Call it a case of putting the musical cart before the filmic horse.

While the overwhelming majority of movies -- especially big budget Hollywood tent-pole films -- hire soundtrack composers only after all the footage has been shot, “Tron: Legacy” director Joseph Kosinski approached the French dance music duo Daft Punk about composing the film’s score a full two years before cameras rolled. His thinking was, the group’s mash-up of electro-rave beats and symphonic orchestral compositions would set an emotional tone for the sci-fi thriller’s futuristic scope and sweep.

Band mates Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter experimented with different musical textures, but ultimately decided -- in what initially came as a surprise to both Kosinski and “Tron: Legacy” distributor Disney Studios -- that the kind of big-beat electronica for which they are known was all wrong for the movie. Instead, the group went in a more orchestral direction that almost nothing in its musical oeuvre suggested they could pull off.

“There was this idea to find influences that could be 400 years old -- or 400 years in the future,” Bangalter said. “To properly establish a timeless quality that suggests both the future and the past.”

After a year and eight months of work on the project, Daft Punk and music arranger and orchestrator Joseph Trapanese decamped to London’s AIR Lyndhurst studios to record with an 85-piece orchestra over the course of a rapid-fire session that lasted less than a week.

“It was both exhilarating and very emotional,” recalled Bangalter, a slender, thoughtful guy with a shock of unruly hair who does most of the talking for the group in strongly accented but flawless English. “And at the same time it was completely terrifying. You were working a year and a half on pieces of music that you had five days to record.

This is Part 2 of Chris Lee's story from his rare interview with Daft Punk. Today, we see how the duo worked on the score for "Tron: Legacy" and whether more soundtracks are in the works. (To read Part 1, click here.)

After a year of reflection in which "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski continued to detail his vision for "Tron: Legacy" to them, Daft Punk duo Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter agreed to take the plunge as a means of learning to "widen the palette" of Daft Punk's sound. And in 2008 Disney arranged to have the band mates meet with several of the most successful soundtrack composers working today about potentially collaborating: Hans Zimmer, Harry-Gregson Williams, John Powell and Christophe Beck among them.

Bangalter, 35, said: "They were very generous and very open, sharing a lot of technical advice."

"And warnings," De Homem-Christo, 36, added. "They said, 'You have to make your vision understood. It's not easy. You're serving a movie. You're not just serving the director, you're serving a team of people. It's always about changing and going back.' "

The band ultimately scrapped any collaboration plans. And the task of telling the studio fell to Kosinski, a successful commercial director with no feature film background. "It was considered a huge risk for Disney," Kosinski said. "A director who had never done a feature before and composers who hadn't scored a movie before."

'Electronic sketches'

After the two relocated to Los Angeles, scoring began in earnest in January 2009. Nevermind that "Tron: Legacy" still had no script, only concept drawings to illustrate set pieces and characters. De
Homem-Christo and Bangalter decided that an orchestral score employing subtle electronic cues -- rather than vice versa -- would be most appropriate to "paint that epic quality" the film dictated. So the duo applied the same kind of musical cross-pollination responsible for its gold-certified 1997 debut album "Homework" and commercial breakthrough "Discovery" to recording violin arpeggios, surging horns and roiling timpani.

 
"In dance music, we've always tried to combine existing genres -- heavy metal and disco or funk, something that contrasts associations," Bangalter said. "[For the film], we liked the idea of a dark influence reminiscent of some electronic scores of the '70s. But at the same time, we wanted the scope of classic Hollywood. To mash up those things that usually exist on opposite ends of the spectrum."

The group hooked up with music arranger and orchestrator Joseph Trapanese, whose job was
to translate Bangalter and De Homem-Christo's ideas into symphonic arrangements. They provided him with "extensive electronic sketches" -- synthesizer approximations of orchestral music and iTunes playlists running the gamut of 20th century film composers that were indicative of the "timeless" vibe they wanted.

"They had this very clear and distinct idea of what the orchestra should sound like," Trapanese said. "They gave me an overall tone to work in. Maybe they couldn't physically transcribe what music for, say, a cello. But they know how a cello sounds and how to translate ideas to it."

