Pitchfork: I
read
an article where you said you wrote all the Symmetry music for
Drive and it didn't end up getting used. What's the story there?
Johnny Jewel: It's a slight misquote. That interview was done before I really started narrowing down the tracks for Symmetry. The end result has very little of the material that was for
Drive. Before they started shooting it, they came to a show in L.A. and verbally hired me to write the score. They wanted all of it to feel like [Chromatics']
Night Drive.
We got the same temporary cues from [
Drive director] Nic [Winding Refn] as [
Drive composer] Cliff [Martinez] did: Brian Eno, Angelo Badalamenti, a little bit of Atticus Ross. So the stuff I did for
Drive was very similar to the stuff that's actually in
Drive because we had the same cues. There's like four tracks on the Symmetry record that were specifically written for
Drive, but I reworked them. I don't think I'm ever going to release the stuff I did for
Drive because it seems disrespectful to the movie.
Pitchfork: Was that a disillusioning experience?
JJ: It was more confusing, but it was really awesome working on such a difficult project. It was the first time I really had a reason to start trying to finalize these abstract ideas. I mean, all the Hollywood clichés are true. But it was also Nic's first time doing a Hollywood movie, and him and Ryan [Gosling] were struggling for creative control.
The producers were concerned about whether I was able to compose, because they were just familiar with my pop music. But Nic and Ryan and Mat Newman, the editor, had a wider knowledge of my background than someone who just searched "most popular Glass Candy tracks." I think they thought I was just a little 20-year-old hipster dude. It was a case where two composers were hired but only one was contractually bound.