How ‘Natural Born Killers’ Kicked Off Trent Renzor’s Other Career
Thirty summers ago, Trent Renzor was reaching new levels of fame after Nine Inch Nails’ legendary mud-covered set at Woodstock ‘94. But that summer also saw his first major foray into music for movies, something that would take his career to some surprising places, including the stages of the Oscars and the Emmys.
Just as Nine Inch Nails’ classic The Downward Spiral dominated MTV and the radio, another Reznor project was hitting record stores. In 1994, Reznor put together a soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s over-the-top and subtle-as-a-sledgehammer film Natural Born Killers, but it wasn’t a soundtrack in the usual sense. Surely Warner Brothers films would have loved something akin to The Crow soundtrack, released earlier that year. That album spotlighted some of the cooler and edgier metal and alternative bands of the day, including the Cure, Rage Against The Machine, Violent Femmes, the Rollins Band, Helmet, Stone Temple Pilots and Pantera, along with Nine Inch Nails (who covered Joy Division’s “Dead Souls”).
But Reznor was way more ambitious with this project; you’d be hard-pressed to name a less-commercial soundtrack. The film was very much a product of its time and quite polarizing: the script, originally written by Quentin Tarantino, was seriously altered by Stone. Tarantino even said on the record, “I hate that f—ing movie; if you like my stuff, don’t watch that movie.”
The soundtrack, on the other hand, was quite ahead of his time. Way before downloading and streaming services started breaking down walls between genres, Natural Born Killers veered from Leonard Cohen to L7 to Dr. Dre to Patsy Cline. Nine Inch Nails included a new song, “Burn” as well as some previously released tracks. And years before “mashups” had their pop culture moment, Reznor created new tracks with pre-existing songs, like “Sex Is Violent,” which combined Jane’s Addiction’s “Ted… Just Admit It” with Diamanda Galas’ cover of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You.”
The mid-’90s was a wild time: alternative rock was at the center of pop culture and Trent Reznor was a major tastemaker–an “influencer,” if you will (although he’d cringe at that description). If he indicated that something was cool, then it was cool. Natural Born Killers, released on Reznor’s Interscope imprint, Nothing Records, was certified Gold by the RIAA, and hit number 19 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. It even catapulted the Cowboy Junkies’ 1988 cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” onto commercial radio for a while.
From there, Reznor worked with David Lynch on the soundtrack to 1996’s Lost Highway. That felt more like what you’d expect from Reznor, with tracks from David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Lou Reed, plus new songs from Nine Inch Nails (“The Perfect Drug”) and Smashing Pumpkins (“Eye”). The legendary Angelo Badalamenti scored the film, but Reznor also contributed two pieces of music under his own name, notably “Driver Down.”
Around that time, he started working on music for video games, including Quake and later Call Of Duty: Black Ops II. But his film career really took off when he and his collaborator Atticus Ross scored David Fincher’s 2010 feature, The Social Network, telling the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. That marked Reznor and Ross’ first Oscar for Best Score; they also won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score. They then did Fincher’s 2011 adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (including producing a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” sung by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs).
In 2016, Ross joined Reznor in Nine Inch Nails, as the pair kept working on scores, including that year’s climate change documentary Before The Flood, and the drama based on the Boston Marathon bombing, Patriot’s Day. Since then, they’ve scored the Ken Burns 2017 TV documentary The Vietnam War, the 2018 Sandra Bullock film Bird Box, and the Jonah Hill-directed Mid90s also from 2018.
2019 saw them win their first Emmy for their score to HBO’s Watchmen, and they later won another Oscar for 2020’s Pixar film Soul, which they shared with Jon Batiste. That served us one of the more subtly surprising Oscar moments, when the cameras panned to the audience showing the three men embracing as Reznor was beaming with a huge smile.
Next year, Reznor and Ross will score a film as Nine Inch Nails as they take on the third installment of the Tron franchise, replacing the now-defunct Daft Punk who scored 2010’s Tron: Legacy. And while all of Reznor’s film projects have been interesting, Natural Born Killers is still the one that holds up best on its own.