Tonally, Bangalter explained: "We thought it was very important that the score not sound like real world music. It could not feel 2010 in any aspect."

In July 2010, Trapanese helped actualize Daft's vision for the score over a five-day recording session with an 85-piece orchestra at London's AIR Lyndhurst studios. "My role was as the interface between the robots and the orchestra," he joked.

For his part, Kosinski says he understands why Daft Punk wanted to diverge from the repetitive, sample-and-synthesizer-based template that has served such epochal dance floor anthems as "One More Time." And he feels the new music fuses electronic and orchestral music in ways that serve the scope and sweep of "Tron: Legacy."

"It was always conceived as a blend," Kosinski said. "What evolved over that first year was the ratio. The original thinking was more electronic music with classical orchestral lines in it. As the process evolved, when they got down to writing the final cues, it became much more orchestral than any of us initially anticipated. I couldn't be happier with how it turned out."

Even in the face of acclaim for the group's new musical direction, though, the influential music review website Pitchfork panned the soundtrack, lamenting the "gloom of blown expectations" and basically calling into question whether Daft Punk had sold its soul to Hollywood.

Bangalter and De Homem-Christo said they have no plans to record another soundtrack anytime soon and hinted at the release of new Daft Punk music: "Making music for a movie is very humbling," Bangalter said. "We've been working on some of our music concurrently." (They declined to specify touring or album release plans.)

With typically Gallic shrugs, the band mates also said they have learned to live with being tarred and feathered as "commercial."

"We like the idea of trying to experiment and do different things we haven't done in the past," said Bangalter. "Our idea of selling out is a different one, though. I imagine it would be finding a successful formula and sticking with it and always doing the same thing. That is not what is exciting to us."

-- Chris Lee

RECENT AND RELATED

'Tron' glow-in-the-dark posters are retro visions

'Tron: Legacy,' the Hollywood premiere

Review: 'Tron: Legacy' glows bright but lacks life

Free 'Tron: Legacy' screening on Dec. 15

'Tron' creator on 'arcane, dark cinema voodoo'

Daft Punk gives 'Tron: Legacy' a pulse and power

Daft Punk rocks the grid with 'Derezzed'

'Tron' designer hoped for 'a new chapter of beauty'

'Tron: Legacy' -- a film of visual marvels

Top photo: Daft Punk on the fringe in 2001. Credit: Seb Janiak. Middle photo: Daft Punk does a cameo in "Tron: Legacy." Credit: Disney. Bottom photo: Daft Punk takes a stroll down the red carpet in Hollywood at the El Capitan for "Tron: Legacy." Credit: Valerie Macon / AFP / Getty Images

Times staff writer Chris Lee, who landed a rare interview with Daft Punk, writes about the French electronic music duo who scored "Tron: Legacy." Today, Pop & Hiss presents Part 1 of Lee's story, which delves into how the duo came to be involved with the project. Part 2 will follow this weekend.

Played in the denouement to a gripping shootout between digital warriors on rocket-propelled hang-gliders, the musical passage "Adagio for Tron" arrives about two-thirds through the $170-million sci-fi thriller "Tron: Legacy" (which hit multiplexes Dec. 17). It's an elegiac movement recorded by a symphony orchestra that features desolate violins swelling around a barely there synthesizer pulse.

Scoring aces such as Hans Zimmer ("The Dark Knight," "Pirates of the Caribbean") and John Williams (the "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter" franchises) have become global brands for creating similar emotionally pregnant soundscapes for film -- the kind of music that isn't shy about pushing viewers' buttons or providing an emotional context for what's on-screen.

But while "Adagio for Tron" -- for that matter, most of the tracks on the soundtrack -- shows a mastery of orchestral music and fluency for deploying every symphonic resource from timpani to Wagner tuben, the musicians responsible for the score are better known for a sound that can be characterized as anything but classical.

