Having seen the film, this much we know: the final song on The Arcade Fire‘s Reflektor, is also the closing credits song of Spike Jonze‘s upcoming fantastical, sci-fi-ish romance film “Her,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and the disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson (you can read our NYFF review here). Here’s what we didn’t know, the song was originally written for Jonze’s aforementioned movie, but then morphed in the process (which probably means its ineligible for Oscar for those keeping score). Also? Apparently Jonze asked the Montreal band to score his movie two years ago. Makes sense, we suppose, as Jonze was already working with the band as far back as 2008 when he used their music in the trailer for “Where The Wild Things Are.”
“The [band] was working on [their latest album Reflektor] as they were working on this,” Jonze said about collaborating with the group on the film’s soundtrack.during a post Q&A screening in L.A. recently (via Hitfix). “Win and I started talking about the score about two years ago, and then it kinda seemed like the record sort of informed the soundtrack and the soundtrack informed the record a little bit, and there’s like a song on Reflektor — the last one, ‘Supersymmetry’ — that he wrote for the movie, but then it sort of became something else. It’s actually the last song in the end credits.”
Pretty damn cool. Even if the song isn’t eligible for Academy voters, Arcade Fire (along with collaborator Owen Pallet) did write the score for the film and it is quite beautiful and kind of a companion piece, at least spiritually, to that song (hopefully you’ll be hearing some of that soon). Jonze explained the sonic texture a bit more.
“What Win and I started talking about in the beginning was just that we wanted the soundtrack to have this electricity to it, a current to it,” he added, “but not to be electronic and not to…use synthesizers at all. For it not to feel synthetic, but to feel like hand-made, but still have an electricity to it, and also just to sort of play this sort of romance and love story and longing of Theodore.”
“Her” also co-stars Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt, Portia Doubleday, and if you listen closely, cameo voice work by Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Brian Cox and Spike Jonze himself. “Her” opens on December 18th in limited release and then expands in January. A live version of the song below plus some new-ish photos you may or may not have seen. Oh, and bonus clip of Jonze discussing “Her” at the recent AFI Film Festival.
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