that put the director firmly on the radar, culminating with an Academy Award nomination for Ellen Burstyn’s incredible performance. Having gelled together so well on Pi, Mansell was back on board for Requiem, and the results didn’t disappoint. “Darren is always looking for more, and one of the things that we originally connected over was how we felt that modern film music was just so much wallpaper,” says Mansell on the continuation of their alliance. “Creative relationships are never easy, and maybe they're not supposed to be, but if you keep challenging one another and the results come then it’s worth the journey.”

As for ‘wallpaper music,’ Requiem could never be called such a thing and we’d wager that anyone who watched it originally will have had the film’s central motif, Lux Aeterna, on internal rotation for some time afterwards. As a change from Pi’s electronic score, Mansell wrote many parts of Requiem to be performed by the Kronos Quartet, a loose and hugely celebrated ensemble from San Francisco. The enormity of the step-up was, however, lost on Mansell. “I was an electronic punk rocker at that time – I'd never heard of them,” he admits. “I soon learnt though. I remember listening to them when we were recording and Darren saying to me, 'We just haven't earned this yet.'”

A large portion of the world also found itself infected with this particular earworm when the main composition was re-recorded for a Lord of the Rings trailer and subsequently used and abused by other film promos, TV advertisements, countless YouTube videos and, er, Top Gear. “It’s like having children, I imagine,” says Mansell of the song's ubiquity at the time. “You produce them and then they go off and live their own lives. You can't make the choices for them.”

Mansell's style of creating pieces with central themes that seem to have their own personality fared well with the pair’s third collaboration, 2006’s The Fountain. Though receiving mixed reactions, mainly due to its triple time narrative, the film has found a steady cult following, with Mansell’s work going some way to helm the disparate story lines together. “Originally, we thought about a different style of music and themes for each time sequence but it felt schizophrenic with that approach,” he explains. “Then we realised that it’s actually one man’s story and the music should be the connective tissue. This allowed me to re-use and develop the themes to support the journey.”

Since then, Mansell has continued to work on all of Aronofsky’s films right up to this year's biblical epic, Noah. However, this relationship is certainly not a monogamous one and Mansell has shacked up with others, notably director Jon S. Baird on last year's black-hearted comedy Filth and Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie, for 2009’s sci-fi drama, Moon. “I look for things that speak to me, something that allows me to channel my feelings, my experience and my view into the film in a positive way,” he says of his composing choices so far.

In terms of influences, he rattles off a rich list of visionaries to whom he can doff his cap: the aforementioned Carpenter; Michael Small, the man behind the sounds of The Parallax View and Marathon Man, and David Lynch’s partner in odd, Angelo Badalamenti. However, it’s a figure much closer to home who really stoked the fire. “Growing up watching films with my dad,” he states, was a huge influence. “I was a teenager in the 70s and there was great film and TV music everywhere: Klute, Assault on Precinct 13, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Stingray, Star Trek, Dr Who. It was an unbeknown influence at that time.”

Of his tenure with Pop Will Eat Itself, Mansell is pretty straight-talking on what it taught him as he entered the film world. “Work harder,” he stonewalls. “Writing anything, in any style, needs to work as an overall cohesive unit. If it doesn't feel right, you keep working on it until it does. Ultimately, it’s the director’s overall vision, but the important thing is to work on the right project with the right collaborators so that everyone is pulling in the same direction. Hopefully then you have free reign to bring your ideas to the project.”

He remains tight-lipped on his future recording plans for fear of a jinx, but his upcoming five-date tour will be brief respite from the studio, and an overdue celebration of his scores to date. “It’s a nine-piece band; string quartet, piano, guitars, bass, drums, keyboards... neo-classical, modern classical, I guess,” he says of the setup. “We play a cross-section of my film music from Pi to Moon to The Fountain and Requiem for a Dream. It just depends on how much I like each score, how we can perform it and if it will work in a live setting.”

It’s certainly a far cry from Mansell’s old touring days with The Poppies (as they were affectionately known), as he himself compares in a single sentence. “I get to sit down when I play now and less leather pants,” he jokes. More seriously though, he is able to take stock of his position and how fortunate he feels he has been. “I thought film score composition was a job that other people did, it seemed impossible to break into,” he admits. “Darren said to me after we finished Pi that he thought I could have a career at it, if I wanted. I still don't consider myself a jobbing film composer but I've been doing it longer than I was in a band so it goes to show what I know.” 

Having already performed an impressive and unlikely volte-face in becoming one of Hollywood’s foremost film composers, we’d never second guess Clint Mansell’s next career move. But should he want one, it seems he may have found a job for life.