Reznor, Ross, and Me: A Love Triangle

ISSUE #276

A 2012 profile in the New Yorker put it best: “People seldom forget their first encounters with Nine Inch Nails.” I certainly didn’t—I was trying to find someone to cut my hair to look like Ewan McGregor’s. My stepmom took me to her friend’s house, a former hairdresser who looked a little like John Cameron Mitchell. In his kitchen, in fading light, he perfect a Kenobi-cut while The Downward Spiral played. He made little acknowledgement of this intense, moody music, outside of occasionally humming along. It was sublimely relaxing—paradoxically so.

David Fincher remembers his first time, too, which he recalls in that same profile of NIN’s Trent Reznor. When it came time to cut The Social Network to a temp score, he did it to Ghosts I-IV, Nine Inch Nails’ excellent ambient album. Fincher was compelled to reach out to Rezner to write the official score; Reznor sent him back forty minutes of music. “Of that forty minutes, I think we ended up using pretty much all of it,” Fincher said. Reznor enlisted Atticus Ross to help him with the rest, and one of cinema’s most fruitful partnerships began. Like Fincher’s films, their music is propulsive, yet minimalist; at times, it’s hypnotic, before erupting in meticulous bouts violence. Every one of Fincher’s projects in the 2010s has had their names in the credits.

Before Ross, Nine Inch Nails albums were almost entirely Trent Reznor; he joined officially in 2016. A few years younger than Reznor, he is key to Nine Inch Nails’ incredible second act—the five albums they’ve put out since he joined have ripped. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.” Together they’ve scored everything from Pixar’s Soul to The Vietnam War, the Watchmen series to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (a favorite). They’ve become perhaps the greatest working film composers.

Their most recent score is for Challengers, which I saw last night. “What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?” is the pitch director Luca Guadagnino gave them. “I wish I had his notes,” Ross said. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Unending homoerotic desire,” Reznor recalled. “It was all a variation on those three words.”

At first, this might feel like it’d be out of their wheelhouse, but in fact, it’s been the essence of Nine Inch Nails from the start. Repression, sexual angst, and the sublime comfort of the lonesome night—this is Reznor and Ross, paradoxically so.

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