That would be Daft Punk. In a startling departure from the kind of techno-disco-heavy metal mash-ups and bombastic dance music that propelled them into international superstardom, the Grammy-winning French electronica duo back-burnered what they do best and went on hiatus from a lucrative touring schedule for nearly two years to compose and produce the "Tron: Legacy" soundtrack.

In its first week of release, the CD landed at No. 10 on the national album chart, scanning over 70,000 units according to Nielsen SoundScan; it has sold more than 118,000 units to date. Critically hailed as a game-changer for the group (even while a certain quadrant of the blognoscenti decries its commerciality), the soundtrack is the first film score to chart that high in half a decade and Daft Punk's highest-charting album to date.

But hiring the group to score one of Disney's tent-pole films of 2010 was hardly a no-brainer for studio brass. Moreover, it took the members of Daft Punk, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, over a year to commit to the project after being initially approached by "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski. And when the duo finally set to work with an 85-piece orchestra,
they shocked the filmmakers by shelving Daft's signature four-on-the-floor sound in favor of a more classical direction that little in the duo's musical oeuvre suggested they were qualified to produce.

 
"It was not obvious for anyone," Bangalter said during a rare interview with the notoriously press-averse group. He was seated at an outdoor picnic table at the Jim Henson Productions complex in Hollywood, where Daft Punk's production company, Daft Arts, keeps offices. "We knew that dance music was not the appropriate style of music to fit this movie -- in scope and tone on many levels. We were not interested in doing it in terms of what we've done in the past," he said.

Underground act

Bangalter and De Homem-Christo started out in Paris as a punk-leaning indie rock group before trading their guitars for computer sequencers and making a name as an underground rave act. In the early '90s, Daft Punk performed a self-styled synthesis of acid house, funk and big beat electronica at illegal warehouse parties in France that "you had to crawl under barbed wire and run from police" to attend, as Bangalter recalled.

But they shocked rave purists by landing a major-label recording deal with Virgin/EMI in 1996. Since then, with musical output comprising a scant three studio albums, the Grammy-winning live recording "Alive 2007" and a couple of remix CDs, Daft Punk has cemented its reputation as an enigmatic group of almost unerring street cred and uncompromising vision as well as a top touring act that has headlined major music festivals around the world.

Big-budget Hollywood films typically contract a soundtrack composer only when the film is in the can. In contrast to the prevailing method, though, "Tron: Legacy's" Kosinski tried to enlist the group in 2007 long before a script or even so much as a single visual effects test had been created.

Given the musicians' electronic musical métier and the movie's computer-matrix-for-virtual-gladiator-games setting, it seemed like a marriage made in digital heaven. Plus, Bangalter and De Homem-Christo already had some film experience, having co-written and co-directed the arty travelogue "Daft Punk's Electroma." And Bangalter composed a score for controversial French writer-director Gaspar Noé's 2002 drama "Irreversible" (albeit one filled with dread-inducing techno and not anything remotely orchestral).

The original "Tron" left a lasting impression on Bangalter and De Homem-Christo, who saw the movie as children and took to heart its core value: that the interface between humans and technology can be alternately seductive, galvanizing and terrifying. As evidenced by the group's robotic helmets -- without which they have seldom been photographed since 1996 -- the "Tron"-inspired electronic pyramid they use for live shows (beginning with 2006's Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival) and the heavily computerized "Robot Rock" that characterizes most of Daft Punk's last studio album, 2005's "Human After All," "Tron" remains a touchstone for the duo that's helped define much of Daft Punk's cultural output.

But even after a meeting during which Kosinski and the musicians discussed their mutual admiration for recording artists such as Vangelis, Philip Glass and "Tron" soundtrack composer Wendy Carlos, De Homem-Christo and Bangalter still had doubts about signing onto the project.

"Obviously, we love 'Tron,' " said De Homem-Christo, the quieter, more intense of the two. "We thought it would be hard for the director or anybody in the new 'Tron' to top not only the music but the visual aspect of the first one, which is still relevant and more avant-garde than most of the stuff out there now. Also, to commit to work with a big studio, maybe the biggest and most iconic? It was a big question."

