Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on Working With Omar Apollo and Caetano Veloso for Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’

While they might always be best known to some people as the alt-rock legends behind the band Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have, in the last 15 years, become two of film’s most celebrated, in-demand composers.

Beginning with 2010’s unforgettably propulsive score for The Social Network, the duo have gone from strength to strength, becoming the composers of choice for filmmakers like David Fincher and Luca Guadagnino and picking up two Oscar wins on the way. This year, the duo logged another grand slam with their sweaty Moroderesque score for Guadagnino’s box-office smash Challengers, which became a social media needledrop as popular as anything off Charli XCX’s Brat.

Just seven months after Challengers, Reznor and Ross are once again teaming up with Guadagnino—this time, for Queer, the director’s deeply personal adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella. “What became clear when we signed on to do Queer was how much the book meant to Luca,” Reznor tells GQ on a Zoom call from their studio. “That was one of the things in his formative years that helped, I think, define him and had a very important role in who he is and how he sees himself. So we knew this wasn't going to be a flippant let's-see-what-happens project. This has real emotional weight for Luca.”

To help bring the film’s sonic world to life, the duo collaborated with legendary Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and upstart R&B singer Omar Apollo on a pair of songs that serve as the film’s heart. GQ recently talked to the duo about their ongoing collaboration with Guadagnino, how they got Veloso to sing on the film’s soundtrack, and what impressed them about Apollo.

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GQ: I found it really interesting that you guys worked with the legendary Caetano Veloso for Queer. Specifically, because his song “Cucurrucucu Paloma” is so identified with queer cinema, from Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together to Barry Jenkins' Moonlight. What was the thinking there? Was it a conscious decision to engage with that canon?

Trent Reznor: Well, the story of this track [“Vaster Than Empires”] came about when we had written a song for Omar Apollo, who has a cameo in the film earlier. Originally, his character was singing in a bar and we needed a track that was a torch-song piece for him to sing. So we worked with Omar on a track and had it arranged properly, and musicians trained to be on camera, and they filmed the scene. And then, for whatever reason, that scene got cut from the film—the original cut of the film was three and a half hours plus.

So jump to many months of scoring the film, and we have a conversation with Luca where he says, “I'd love to take that Omar piece and rework it over the end credits." And I said, I don't think that'll work, because the piece was written for a specific mood and a specific need. I don't think that fits. We can rework the track—and we're happy to do that—but why don't we just write a new piece that fits the end credits, that fits the feeling?

And we started talking about what that feeling would be and what kind of degree of resolution would be right. My problem was the emotional tone of the piece we'd written with Omar didn't feel to me like what I'm hearing Luca describing, he wants this section to feel like that very important moment when [you’re thinking] "Oh, the film's over. I need to make a judgment if I enjoyed it. How should I feel?” In my opinion, there's a lot of weight on that moment, and so we spoke about that. And then that was followed by, if I remember correctly, seconds later, an email showing up from Luca saying, “Hey, I got a hold of William Burroughs’ last journal entries, and what if you could turn those into lyrics? What if that could be a song?”

And reading through them, I was like, “Fuck, no, that can't be a song. God. No. Goddammit, Luca." But a weekend later, inspiration struck, and we had some music that we loved for the score that didn't make it in the film, and so then, using Burroughs’ words, we edited it down into something that we felt excited about. And I sang a demo of it and ran it by Luca pretty quickly after he asked for it. “Love it. This is right.” And then the discussion pivots to what kind of voice would be in there, because the intention was never for me to sing it. I just happened to be here at the piano and we needed to do this quick.

And he kept saying, "If it had somebody whose voice was like Caetano singing…" and “I'm picturing an older male voice that sounds aged, that's been through something…” And there was lots of talk about, “Who would be like Caetano?” And then [we thought], “Why don't we just track down Caetano? All they can say is “No,” and we're in no worse shape than we are right now.” So it took a few weeks, but we tracked him down, and he was excited about the idea of trying it.

And there was a few more weeks of getting it recorded remotely, and then you know the result. Luca was thrilled. The idea was Luca's. He felt [Caetano’s] voice was perfect for the song, and he felt what Caetano means was perfect for the film.

Atticus Ross: When Luca sent through the last page of the journal—a rumination on love, which interestingly would be the last thing that Burroughs wrote—I was like, “I've got no idea how somebody could make a song from this at all.” And then to hear what Trent did was pretty remarkable, I think, in terms of how well that lands not just as a song, but how well that lands the emotion of that last bit of the film and leave the cinema with.

“Te Maldigo,” the Omar song that recently came out—was that the song that was supposed to be in the film?

Reznor: Yeah, the video of that is is what they filmed that would have been in the film, before [Daniel Craig’s character] Lee meets him and picks him up in the bar.

Ross: So he's singing a torch song in the bar that Lee takes him home from.

Were you familiar with Omar's work prior to him being in the film?

Reznor: Yeah, when Luca mentioned, “I'm going to have Omar Apollo,” [I thought,] great. He just lives across the town and he came in here. He was a joy to work with. We had a really fun day in the studio with him. Yeah.

You guys aren't strangers to unexpected collaborators—I love that Halsey album, you have that song with Lil Nas X. But I thought it was so interesting that you guys worked with Omar. He has, in his own work, such a soft touch. I was so curious what that tension would bring out of the song. What was your impression of him as a singer-songwriter?

Reznor: Yeah, and we had the framework of a track together, and it was in English.

