Montreal orchestral rockers the Arcade Fire must feel blessed. They’ve won the approval of the entire music world, luminaries like U2 and Bruce Springsteen, and now even the film world has seemingly glommed on to them as well (see Richard Kelly and the score to “The Box“).
When Spike Jonze asked the band to re-record their song, “Wake Up,” from their 2004 album, Funeral, for the trailer for “Where The Wild Things Are,” many assumed that their music would be featured in the film. We’ve seen it, it’s not (as reports indicated earlier this year), but that doesn’t mean Jonze wasn’t thinking of them almost every step of the way. In fact, they were an integral part of the writing process the filmmaker told AICN.
The initial trailer… that Arcade Fire song [“Wake Up”] was something I’d used along the way in cutting stuff. Before we shot the movie, I cut together this mood piece; I used footage from E.T., RATCATCHER and THE BLACK STALLION, and cut together this mood piece to the song. I showed it to the crew to give them a sense of the tone and the feeling of the film before we shot. It was a way to get everyone to the same place. I wrote the whole script to Arcade Fire’s FUNERAL, and I listened to that song a lot. That record is thematically very connected to the film. So it seems so perfect that we got to put that in the trailer.
Yeah, we’re a bit over the Arcade Fire. Neon Bible underwhelmed. But dunno, if some pretty well-celebrated filmmaker told you he wrote his new (great) movie to your album, you’d probably be pretty fucking psyched too. So music or no music in the film (though the early test screenings were filled with their music apparently), the Arcade Fire will always have that feather in their cap. Good on ’em.