How did Daft Punk overcome their doubts, what was their work like on the score, and will they be doing another soundtrack soon? Check back this weekend for Part 2.

-- Chris Lee

RECENT AND RELATED

'Tron' glow-in-the-dark posters are retro visions

'Tron: Legacy,' the Hollywood premiere

Review: 'Tron: Legacy' glows brightly but lacks life

Free 'Tron: Legacy' screening on Dec. 15

'Tron' creator on 'arcane, dark cinema voodoo'

Daft Punk gives 'Tron: Legacy' a pulse and power

Daft Punk rocks the grid with 'Derezzed'

'Tron' designer hoped for 'a new chapter of beauty'

'Tron: Legacy' -- a film of visual marvels

Top photo: Musicians Thomas Banglater and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk pose back-to-back. Credit: Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times. Bottom photo: Daft Punk is pictured with sirens at the premiere for "Tron: Legacy" in Hollywood at the El Capitan Theatre. Credit: John Sciulli / Getty Images.

The duo is inspired by Wendy Carlos, who scored ‘Tron.'

Daft Punk's mission in creating the music score for “Tron: Legacy” is doubly imposing. First, the French electronic music duo is charged with creating soundscapes to help director Joseph Kosinski guide audiences convincingly into the inner dimensions of virtual reality. In doing so, Daft Punk members Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo also face the challenge of delivering a worthy successor to the work of one of their key influences and one of the true pioneers of the entire field of electronic music: Wendy Carlos.

“Creatively, we all wanted the same thing,” Kosinski recently told KCRW-FM program director Jason Bentley, who also is the music supervisor for “Tron: Legacy.” “I knew we wanted to create a classic film score that blended electronic and orchestral music in a way that hadn't been done before.”

That's what Carlos did when she composed and performed the score for the original “Tron” film in 1982 for director Steven Lisberger, bringing to the project her technological and compositional innovations that in the late 1960s and '70s significantly helped transform electronically generated sounds into bona fide music.

The score for “Tron” featured a trailblazing integration of traditional orchestral music with the sweeping, atmospheric synthesized sounds Carlos had introduced to much of the world in 1968 with her groundbreaking “Switched-On Bach” album.

“It was a chance to work with a big orchestra and a fairly big electronic ensemble and wed the two together before synths had gotten to the stage where they could be used in the same room with the orchestra, being played along with, like the way … a lot of others do now,” she told Film Score Monthly magazine several years ago.

Those unnerved by the advent of computer-composed classical works should breathe easier: The robots of Daft Punk have written a film score, recorded with the help of an 85-piece orchestra. If the machines are taking over, then the future of composing is in capable LED-lit hands.

Over their long career, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter have stood apart from their dance-floor peers for their meticulousness in sculpting long-form tracks that deploy brainy means (virtuoso filter work, interplay between sonic compression and wide track dynamics) to joyful, primal ends. In a genre all about timbre, there’s no production duo that sounds as good.

This system works just as well out of the club and in the concert hall with the “Tron: Legacy” score. From the crackling main synth theme on “The Grid” to the distant timpanis on “Disc Wars,” the duo seamlessly grafts its phosphorescent ambience onto the orchestra’s dystopia-dripping arrangements. The band is unafraid to let its technical wizardry take a backseat to its compositions on tracks such as “Adagio For TRON” and “Flynn Lives.” But the propellant, digitized stutter of “Derezzed” and the melancholy smears of “Solar Sailer” show a Romantic streak in Daft Punk’s heart of wires and microchips.

— August Brown

Daft Punk
“Tron: Legacy” Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Walt Disney Records
Three stars (out of four)

 
The waiting is almost over for one of the most anticipated musical events of 2010: the unveiling of Daft Punk's score for Disney's upcoming film, "Tron: Legacy." Although the Internet has been overflowing with snippets both real and fake (mostly the latter) for the last half-year, only a few pieces of Daft Punk's score, which the French electronic duo has been working on for the last two years, have seen the light of day thus far.

