• By
  • John Jurgensen
Focus Features
Scene from “Hanna.”

In the thriller “Hanna,” a doughy, tracksuit-wearing villain played by Tom Hollander pursues the young heroine (Saoirse Ronan) while whistling an upbeat tune. The melody, which sounds like something from a circus carousel or a parade of Walt Disney creatures, is at eerie odds with the character’s intent. The ditty was composed by those purveyors of “Block Rockin’ Beats,” the Chemical Brothers, whose score drives the film as much as the action sequences featuring Ronan’s young assassin.

Other stars of electronic music have been crossing over into Hollywood. Daft Punk did the “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor took home an Oscar (with Atticus Ross) for the score to “The Social Network.” But it’s not as if some trend-chasing movie producer recruited the Chemical Brothers; they were hired by an old friend, “Hanna” director Joe Wright (“Pride and Prejudice,” “Atonement”). We spoke to Tom Rowlands, one half of the the Chemical Brothers with Ed Simons, who says their movie music is a “separate entity” and isn’t likely to find its way into their live performances, which included a set last Friday at Coachella.

You wrote a bit of the music for “Hanna” before shooting even began. How did that work?

Joe [Wright} had sent a script over and given a very detailed explanation of the scene, in a strip club in Germany, and how he needed the music to choreograph that scene. Which was a good, because that whistling motif that we came up with was used in other parts of the movie. Joe had explained this fairytale, childlike scenario going on in this club. A stripper in a weird wonderland. And he wanted an innocent theme with this otherworldly undercurrent.

Did having that theme in place help unlock other aspects of the music for you?

We were going around the house whistling this annoying ditty. With the whole film there’s a childlike innocence, butted up against this terribly violent invasion of the synthetic world. Having that theme definitely made us feel that we were able to do this thing.

What was the most challenging part of it for you?

Just the idea of having this very specific thing to aim for in music. Normally, we’re just experimenting with sounds, trying to freak each other out. Here, we had to hit a very specific sound and idea for a scene. Usually we sit in the studio and the freedom of it is sometimes terrible, but to have a structure and to have the limitations of the project was actually quite liberating. Having a choice of everything can paralyze you.

I went into the film knowing that the music would play a big role, but I was still surprised at how prominent it actually was. At times it almost seemed like the chase scenes were built around your score, not the other way around.

The start of the film [which follows Hanna’s lethal training in a remote wilderness with her father, played by Eric Bana] is so sparse and there are only little bits of sound design. Joe was keen to blur the meeting between noises and music, which is something we do a lot in our music. So when the music does arrive it feels like it’s just coming on strong. He also wasn’t keen on having music play under dialogue. So when the music is there, it’s the driving thing. We went to see the film last night for the first time in a theater. I love the way it’s so quiet, then the whole cinema is rumbling.

While doing your own score were you able to correct things that you don’t like about movie music?

Joe set very clear ideas for us. He didn’t want his action thriller film to have the same [musical] language as all the others. He didn’t want to hear tremulous strings to signify there was a tense moment. He’d much rather hear a concoction made on broken old synthesizers to communicate that.

Some of the sequences play to your strengths, with heavy, beat-driven music. But were there other parts that pushed you into unfamiliar territory?

People have an idea of our music as the driving, beat-driven stuff you refer to. But our albums move around. At one minute you’ll be listening to apocalyptic, 3 a.m. acid meltdown music, then that will move into some beautiful pastoral melodic music. At least in our minds it does. l love the soft moments of “Hanna.” It was fun to be able to do that. The more driving, dynamic pieces were almost more difficult to do, because we had to really up the feeling. Joe kept asking for more, more. I think he was trying to recreate the experience of hearing us in some crazy club somewhere, to have that feeling of when you’re listening to the music at 120 decibels with 5,000 other people going nuts around you.

What did you learn about playing off of visual images? With a song, you have build up to an emotional peak. But when the images on the screen are driving the action, you don’t necessarily need the same kind of musical setup.

That was a different world, a different challenge. In a song, we’ll always be aiming at a point to get to as we go for this transcendent, engulfing feeling. But with this project, it was, “After eight seconds I need to have a slight element of doubt. Then four seconds later I need a sense of foreboding.” It was a very different way of working for us. We’d set the screen up in the studio and just play and adjust synthesizers and tweak them, performing live to the picture. We were playing to the screen rather than programming to the screen.

Did soundtracks have a big influence on the Chemical Brothers?

From being a record collector and crate digger and looking for interesting sounds, soundtracks are a hotbed. For anyone interested in sampling. I really like the soundtrack to “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” On a more classic level, there was the Goblin record for “Profondo Rosso” [a.k.a. “Deep Red,” by Italian horror director Dario Argento].

It was a medium for a lot of experimentation. Soundtracks were probably where many people first heard electronic music.

Yes, “A Clockwork Orange” and all that. A lot of what we like to do is to make electronic music feel organic and not too space age. We like electronics to feel kind of dirty and not pristine. As if the machines are grubby and sweaty. Electronics on the cusp of malfunction.

It must be difficult to be involved with an artistic project that you can’t control completely.

We had differing opinions about things. Joe was clear on what he wanted but he was also prepared to be surprised. If anything, it was quite nice to know that someone else was ultimately in charge. Usually in the studio, we’re writing it and engineering a lot of it and producing it and then performing it. Here, all the big decisions hung on someone else, which was a nice change.

Is it just a coincidence there’s a lot of electronic music being used in films, or is there something else at work?

Maybe it’s the directors who are fans of the music. It means something to them, and they’re of the same generation of the people making the music.