AUDIO

Director/Composer Interview: Nicolas Winding Refn & Cliff Martinez

Nicolas Winding Refn and Cliff Martinez are one of the best director/composer duos working in the industry, and are bringing the spotlight back to auteur filmmaking in a time where studio-curated franchises dominate theaters. The two have worked together on Drive and Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon marks their third collaboration together. In this unique interview we get to hear from both Nicolas and Cliff together. We discuss how they met, why they work so well together, what it means to be an auteur in today’s industry and their process for working on The Neon Demon. Enjoy this short but sweet interview from two auteurs who are blazing their own path.

Interview produced and presented by Kaya Savas with Film.Music.Media

Cliff Martinez : The Neon Demon S/T

Cliff Martinez has been quietly dominating indie film scores for well over 20 years, starting out with Steven Soderbergh and his debut film Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He’s scored films as diverse as Pump Up The Volume, Wicker Park, and The Lincoln Lawyer, but he made his name with Steven Soderbergh. His scores are exquisite and precise. They form to the needs of the film and story. There’s never any grandstanding with Martinez. He serves the film and the film alone, but in doing that over the years he’s developed his own voice as a composer. By the time Soderbergh’s excellent remake of Solaris rolled around he’d found this unique way of serving the film, while at the same time creating a standalone piece of art in his music. That score is magnificent, dark, beautiful, and stays with you. I feel from that point on he’s become one of the most important American composers working today.

Back in 2011 Martinez started a working relationship with Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn. Martinez created the darkly lit, synth-driven score to Refn’s Drive that has since turned into a blossoming artistic partnership. He’s scored the aforementioned Drive, as well as Refn’s Only God Forgives and the short doc about Refn himself titled My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, directed by Refn’s wife Live Corfixn. Their newest collaboration is The Neon Demon, and I believe it’s their best collaboration to date.

Read the full review by J Hubner at BackSeatMafia.com

Cliff Martinez Expertly Conveys Refn’s Inner ‘Neon Demon’

In a stylized, oft-poetic way, Demon portrays the competitive grind and sheer artifice of the modelling world, and probably Los Angeles as a whole to an extent. The emotions are intense and massive, even in the most sedated scenes. Martinez does an excellent job of using throbbing synthesizers, scattered guitar expressions, pulsating drum machines, and ambient textures to convey this.

However, this time around Martinez works less like a counterpoint to Refn than he has in the past, when he would have tempered ostentatious visuals that seemed to call for compositions as equally stylized. (Think of Drive – the infamous elevator scene has a delicate and crystalline ambient love theme that counters the crunch of violence between The Driver and a would-be assailant.) While Demon certainly has shades of this, more than ever in their three-picture-run-so-far Martinez plays the role of amplifying Refn’s bombast.

Read the full review by Aaron Vehlinggo at vehlinggo.com

Beauty Is Currency: An Interview with Elle Fanning, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Cliff Martinez

The Neon Demon actress, director, and composer exorcise the film’s themes.

A former drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Captain Beefheart, and Lydia Lunch, the 62-year-old composer initially broke into film after scoring Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 breakthrough indie hit, sex, lies, and videotape, a partnership that’s continued ever since and ultimately led to his latest ventures with Refn.
The Neon Demon marks their third collaboration together — fourth, if you count Liv Corfixen’s My Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn — and Martinez’s compositions have certainly added a flavorful touch to Refn’s stoic ouevre. In a way, each score serves as a ghostly narrator, haunting the filmmaker’s trademark long shots with an ambient glaze that’s meditative and comforting.

Read the full article and interview by Michael Roffman at Consequence of Sound

David Poland chats with Cliff Martinez on DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood

The composer (and once Red Hot Chili Pepper) who has made multiple films with Nicholas Winding Refn and Steven Soderbergh, as well as such diverse projects as Spring Breakers, The Normal Heart, and Pee Wee’s Playhouse chats with David Poland.

DP/30: The Oral History Of Hollywood

Krakow Film Music Festival 2016 – alterFMF Gala: Drone Sounds

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Joseph Trapanese, Cliff Martinez i Łukasz Targosz gośćmi specjalnymi piątkowego wieczoru w Centrum Kongresowym ICE Kraków

„Partytura dronowa jest może trudna do zdefiniowania, ale ma przed sobą wielką przyszłość pod warunkiem, że zostanie połączona z tradycyjnymi elementami muzyki, takimi jak wyrazista melodia czy klarowna rytmika” – uważa Łukasz Targosz, jeden z bohaterów piątkowego wieczoru w Centrum Kongresowym ICE Kraków. Jego muzyka do serialu HBO „Pakt” i dramatu Patryka Vegi „Pitbull” otworzyła wczoraj uroczystą galę „alterFMF: Drone Sounds”.

Krakow Film Music Festival

Cliff Martinez joins Elvis Mitchell on KCRW’s ‘The Treatment’

Film composer Cliff Martinez joins Elvis Mitchell to talk intentions and meaning of auditory accompaniment in his newest work Neon Demon.

Cliff Martinez has strong roots in rock music, having begun his career as the drummer of Red Hot Chili Peppers. But, after reflecting on his love for the soundtrack of A Fistful of Dollars, Martinez broadened his musical scope as film composer behind scores for such films and television series as Spring Breakers, Sex, Lies and Videotape and The Knick. He joins Elvis Mitchell to discuss his personal music history and the thought process behind his latest musical work on Neon Demon.

