A new soundtrack at the multiplex

Trent Reznor won an Oscar for his work on David Fincher's Facebook movie The Social Network. Photo / Supplied

There was a time when the closest you'd come to hearing a dance act in the cinema was in a film such as Human Traffic. Clubbing films, briefly all the rage in the late 1990s, took advantage of the rise in popularity of techno, trance and drum and bass outfits - often with soundtracks supervised by the likes of Carl Cox and Pete Tong. Underworld went overground with Born Slippy thanks to Trainspotting, but had to be content to share the limelight with Pulp and Iggy Pop on the film's zeitgeist-defining musical roster.

But a decade on, electronica artists are no longer just fillers on a soundtrack - but the creative forces behind them. Recently, Daft Punk scored the music to Disney's sequel Tron: Legacy. Like the 1982 original, the film primarily takes place inside a digital universe, a minimalist wilderness perfectly designed for the Gallic duo's soundscapes.

Musicians that moonlight on movies are nothing new, of course. In the past year or so, we've seen Sigur RUs' keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson collaborate on Neil Jordan's Irish fairy tale Ondine and LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy contribute to the music for Noah Baumbach's comedy of middle-age malaise Greenberg.

Perhaps most potently, Trent Reznor - the creative force behind his industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails - won an Oscar for his work on David Fincher's Facebook movie The Social Network. While Reznor is no stranger to movies, not least working with Fincher on the opening title sequence of Se7en, it was an award as establishment-rocking as the time Eminem claimed Best Original Song for Lose Yourself for 8 Mile.

British directors are also embracing this new willingness to look further afield. The Chemical Brothers are behind the pulsating score for Joe Wright's Hanna, an enthralling jaunt around modern-day Europe starring Saoirse Ronan as a teenage assassin. Following that, Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, which follows a group of teens who take on a bunch of marauding aliens after they descend on a south London housing estate, sees its composer Steve Price ably assisted by Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe from the house music duo Basement Jaxx. Like Daft Punk, Cornish envisioned a sound harking back to 1970s Hollywood: "My pitch was always meets 'John Williams meets John Carpenter in Roots Manuva's flat in Kennington.' That's what I was going for."

Yet why is it only now that bands such as The Chemical Brothers and Basement Jaxx are getting involved in film scores? "I've got a theory about this," says Cornish. "Film scores have been hijacked by reality television. If you watch The Apprentice, or American Idol, you will hear the music from Requiem for a Dream. You'll hear loads of movie scores. So movie scores have been a bit debased because they've been hijacked by reality television, which wants their grandeur and emotional power. It seems to me that in order to sound fresh and not like they're an overexcited Simon Cowell production, movies have had to find a fresh sound."

He has a point. But Wright, now one of Britain's most respected directors following 2007's Atonement, believes it's more to do with the new generation of directors coming through. "We're all in the position now to be able to call the shots a little bit more and therefore express our musical tastes," he says.

What is interesting is that this influx of new musical styles is being welcomed by the old school, too. According to Reznor, Hans Zimmer - who was up against him at the Oscars for his own innovative score for Inception - was almost cheering his rival on. "He told me, 'In a lot of ways, I hope you win because it's helped open up the field a bit for texture of what film scores can be,"' Reznor explained to reporters straight after his Oscar win. With the Nine Inch Nails man now scoring Fincher's remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, it would seem like Zimmer has got his wish. For any film fan, it should be music to their ears.

- INDEPENDENT