Jon Burlingame
January 13, 2024
Variety
Sometimes directors don’t want you humming the music as you leave their film.
More than ever, filmmakers are seeking fresh musical approaches, especially when the subject matter is dark or fantastic. Three late-2023 releases demonstrate this with music that catches the ear in unusual ways. […]
For “The Killer,” their fifth film with director David Fincher, double Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (“The Social Network,” “Soul”) faced a new and unexpected challenge: Fincher informed them that he wanted to see “how far we can go in the edit with no music at all,” Reznor recalls.
So the composing partners from Nine Inch Nails were on standby for months until the call came to supply music — but in only high and low frequencies, leaving the middle portion of the audio spectrum for the ongoing narration of the assassin played by Michael Fassbender.
The Fincher Analyst 