Tag: Soundtrack (Score, Music)

Shot Talk: Weapons, with Director Zach Cregger and Editor Joe Murphy

Oren Soffer
December 5, 2025
Shotdeck

Cinematographer Oren Soffer sits down with director Zach Cregger and editor Joe Murphy for an in-depth conversation about Weapons. From Zach’s meticulous pre-planning with photoboards, to Joe’s work shaping the tone of Gladys in the edit, to the rare opportunity to receive feedback from David Fincher, the duo breaks down the creative process behind the acclaimed supernatural horror film.

Along with the interview, we’re also releasing a bunch of great shots from the film, so you can start adding them to your decks and getting inspired right away!

But before you dive in and watch the filmmaking mini-masterclass above… make sure to go check out Weapons, streaming now on HBO Max.

Sign up for an account at ShotDeck, the world’s first fully-searchable film image database. It’s an invaluable research and educational resource that makes life easier for anyone in Film, Media, Advertising, and Education.

If you are creative, Shotdeck is the place to get inspired and discover new films and talented artists through our meticulously tagged database of still images, all while saving you time.

Search by film title, keyword, location, color, or a dozen other criteria to quickly find the exact “shots” you need to communicate your vision for your next project.

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How Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails Changed the Sound of Movies

After Reznor brought industrial grind into the mainstream, he became an in-demand film composer—and from Natural Born Killers to Tron: Ares, he’s done some of his best, most adventurous work for the screen. A definitive guide to Nine Inch Nails on film.

By Laura Wynne
Photograph by Danielle Levitt
October 17, 2025
GQ

Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor can’t have known how different a line like “I don’t believe in your institutions” would sound decades later. Nine Inch Nails have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Reznor and his composing partner Atticus Ross have an Emmy, a Bafta, two Grammies, three Golden Globes, two Oscars (they’re just a Tony away from an EGOT), and a Country Music Award. In some ways Reznor is now the kind of establishment figure he always despised, a respected elder statesman to goths and queers everywhere. With Nine Inch Nails, he married industrial aesthetics to pop instincts; Prince and Bowie were always more important to the recipe than Skinny Puppy. Reznor and Ross won their second Oscar for a Disney movie, and might win for another one at next year’s ceremony. The institutions believe in them.

It makes a lot of sense that someone whose audience is wide enough to include every strain of angry queer teen and the staff of Pixar would embrace these contradictions as he got older, got sober, had children, and became close friends with the people he grew up admiring (Bowie, David Lynch, John Carpenter). There is something in Reznor’s voice that speaks to millions of people, something indefinable that has nothing to do with hooks or record-label muscle behind him. The subject matter has always been lacerating and bleak. On his albums, Reznor was a one-man band plus hired hands until around 2016, where he officially made Atticus Ross a full member. Contradictorily, when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame he submitted every single touring musician as a band member and was forced to negotiate down to 7.

The Tron: Ares soundtrack, released a few weeks ago in advance of the Jared Leto-led threequel, is the first Nine Inch Nails album in five years credited to the band (as opposed to Reznor and Ross) and the first NIN release with sung vocals since 2018’s excellent but brief Bad Witch. It comes on the heels of a tour that everyone you know and admire went to, featuring startling production and the seamless incorporation of acoustic pianos and new collaborator Boys Noize. The pair have announced upcoming projects ranging from a new Naughty Dog video game to starting a production company that wants to branch into film production and fashion. Tron Ares, out today, isn’t even the only movie with a Reznor/Ross soundtrack in theaters right now—they also scored Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt.

Read the full article

David Fincher talks remastering SE7EN and reveals what was really in the box

The filmmaker says the rumor that the infamous box contained a prosthetic head is “entirely ridiculous.”

Wesley Stenzel
January 2, 2025
Entertainment Weekly

SE7EN turns 30 this year, and to commemorate the anniversary, director David Fincher has overseen the 4K remaster of the seminal crime drama.

The serial killer mystery — which stars Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey — first shook up the crime genre in 1995 with propulsive, precise craft and unprecedentedly nasty crime scenes that have influenced everything from Saw to The Batman. The film now has a higher-resolution look that will debut on IMAX screens on Jan. 3 before releasing on 4K UHD Blu-ray Discs and on digital Jan. 7. Fincher and his team painstakingly recreated the film as it was originally printed in 1995, utilizing some AI tools to enhance the image and fix visual mistakes that weren’t visible in previous scans of the film.

Entertainment Weekly chatted with Fincher to discuss the new version of SE7EN and reflect on his memories of helming his feature directorial breakout 30 years later — including what’s really in the box.

Read the full interview

MINDHUNTER Composer Jason Hill

Darek Thomas
May 20, 2024
Monday Morning Critic

Jason Hill is a multi-talented artist who has made a name for himself as an award-winning film composer, platinum-selling recording artist, record producer, and mixer.

Hill’s upcoming projects include; Apple TV+‘s drama series Dark Matter, which premieres May 8th; and season 4 of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, which premieres May 31st. Hill is also a music producer on the forthcoming Robbie Williams’ biopic, Better Man.

