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Tuesday October 8, 2019

Damon Lindelof on the music for The Watchmen on HBO

Paul Guyet got in touch, having finagled his way into a press seat at the New York Comic Con last week. Not only was the first episode debuted - with an opening that Guyet describes as "THE BEST pairing of Reznor and Ross' music with imagery that I have ever seen", but during the talkback and Q&A, an audience member asked about the score. Lindelof replied, and I'm quoting:

I have a rule about composers, that they're different from show to show...one of the things that I didn't know about Watchmen was what it was going to sound like and every time I imagined what it would sound like, it sounded like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. So I called HBO and said "these guys have never done TV before but do you think we could take a shot at them?" and Francesca Orsi said "that is so weird, Trent and Atticus' manager called this morning and they were asking about Watchmen".


One of the first things Trent said was "so...are you doing the squid?" and I was like "oh this guy is all the way in". They wrote a lot of this music and sent it to Nikki (director of some of the episodes) and I before we started shooting. They said "we read the script and these are some of the things we were thinking". I'd say close to 80% of the music they wrote before we even shot is in the pilot. We were just trying to make stuff worthy of those guys, they're amazing.

Sounds like we have a lot to look forward to with this one, and with any luck, maybe we'll see an original score made available in the not-too-distant future. Thanks again, Paul!