There were few scores that sliced through the din like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music for Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers.”
When the movie, a romance involving three tennis pros (played by Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) was released this spring, the soundtrack was quickly singled out as a highlight. This was full-on dance music from Reznor and Ross, which amped up the tennis sequences (breathlessly staged by Guadagnino) and the quieter domestic scenes alike.
“Challengers” was the second score that Reznor and Ross, who are also the principals in rock band Nine Inch Nails, had composed for the filmmaker, after 2022’s melancholic cannibal road movie “Bones and All.” The early conversations for “Bones and All” were over Zoom, but Reznor remembers “a familiarity and respect” settling in immediately with the filmmaker. “There was the right amount of guidance but complete freedom to do what we wanted to do,” Reznor told TheWrap. “We quickly found our footing.” Guadagnino pitched his follow-up to Reznor and Ross as “a super sexy love triangle set against tennis.” They were in.
“What we’ve come to realize is, why we really do this is the joy of collaboration with people that makes our lives better,” Reznor said. “Of course, we want to do the best work we can, and we would hope that it finds an audience, and we hope that we are pushing ourselves. But it really is the feeling of mind melding and being assigned a situation to see if we can work within this structure of what we’re being asked to do. It’s refreshing as a difference from Nine Inch Nails, where everything is up to us, figuring out what we want to do. Working in service to something is surprisingly rewarding. I think it’s the companion career.”
What Reznor and Ross had learned from “Bones and All” was that the experience of reading one of the scripts to Guadagnino’s movies and seeing that same movie were very different.
“It didn’t differ in terms of the words being said from the script, but I think the humanity that he brought to that, his first movie set in America, the detail and the set pieces, that felt so real,” Reznor said. “I grew up in that area, in that era and the authenticity, the humanity surprised us the way the actors presented the material felt, Oh, now it feels like a Luca movie inside this story. We were curious to see how ‘Challengers’ was going to transform from how we read the script to how he executes the script.”
Guadagnino told them that he wanted the music to be a character; that you should be able to dance in your seat through the whole movie. He wanted the music to be loud and in-your-face. “That’s not how we would have sat down and thought, Let’s tackle this movie,” Reznor admitted. “It immediately became fun and exciting but also scary, because it radically altered what the film was going to feel like.” They had learned from past experiences, like on HBO’s “Watchmen,” which put their music very much in the forefront, that if that doesn’t happen, it can “be minimized behind sound effects and in a polite, proper sound level, it sucks,” according to Reznor. At worst, their music could sound distant, aloof, “like a radio in the room or a club next door.” That wouldn’t work with “Challengers.”
“Luca had the courage to lean into this, respond to it, and say, ‘No, it needs to be louder,’” Reznor said. “That was exciting. We found ourselves as the conservative voices at times. Normally it’s us saying, ‘Let’s try this radical thing.’”
“He was definitely committed,” Ross said. According to Ross, Guadagnino’s philosophy is, “hire good people and then let them be good.” “The notion of dance music came up one time in a sentence, which is an easy sentence to say, then the real work begins of bringing it to life,” Ross said. Early on in the process, when Guadagnino was in Los Angeles, Ross and Reznor played him a bit of the music. The filmmaker wanted to hear it on their speakers, turned all the way up. “He said, ‘Magnificent!’ And we’re off,” Ross remembered.
About an hour into the film, Zendaya and O’Connor get into a fight and it’s a relatively small sequence but the music doesn’t let up. It shows you just how elastic Reznor and Ross’ score is for the movie; its pliability on full display without having to temper the overall approach. Ross said that it’s based on something they came up with on “Bones and All” – with various themes running through a central idea.
“Dance music is the vessel and there are hidden things within them,” Ross said. “If you were to analyze it, in his mind, it’s the two beats that are fighting each other. Patrick and Tash’s theme was built off of that. It includes part of the love triangle theme. And in the final match, all those themes come together.” Ross said that in a sense it’s experimental, but in another it’s more traditional – it’s all built around the characters and the “emotional context of the story.”
Earlier on they realized the dance music approach worked really well over a tennis scene. Then they asked the next essential question: “What would we do over the bedroom conflict scene?” It was early in the film and they could pivot. “And to our surprise, it could work. It was thrilling to turn up a piece of music like that, when they start arguing,” Reznor said. They thought it was “really fucking cool” but also assumed Guadagnino wouldn’t go for it. (He did.) It was in that scene that they realized how tricky it could be to have to filter all of their ideas through the “construct of something that sounds like dance music,” as Reznor said. “It became far more difficult than we would have imagined as we got into it.”
They realized that, once the music was added, “Challengers” changed. “The film felt quicker. The tennis was more exciting,” Reznor said. He wasn’t trying to toot his own horn. “You were leaning forward in your seat. There was a kind of fun – a propulsion and momentum. We are still in awe of how you can manipulate the way people feel with scoring. This was another great lesson for us.”
Reznor and Ross have since worked on a couple more Guadagnino projects – “Queer,” starring Daniel Craig, which goes wide this week (and offers a much more elegiac score); and the upcoming Julia Roberts-led “After the Hunt.” The collaboration is continuing. Thank goodness, considering how people responded to “Challengers.”
We were talking a couple of days after Spotify Wrapped had been released and “Challengers,” whether the official soundtrack or the continuous mix version by Boys Noize, was on so many people’s end-of-year tallies. It is the latest example of the way that the score has crossed over, from movies to culture at large, something that “Challengers” did time and time again with memes and usage on various social media platforms, including TikTok. This kind of cross-media acceptance made Reznor and Ross feel good, especially because the experience of making “Challengers” was already so enjoyable.
“Everything was falling into place, the way that the film evolved and then was responded to by people, just feels organic and natural. To watch what it did virally, just people talking about it, it was something that we’ve been proud and to be involved in,” Reznor said. “It felt like a gift, in the sense of that it was fun to work on it, it was hard work, but never felt crippling, or never felt like we were off, possibly going the wrong direction. It felt daring within a fun container. It’s been cool to see people respond to the film. I think it’s a smart film. It didn’t talk down to an audience. And it is playful in a way that was exciting to be part of now.”
Ross added: “He really imagined a world – form the costumes to the performances – and when it all comes together, like ‘Challengers’ was a thing. Whether you like it or not, it was a thing. And I think that’s his vision.”
