Now, thanks to the fine folks over at Paste who had a chance to sit down with Mastodon Bassist Troy Sanders, we have some more details on their epic score for the DC/Warner Bros. film starring Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox to name a few.
Troy says that while Mastodon spent much of summer 2009 on the road in Europe with Metallica and the 9 week tour was incredible, it left the band feeling disconnected from home.
“I felt my dogs wouldn’t even recognize me”
Just before crossing back over the Atlantic, Mastodon received a phone call from an enthusiastic fan. It was director Jimmy Hayward, who said he’d been inspired by repeated listenings of Mastodon’s 2008 epic, Blood Mountain, and that said inspiration had helped him finish up a little project he was toiling over—the script for Jonah Hex.
The album weighed heavily on Hayward, Sanders said, and so he wanted Mastodon to weigh heavily on his movie.
“As opposed to labels profiteering the situation, saying they’d give a band $500,000 to use some song, he called us out of the blue as a fan,” Sanders recalled. “It was the most beautiful, authentic way to collaborate.”
With the band’s collective interest piqued, Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds accepted Hayward’s invitation to visit the New Orleans set of Jonah Hex, where, Sanders said,
“they were immediately on the same wavelength of art, music and life in general.”
Hayward even gave Hinds a cameo in the flick; he’s the first of 172 poor souls to be slaughtered onscreen.
Their families (and forgetful dogs) on hold for another two weeks, the men of Mastodon flew to Los Angeles to meet Hayward and begin recording what would become the score of Jonah Hex—all on good faith, as the gig paid
“basically nothing.”
“[The movie budget] covered our studio fees, but it was a break even deal,” Sanders said. “Malkovich, Brolin and Megan Fox all took pay cuts to be a part of this movie—that alone speaks volumes about how much people care about this film.”
“I guarantee an incredibly popular misconception will be, ‘Oh my god, they’re selling out doing a fucking comic-book movie. They probably got a huge paycheck and don’t give a shit about integrity,’” Sanders continued. “The fact is the exact opposite. We sacrificed another two weeks away from home to give away an album’s worth of material for nothing in return but satisfaction in being a part of something incredible.”
Mastodon kept a low profile in Los Angeles last month, where Hayward
“played scenes for us and gave us all day long to create music that matched the emotion of the scene,” Sanders said. “It was flattering to be given 100% creative control in this movie. It was very pure, it was real creative and totally spur of the moment.”
The resulting music is about an hour long in total, all instrumental, including five full songs and many smaller musical themes adapted throughout. Upon finishing, it was then given to composer John Powell (Shrek, The Bourne Identity), who will paste the music to the movie.
Some of the material, Sanders said, will likely be adapted for the London Orchestra for particularly epic scenes.
“We wrote variations on themes for each character, different variables for a bunch of riffs: faster, slower, heavier, lighter,” Sanders said. “It’s the Darth Vader approach.”
