Joseph Kosinski is two for two in hiring cool bands to score his first two movies. Daft Punk fit right in with the TRON: Legacy universe, and we expect the same from M83 for Oblivion. Kosinski told us in December, "I went back and I found my first treatment for Oblivion from 2005 and it had listed in the treatment a soundtrack of M83."
It's not much to go on, but M83 has posted a short clip to their YouTube channel of a drum battle between band member Loic Maurin and Ilan Rubin that will feature in an "Oblivion action scene" according to the description. You can hear the full dramatic orchestral score in the background. Watch the drum battle after the jump. Oblivion---starring Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, and Olga Kurylenko---opens April 12.
Here is the section from our interview with Kosinski on M83 and the scoring process:
Collider: I couldnât believe you got M83 to do this. Clearly you have some really good taste with the music. Iâm curious how you managed to get them, was it a challenge? Or did you point to Tron: Legacyand say, âI did this one, too.â
Kosinski: No I had been thinking about M83. I went back and I found my first treatment for Oblivion from 2005 and it had listed in the treatment a soundtrack of M83, Boards of Canada; they were listed back then when they had only done an album or two. So I always felt like Anthonyâs music was suited to this story from its very inception. So when it came time to putting this film together, obviously the Tron: Legacy collaboration with Daft Punk worked out as good as I would have ever hoped, I wanted to do something similar in that Iâm pulling an artist from outside the movie business to create an original sound for this film. But I didnât want it to beâDaft Punkâs music wouldnât make sense for this movie. It had to be an artist whose music fit the themes and story I was trying to tell. And M83âs music I felt was fresh and original, and big and epic, but at the same time emotional and this is a very emotional film and it felt like a good fit. So I talked to him very early and he was finishing up his latest album at the time and I am so excited. I brought in Joe Trapanese, the orchestrator from Tron: Legacy is now the orchestrator on this so itâs very similar arrangement of talent. Iâm as excited about what weâre doing musically for this film as I was for Tron.Â
If I recall, when we spoke on Tron: Legacy, Daft Punk had given you a lot of demos and then you picked out some stuff, has it been a similar process with M83?
Kosinski: Itâs been a little different because on Tron the timeframe of that movie from development through shooting through post was three years, so Daft and I got started very early on ideas. So when we were shooting I actually had a dozen tracks or something, demos, but something I could play on set. I donât know if you were on set, at the End of Line club, I think you were probably there.
We were playing the tracks that were eventually used in that scene. Thatâs very unusual, I think, to have your score before you shot. Having the music while youâre cutting it was a good thing in many ways and maybe not so good thing in other ways. But that was the process and ended up with a score and a picture which were very interlocked and I think it made sense for that movie. This one was a little different just because weâre moving faster I didnât have full songs on set in the same way. The development was a little more typical where I had a couple demos while we were shooting, but most of the workâs been done in post. Weâre going to be recording everything in January.
Is it going to be all new tracks or will there be any tracks that heâs done in the past?
Kosinski: All new. All original, all new, yeah.
Do you foresee fifteen tracks or do you have an idea of how many there are?
Kosinski: Iâm not sure what the count is, but itâs a lot of music. Thereâs a lot of music in the movie. Itâs probably eighty percent scored. I would say the same thing I said for the Daft Punk tracks, some stuff feels like Daft and some stuff you would never guess Daft would do. Some of my favorite tracks from Legacy were tracks that you would never guess in a million years were Daft Punk and I think the same goes for this. Some of the stuff youâre going to hear the M83 in its full glory, screaming out, but at other times it serves the movie as a score should itâs under the surface. So it will be interesting to see what people think.