I just signed Aronofsky's guestbook and said there was a nice fan commentary and discussion here, and maybe he'd like to leave a comment here. Wouldn't that be something.

I had lunch with my best friend today. He was only in town for a few hours, on his way to someplace else. I've known him for fifteen years, but I never got around to asking him if he'd seen this movie. "Only a million times," he said. "It's one of my favorites." So we talked about it. For about ninety minutes. I'm pretty sure we could've watched the movie in less time than we spent talking about it.

One of the things he said really struck me. He said — and I'm paraphrasing here, not doing him justice — "It's like Aronofsky wanted to distill a feeling. He didn't want to describe the feeling, he didn't want to tell a story about the feeling, he didn't want to show people having the feeling. He wanted to boil down the pure feeling itself and put it into the audience directly, right into their veins. And that feeling is regret."

And you know, I think he's right. The movie's not about regret, but it does capture regret more perfectly than just about any other work of art in any medium I know.

Hooray, I'm helping!

Billy West on Geekza.

Steve mentions his love for "Death is the Road to Awe" and says he wishes they used it in the trailer for this movie. He clearly wasn't the only one thinking that, if you recall, "I am Legend" did use it in their trailer ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DcrHyJ5RTA )

Seeing as Mansell's had his Requiem for a Theme jacked into more promos than any piece of recognizable score in recent years, guess it's appropriate to ask if anyone else hates that trend of using themes from other films in trailers?

That new everyone-conspires-against-Matt-Damon-movie trailer uses the theme from Sunshine. Arrrghh.

The use of the REQUIEM theme in the TWO TOWERS trailer caused me to sex in my pants when the trailer was first released. I hadn't seen REQUIEM yet though, so I didn't know the tune.

I remember being appalled when the trailer for CASPER used "What's This?" from NIGHTMARE.

I'm sure Scott…Steve…Frogurt, whatever his name is, could speak to why trailer editors have to use themes from earlier movies in trailers, and what forces end up making the same five themes be used over and over.

Get 'im in here!

Epic theme is epic, and already exists. It's a lot cheaper than either rolling out your soundtrack a year before the film comes out, or scoring the trailer separately.

Not to mention Marketing couldn't give less a damn about losers like me that find it a little tasteless.

Last edited by paulou (2010-07-17 14:51:13)

There’s a gabillion people involved in any piece of marketing (director, producer, actor, trailer producers, studio heads, studio marketing folks and whatever else), and it’s never consistent as to who has the creative power. I think I got to live in every flavor of experience, from getting to do everything I wanted amongst great teammates thru being a puppet monkey slave for people I considered really unsmart.

I’ve never heard of any creative person long to copy what’s been done before. So when you hear the same cue in a million things, it’s probably more a business-over-creativity decision hammered down on them after much fighting (creativity requires innovation and new things are mathematically risky). I see, usually in fearful authorities, the logical business formula of "use the Requiem score, it was on Lord of the Rings and that made money therefore, we will make money.” In fact, in EVERYTHING in EVERY industry, it seems that the REALLY powerful authorities give creative freedom while middle management authorities are more fearful and copycatty.  Like they’re falling back on their mathematical reasoning before even making a decision.

I haven’t seen the Requiem For a Tower cue in anything since 2006. I think the new cliché is John Murphy’s Danny Boyle movie scores. 28 days later and Sunshine have been abused in Beowulf, Death sentence, Wolverine and as the score to KICK-ASS in the movie itself.

As for why trailers use existing movie scores…

There's no universal answer to why another movie's theme is used in marketing, but the safest would be that it illicits the right type of emotion to tell a story that quickly.

In most cases, humans respond to emotion first, logic/story/context/everything else second. The quickest way to emotion is music.

Movie score music is generally designed entirely around emotion first, while a chunk of standard music may have other priorities, like singing about having boats and money or breaking up with your ‘boo right before prom (aw yeah gurl).

Regardless, I'd say it's not freakishly SUPER common to hear movie scores in trailers. I mean, think of ALL the trailers out there each week (plus it’s way expensive to license a movie’s score). Everyone here is probably in the upper 1% of observational intelligence, especially for movies, so when “I Am Legend” uses a (modified, drummed up) cue from “The Fountain,” it sticks out to ya’ll. In reality, 99% of people don't remember specific scores, they just feel something when they watch a trailer then remember that feeling.

Most trailers use library music, specifically made to sound like movie scores, with perfect timing for segmented, evolving storytelling. IE the new Harry Potter trailer is library stuff from years ago.

Clint Mansell is touring LA in 2012 if you're interested in hearing his great scores live e.g. Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Moon, etc.