Requiem for a Tower
Monday, 23 April 2007. Film and Music.
When you see a film trailer, there are generally two things that grab your attention, exciting fast action set-pieces and the music. Music for film trailers have become big business and companies such as X-Ray Dog, and Immediate Music specifically write cues for trailers. Hellboy, Spider-Man 2, Blade Trinity, Van Helsing and Pirates of the Caribbean have all used library music in their trailers. That said, it isn't only 'library' music, for James Horner's soundtrack to Aliens and David Arnold's Stargate score are both frequently used in movie trailers.
One piece in particular has interested me since I first heard it. You might have noticed something similar about the trailer for 300 or the new Pirates movie... the music. The trailers use a cue from Clint Mansell's score to Darren Aronofsky's movie Requiem for a Dream.
Requiem for a Dream is a gut wrenching story of how the addictions of four individuals slowly drives them to the edge of destruction, and then pushes them over it. Personally I thought the film was stylistically brilliant, but I only needed to watch it once.
However, the story of what happened to the music from the film is just as involving. The soundtrack was composed by Clint Mansell and performed by the Kronos Quartet. It uses short sharp stabs of sound from the two violins, a viola and a cello, followed by long haunting notes. A discomforting sound, yet strangely enticing.
After the film and soundtrack were released, it was re-recorded with a choir and full orchestra for The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers trailer. It was then sampled by Paul Oakenfold on the album Bunkka.
The re-orchestrated version was intending to be used in trailers only, and has since been used on trailers for The Da Vinci Code, Zathura and Sunshine.
The music was never meant to be released to the general public, but after it was leaked onto a number of file sharing systems, it was made available on iTunes in October 2006.
So that is how a film about drugs had an amazing original score, which was then reworked, and the reworking proved so popular, that it qualifies for its own album!
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