The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW

Neon Demon and the Synthesizer Soundtrack by Cliff Martinez

My absolute highlight of this movie was the soundtrack by Cliff Martinez. It’s a complete electronic and Synthesizer dominant soundtrack. If you like electronics soundtrack with a lot of Synthesizer sounds, you will like it for sure. If you watch now this very special “neon” design of the movie, so the sounds are perfectly for it. This make the movie special: electronic sounds and this very strange images.

So what I can say in summary: It’s a very strange movie, with some excellent actors and a perfect electronic soundtrack. This movie polarise a lot because they are some very critical scenes inside. If you like more alternative movies, maybe check out it.

Check out also this Youtube video about one track from the soundtrack. (minute 2:01 begins the Synthesizer dream for me)

Posted by Synth Anatomy

Hear 2 Tracks From Cliff Martinez’s Score For ‘The Neon Demon’

One of the more exciting creative partnerships to emerge in the past few years has been that between composer Cliff Martinez and director Nicolas Winding Refn. Martinez’s cool, pulsating sound was a perfect fit for the slick pop thriller “Drive,” and the grim tale of cyclical vengeance in “Only God Forgives,” and the duo are back at it with upcoming fashion world horror “The Neon Demon.” And Martinez is more than happy to keep his artistic relationship with the director going strong.
“Nicolas also sends me his script and he talks to me about the project before he even shoots it….I think I know what kind of music Nicolas likes, so I kind of stay in that territory,” he told Thump earlier this year. “After doing a couple of films with him you realize monogamy has its benefits. You understand what he’s looking for, the communication becomes better, and usually you go a little deeper each time. I think ‘Neon Demon’ had some similarities to ‘Drive,’ it’s kind of a sparse electronic score. Music writing has a juicy role in ‘Neon Demon’ — well, I haven’t seen the finished film, but there’s over an hour of music. And there’s a lot of places where the music is really pushed out more into the spotlight, even more than ‘Drive.’ I think I got a bigger part in the film, it’s flattering.”
Certainly, Martinez’s work is an integral part of the fabric of Refn’s films, and these two exclusive tracks — “Don’t Forget Me When You’re Famous” and “Messenger Walks Among Us” — see the composer provide synth dripping atmospherics, along with his trademark propulsive sound, that are perfect complements for the high end world that Elle Fanning traverses in “The Neon Demon.”

– by Edward Davis at THEPLAYLIST.NET

Composer Cliff Martinez and Director Nicolas Winding Refn reunite for The Neon Demon

Cliff Martinez, the composer who left his mark on Nicolas Windin Refn’s breakthrough film Drive (and more recently TV’s The Knick), is working together with the acclaimed director again on the upcoming film THE NEON DEMON. Their third collaboration together (the other being 2013’s Only God Forgives), the soundtrack will be released via Milan Records both digitally and on CD June 24, 2016, along with a double vinyl release coming July 1st. In addition to the score, the album release also features the original track “Waving Goodbye” performed by Sia. Today Consequence of Sound premieres the first piece of music from the film — Cliff’s unforgettable, dark-disco leaning theme “Neon Demon”.

Listen and read more at SOUNDWORKS COLLECTION

Cliff Martinez – The Neon Demon theme

On the Score with composers Cliff Martinez and Jeff Russo

“The Knick’s” chief benefactor is Steven Soderbergh, whose daring approach has been complimented by the game-changing, alt. scoring of Martinez. He’s taken the most outré Soderbergh scoring for such soundtracks as “Sex, Lies and Videotape” and “Traffic” and placed his trippy grooves with anachronistic wander into the medical gore-filled misadventures of a drug-addicted doctor and a staff that’s full of malpractice – some of it well-intentioned. Now “The Knick” and “Fargo” strongly expand their sonic palettes this month (with the shows’ second seasons respectively debuting on October 16th on Cinemax and October 12th on FX). As the good-bad surgeon Thackery continues to fight his addiction, Martinez adds to his hallucinatory sound with ethereal, glass-like beauty and a beat that’s as out of early 1900’s place as it is intrinsically linked to it. – Daniel Schweiger Read the full article at Film Music Magazine or click play to listen to the interview.

An Evening With The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Cliff Martinez

This is an exclusive interview with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Cliff Martinez. Cliff is best known as a former drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s also played with The Dickies, Lydia Lunch, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, and has composed the scores for numerous award-winning films. During the show he discussed his time with RHCP, composing music for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and the influence Captain Beefheart had on his life – See more at: http://thefivecount.com/interviews/an-evening-with-the-red-hot-chili-peppers-cliff-martinez/#sthash.CirHLYQf.dpuf

To hear the entire show visit The Five Count.

Cannes Daily Buzz: Cliff Martinez Scores Again

Even though this was composer Cliff Martinez’s first trip to Cannes, his movies have been screening at the festival for years. He first made his mark on the event with his work on Steven Soderbegh’s first film, sex, lies and videotape, back in 1989. This year he was back in Cannes with Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives.

Martinez is an acclaimed composer; in addition to recent work with Refn and numerous projects with Soderbergh, he recently collaborated with Skrillex on music for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. – By Eugene Hernandez

Read full article at FILMLINC DAILY from Film Society Lincoln Center