That will all change on Saturday, when "Tron: Legacy" director Joseph Kosinski is scheduled to sit down for a soundtrack preview event with KCRW music director Jason Bentley, who served as the music supervisor on the film. They will have a conversation about the creation of the score, and play a wide range of pieces from it. The event will be presented by Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Records and KCRW, but will not be open to the public. (Pop & Hiss, however, will be attending, and will relay what we can from the listening session.)

Bentley, who was instrumental in luring Daft Punk into the fold to create the score, is to, along with Kosinski, share stories on the making of the music. According KCRW's news release: "The highly anticipated original motion picture score, slated for nationwide release Tuesday, December 7, 2010, has never been heard before, despite rumors and purported leaks to the contrary. This will be the official, exclusive presentation of music from the album, which contains 22 tracks total." 

The location for the event has not been announced.

[Updated, 4:31 p.m.: KCRW will offer a stream of the “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack preview event in its entirety – including a conversation between director Kosinski and music supervisor Bentley, as well as track previews – on demand at KCRW.com starting Monday, November 29, with a portion slated for airing on the station’s morning music show, Bentley's Morning Becomes Eclectic.]

-- Randall Roberts

Photo: A scene from "Tron: Legacy." Credit: Disney Enterprises

Do not be alarmed; the image at left boasts one very big and obvious falsity: French electronic music duo Daft Punk is not playing at this year’s HARD Haunted Mansion event, happening at the Shrine over Halloween weekend in downtown Los Angeles (although according to actress Olivia Wilde, the duo will make a cameo appearance in the movie “Tron Legacy,” for which they’re also crafting the soundtrack). 

Upon closer inspection, the flier also states that the event is happening at a location called “The Hudson.”

This ambitious forgery is just one of many rumors swirling around the Internet regarding the dance music event, including claims of a location change to San Bernardino and that the show is already sold out.

The popular HARD series of dance events garnered a whirlwind of notoriety after HARD Summer 2009 at the Forum was canceled as a result of raucous fans crashing the main floor area.

“HARD Haunted Mansion will take place Friday, October 30 and Saturday, October 31 at the Shrine as planned,” insists promoter Gary Richards via e-mail. “There are many rumors flying around that are false. All correct and up to date information and links to purchase tickets are available at www.hardfest.com.”

In the mid-‘90s, the already fertile house music underground was ignited by an emerging Chicago jock that called himself DJ Sneak. Sampling the best bits from classic disco tracks, DJ Sneak began releasing a long string of these disco-fied house hits, which set off a new trend of mining the bottomless catalog of long-lost dance tracks for the rave generation. It was a deceptively simple idea that only a few artists would be able to master. France’s Daft Punk was able to dominate (and market) the sound into a basis for stardom.

More than 10 years and an American dance underground revival later, and DJs Armand Van Helden (himself a '90s house pioneer familiar with old-school disco) and relative new jock A-Trak have teamed up to inject that euphoric '90s energy into today’s scene, and the results so far have been nothing less than spectacular.

Here's a potentially cool score for Oscar voters to likely bypass in the future. It became widespread news today that French electronic duo Daft Punk will be scoring Disney's "Tron" sequel, dubbed "Tron 2.0," or more annoyingly, "TR2N."

It's a rather perfect choice, in both aesthetic and sound, as Daft Punk specializes in retro-styled futurism. Even those not too familiar with Daft Punk's work may recognize the "Tron"-influenced look in some of the act's work -- check the pairing with Kanye West at last year's Grammy Awards for evidence.

It's certainly a bit more exciting to Pop & Hiss than the previous "Tron 2.0" news posted on Latimes.com. Over at the Hero Complex blog, Geoff Boucher wrote about some "Tron 2.0" casting, picking up on trade reports that "Turistas" vets Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett have been recruited for the film, which Hero Complex noted was eyeing a spring shoot.

Daft Punk aren't strangers to the film world, having directed their own "Electroma," but it featured none of their music. The Playlist, however, touts the score to "Irréversible," which features one half of Daft Punk in Thomas Bangalter, and we trust them.

-- Todd Martens

Photo: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times