Notable film and television credits include David Fincher‘s psychological thriller film, Gone Girl; the Emmy-winning series, Mindhunter; Voir; Videosyncrasy; and his only animated short film, Bad Travelling (part of the Emmy-winning series Love, Death, and Robots); Elijah Bynum’s drama film, Magazine Dreams; Apple TV+’s Extrapolations; and City On Fire; Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened; The Confession Killer; and This Is A Robbery; and Philip O’Leary‘s film, The Buffalo Hunt.

In addition to his work in film/television scoring and production, Hill is also the lead singer, guitarist, and producer for the band LOUIS XIV along with the band Vicky Cryer (which contained members of bands The Killers, Muse, Julian Casablancas and the Voidz, Jet, and Jamiroquai). In 2011, he also joined The New York Dolls and played bass on several tours after producing the album Dancing Backward in High Heels, their final Dolls album. He has produced, written records or otherwise worked with such artists as The Killers, David Bowie, Robbie Williams, Jet, Sky Ferreira, Brandon Flowers, Ariel Pink, The Virgins, Macy Gray, Neon Trees, The Bronx, Nick Littlemore/Luke Steele (Empire of the Sun, Pnau), IDKHBTFM (I Don’t Know How But They Found Me), and more. Hill was also part of the seminal alt-country band, Convoy in his early years.

In 2015 Hill bought a building in Glendale that was originally built as a music studio in the mid-1970s and reimagined it into one of the world’s premier modern recording facilities, Department of Recording and Power. This iconic complex was once the birthplace of massive hits from The Beach Boys, James Brown, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Joni Mitchell, Joe Cocker, and many more, and is now reborn for the next generation of influential artists.

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross—best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates—found unlikely creative fulfillment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making.

By Zach Baron
Photography by Danielle Levitt
April 4, 2024
GQ

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five kids, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a company called With Teeth, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

Read the full profile

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (NIN) Break Down Their Most Iconic Tracks

April 4, 2024
GQ (YouTube)

Watch the video on GQ:

‘The Social Network’ Might Have Been a Very Different Movie Without This Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Cue

“The Downward Spiral” Turns 30

Trent Reznor
March 8, 2024
NIN.com

Spending too much time looking backwards feels dangerous to me, but this day on the calendar caught my attention. Has it really been that long, old friend?

I just spent an hour listening to this time capsule of what 28 year old me had to say, and it still excites me and breaks my heart.

Be kind to yourselves. Hope to see you soon.

Seven (1995) Title Sequence

Rare Humans Podcast: Jason Hill on Working with David Fincher, Trusting Ideas, Playing Music

Evan Roberts
February 21, 2024
Rare Humans

Jason Hill is a multi-instrumentalist known for inventing, building, and mastering his own unusual instruments which help create his unique scores and productions. Hill is the lead singer, guitarist, and producer for the band LOUIS XIV. He has produced, written records or otherwise worked with such artists as The Killers, David Bowie, Ariel Pink, The White Stripes, and more.

Jason Hill now spends most of his time as a film composer working with acclaimed director David Fincher on the psychological thriller film Gone Girl and has since worked on many projects with Fincher such as the Emmy-winning series MINDHUNTER.

Listen to the podcast:

Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Google Podcasts

Pieces of Flare: On David Fincher’s The Killer

With his latest thriller, Fincher further develops his practice of digitally molding the real world in his own image.

Vadim Rizov
February 8, 2024
downtime

In chapter one of The Killer (2023), Michael Fassbender sits in a Paris WeWork office, rented as the base of operations for his nameless hitman’s latest job. While waiting for the target, pigeons fly past, their wings loudly breaking his forced concentration. The odds they entered the frame at a serendipitous moment are low, and there’s no reason to pay for a bird wrangler given the advanced state of CG. Once you see them, they’re impossible to unsee as they follow Fassbender’s character from city to city, segment to segment. It’s clear that they must be a digitally created motif, a fresh reminder of David Fincher’s unwillingness to let the real world preclude his very precise vision.

Initial responses to The Killer included many variants on “minor Fincher,” which raises an obvious question: what’s the perceptible gap between a major and minor David Fincher film? Surely it’s not a question of craft; second for second, Fincher’s films have to be in the top 0.5% of technically-worked-over products. Control, famously, is his thing, to the extent that even The Killer’s seemingly handheld shots were, in fact, static shots made shaky to a exact degree in post. “Minor,” then, refers to the ostensible worthiness of the material: why all this effort to so little end, i.e., the umpteenth variant on “hitman cleans up after a job gone wrong”? When you’ve begun your directing career coming up with compelling images for lower-tier Rick Springfield singles everything after is, presumably, a breeze to elevate. Still, that doesn’t answer the “why bother” question.

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Composers for “The Zone of Interest,” “Poor Things” and “The Killer” Detail Crafting Strange But Memorable Scores

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.

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In Conversation: David Fincher and The Crew of “The Killer” in New York

Tomris Laffly
October 28, 2023

David Fincher discusses the making of The Killer with Sound Designer Ren Klyce, Editor Kirk Baxter, and Writer Andrew Kevin Walker, after the screening for the press in New York. Hosted by Tomris Laffly.

(Video clips recorded with a phone from the audience, with not very good audio and, for some reason, with each video clip edited in twice).