Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter says writing the score for ‘Tron: Legacy’ was “depressing” and “limiting”

Daft Punk‘s Thomas Bangalter has said writing the score for Tron: Legacy was a “depressing” and “limiting” experience.

• READ MORE: The enduring influence of Daft Punk: “They gave off this attitude of not giving a fuck”

The musician and producer reflected on working on the 2010 Disney film during a recent episode of The A24 Podcast, in conversation with Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange.

He explained that director Joseph Kosinski – who went on to make Top Gun: Maverick and F1, had expected Daft Punk to create an entirely electronic score, but Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo actually wanted to use the opportunity to work with a full symphony orchestra.

“Initially, he was like, ‘Oh no I want you guys to do a full electronic score’,” Bangalter said. “By that time, I’d done that music for 15 years, [so I said], ‘No, we’re going to Hollywood. We’re gonna use Fantasia. Like, it’s Disney. So it’s like a full orchestra’.”

He said he spent months working on synth tones for the score, but making it fit with the film was a huge challenge. “The problem was that when we started to experiment with picture, anything that was in the medium range, frequency-wise, would conflict with dialogue.”

“It was so limiting to feel like, ‘Oh yeah, I have all these ideas about things that we can really make music. But the whole thing about film score music is to take a step back and have the performance and not be in the way.”

“It’s always very depressing, actually, when you have all these ideas , and you say, ‘OK, I’m gonna bring that’, and you end up almost having to go back to a more traditional way of doing it,” he said.

“The tradition is not just rules. It’s sometimes, like, common sense. It’s the idea of saying, ‘OK, yeah, you know, we tried that, and it doesn’t work.”

The Tron: Legacy soundtrack was Daft Punk’s first full film score, and at the time, Bangalter called it “by far the most challenging and complex thing we have ever been involved with”. A complete edition with previously unavailable tracks was released for the film’s 10th anniversary in 2020, and a vinyl reissue followed a year later.

NME gave Tron: Legacy a two-star review, writing: “Now it’s been rebooted, it is unlikely Tron fans will have to wait another three decades before they see a third instalment in the saga. Yet however quickly the third movie does comes around, by the time it does, the aforementioned fans might realise they’re not quite as keen on Tron as they might have thought they were.”

Daft Punk, meanwhile, split in 2021 after 28 years, and earlier this year, Bangalter ruled out a reunion as there were still “other things to explore” outside of the duo. They were still heard a lot this summer, though, as their track ‘One More Time’ was France’s official goal music at the FIFA World Cup.

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