Favourites
Curious Worlds Nick Zinner takes us through the film scores that most inspire him, by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography by Nanci Sarrouf
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“It’s something I’ve been gravitating towards more and more,” says Nick Zinner, best known as the guitarist in New York band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The gravitation he speaks of is towards making more music for film. It’s not an entirely new venture for Zinner – he composed his first score back in 2009 for the film White Lightnin’ – but it’s something he’s been spending more and more time on. He’s recently composed the score for Knives and Skin, a mystical teen noir directed by Jennifer Reed that follows a young girl’s disappearance in the rural Midwest and its impact on the local community. The score is a considered yet immersive one to match the slow-build pace and tension of the film. Void of Zinner’s typical sinewy guitar work, it is instead full of enveloping soundscapes and layers of rich synthesiser. Scoring films is something that has long been on his mind, going all the way back to childhood. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “Even when I was a teenager it was a goal of mine to score films. I’d listen to soundtrack records like Twin Peaks and the score to the Krzysztof Kieślowski film The Double Life of Veronique. It sparked something in me.” It also comes off the back of some of his pursuits outside of the world of Yeah Yeah Yeahs not entirely scratching his itches. “The more other projects that I would do and explore, the more it made me want to score films,” he says. “Like I was producing bands for a while and realising: this is not really making me very happy. But the one thing that kept coming back to me over and over was the desire to do a soundtrack – there still seems like there’s so much room to explore and that can be done in that world. There is a lot to learn and so lots of room to experiment. It’s very exciting to be a part of as I’m driven towards curious worlds like that.” As someone who has had control over his band’s output for many years, I ask him if the transition to making music for other people’s vision has been tough. “I don’t see them as being that different actually. Above all I enjoy collaboration. With Yeah Yeah Yeahs the underlying principle at my end is just: will Karen like this? It has to be something that she is going to respond to – she’s not going to sing to something that doesn’t move her. The band comes from a place of back and forth collaboration – that’s where I like to be. I like getting feedback from someone else; I like working towards someone else’s vision.” Zinner also seems to have tapped into a place in which his creative pursuits feel unbound in this world. “I was reading a piece with [Darren Aronofsky’s go-to composer] Clint Mansell a few years ago and he was talking about how he would just sequester himself away with the script until he found the sonic world of it,” he says. “I took that route with Knives and Skin and spent a few weeks in the studio with the script and came up with 40 or so two-minute sketches to see what Jennifer [Reed] would respond to. It’s a really exciting two-fold process because at my end it’s just pure exploration with your creations and innovations; an anything goes situation. It doesn’t even matter if the answer to something is no, it’s just about that moment of pure creation.”
