Ryan Hemsworth interviewd Cliff Martinez for Thump. During the course of the interview, Cliff Martinez talks about working with Nicolas Winding Refn for The Neon Demon soundtrack. On working with Refn, he says:
Nicolas also sends me his script and he talks to me about the project before he even shoots it. Well, that was the case with Only God Forgives. Drive, I didn’t have any warning, we had five weeks to do it, so that was pretty fast. I knew from the spirit of Only God Forgives that in his case, the script isn’t adhered to very closely. I think I know what kind of music Nicolas likes, so I kind of stay in that territory.
After doing a couple of films with him you realize monogamy has its benefits. You understand what he’s looking for, the communication becomes better, and usually you go a little deeper each time. I think Neon Demon had some similarities to Drive, it’s kind of a sparse electronic score. Music writing has a juicy role in Neon Demon—well, I haven’t seen the finished film, but there’s over an hour of music. And there’s a lot of places where the music is really pushed out more into the spotlight, even more than Drive. I think I got a bigger part in the film, it’s flattering.
When asked if the film was a horror film, he said:
We describe the first half as a melodrama like Valley Of The Dolls, and the second half is like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It doesn’t seem to be a traditional horror film to me, but horror is the genre that it’s closest to.
When asked if he was trying to match the visual horror to the music, he said:
Yeah, there’s some horror stuff. He gave me a lot of the psychological parts of the film to do the music. The first half of the film was kind of romantic so there’s a lot of romantic music. But then there’s some cold-blooded horror stuff too and I think could be really creepy.
You can read the whole interview at the link above.