Requiem For A Theme: Film Composer Clint Mansell On The Sound Of Sadness

The 2000 film Requiem for a Dream celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall, and in that time there's at least one part of its legacy that's never faded: the music. The movie's haunted original score spawned a kind of breakout hit that would ripple through media for years to come, while also kickstarting a new career for its British-born composer, Clint Mansell.

Mansell churned out a whole batch of disparate musical ideas after reading the script for the film, which director Darren Aronofsky co-adapted with Hubert Selby Jr. from the 1978 novel of the same name, about four characters succumbing to addiction. The sketch that became the score's central theme, Mansell remembers, was track 17 out of 20 on a demo CD he'd made, and sounded like kind of a hip-hop slow jam: "It even had sort of an 808 beat under it," he says. It didn't yet have the stabbing melody line that would become its hallmark;