I was familiar with his work, but I hadn't sat in a room with him, and so we kind of prepped up a demo of, “Hey, here's what this would sound like,” with a singer that sounds like him and a key that would work just to make it, “Hey, this could be easy to step into this role.” But then he came in and it transformed into him, and he embellished and contributed and wrote and reconfigured some things.

And, again, what's unique for us—or what we don't have a lot of experience in—is working with other singers that have their shit together. I'm not saying we were used to people other than me that don’t have their shit together, but, I mean, seeing [Omar] come in and wrap his head around what we're up to with a cool attitude and sit with his engineer and just, in a period of several hours, hone in on what became [the song], that was really cool to watch.

A very focused, serious and really good singer. What was unique for me to see was he would sing a lot—go back, sing a lot, go back, sing a lot, go back, sing a lot. That was rapid fire. In my life, I've never done that, but him himself knowing what he's going for was cool to see.

Yeah, the collaboration makes me curious what else you guys could do with another R&B artist and what Omar will now do in his future work.

Reznor: Yeah, the context of that song was so specific, too. It has to be this instrumentation set in this era in that bar, so it limited it. No synthesizers—it was a fun restriction, but it would be fun to work with Omar where we could, without those restrictions, see what's possible. And that may happen someday.

Ross: Yeah, and I think what you are implying is that would be an exciting thing for music just generally for people to get out and try different stuff.

Amen. I remember for the GQ cover story on you guys from earlier this year, you said Luca would give you guys notes for Challengers that were basically variations of “unending homoerotic desire.” I was curious what was the overarching note for Queer?

Ross: There wasn't a specific note for Queer, and it was a bit harder to get into. We knew how much it meant to him, but he didn't have [a specific reference]. On Challengers, he said, “I think I hear dance music. Would that work or not?” And then we go off on that path and find out, and Challengers is what it is. There wasn't that kind of clarity from a musical position on Queer. He threw out lots of different things that were kind of riddles to solve, but, eventually, what we decided on was leaning into Burroughs and the idea of the cut-up technique and using samplers. It felt like an organic way to tell the story musically.

[Reznor pulls out his iPhone]

Reznor: I just found some notes from a call with Luca. So I'll read [them to] you. Here was our directions: "Love could feel like dread—Stockhausen. Lee towards lover—engulfing, overwhelming, an uncompromising approach. He's a broken, lonely man—unknown reciprocation, unsure throughout, but still beautiful. I like the scale of an orchestra—bipolar. Make the score bipolar. Burroughs was like this, from Old America, but contemporary—the score should be like that. Maybe electronic element—Ayahuasca." Okay—go write a score.

Amazing.

Reznor: I mean those are charming notes to get, and they can also, as they did in this case, lead you down weeks of a path of what may not be the right direction at the end of the day. But, I mean, that's the job.

I found it interesting what Atticus said about how there weren’t hard references for this, because I do feel like throughout this film—which I personally really loved—there's an unresolved feeling to everyone's work. I mean that in the best way. It really does feel like you all went into the jungle and figured it out from there.

Reznor: I don't want to speak out of turn here, but the original cut was significantly longer, at least an hour longer than what's in theaters now. And a lot of what was taken out was a more surreal element that was exciting and alters the way the film feels quite a bit. When a lot of that got removed, it was hard for us to understand what the film became, because it shifted the tone of it quite a bit in certain ways. And, again, we completely trust the hand that's guiding those things, but that was another curveball. We're not in the room when the decision is to take this out and this out and that and this other thing. It became disorienting at times to also quantify the impact the whole film has. You know what I mean? We're watching three-minute chunks, a week of this three-minute and then a week of that seven-minute segment, assuming it sits atop the scaffolding that got us there and leads to what's happening.

And sometimes, when you start taking those pieces out, it becomes harder to understand. What you're working on is now affected because it doesn't have that stuff you know is there because you watched it, but it's not there. That's the part of filmmaking that I find tricky. We've experienced it with [David] Fincher as well on some things. To be able, as a director, to remain objective with that many moving parts, that's what feels... When people have said, “Do you ever think about directing?”—it's like, I've thought about how I know I couldn't do it. I thought about, “Well, I'd like to do it,” but it's like, the ability to be able to remain objective about so many things, that feels daunting to me. And as composers we feel like we're able to microscope in to get really close up on things.

Ross: Yeah, I think I wouldn't be surprised—I don't want to speak out of turn as well—if there is a longer version of the film released later.

Nirvana's “Come as You Are” and Sinéad O'Connor's cover of “All Apologies” opens the film. And it struck me while watching it that they're both peers of yours who kind of queered the idea of how to be a rock star—to be a popular musician—in different ways. And I know you're not necessarily involved with choosing the needle drops and all of that, but I was just wondering—more emotionally than anything—how it felt to hear two of your peers who are no longer with us start the film?

Renzor: We pushed back at one point a little bit, of just challenging [Luca on] why he wanted contemporary-ish needle drops in there—as one could argue, from a score perspective, it's disorienting and potentially not in a good way. There was a very thoughtful and thought-through response from Luca of why it's important. I remember when I brought it up that the response was so genuine and passionate and heartfelt that it was like, “Okay, we're helping you tell the story you want to tell. And it has been deeply thought-through why those things are in there.” So most of our thinking about those needle drops were around that context.

But no, it's tough as you get older not to be reminded of mortality at all times. And when you have two artists who were great artists that are not with us anymore, that were peers, from my own personal experience, it adds an emotional resonance. I don't know that other people pick up on that, but, to me, I hear it, and it's part of who you are, that's not with us anymore.