Cliff Martinez

In the mid 1980's, Martinez' interests shifted and he began to focus his attention toward film scoring. A tape Martinez had put together using new technologies made its rounds, leading him to score an episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. The same recording also ended up in Steven Soderbergh's hands and Martinez was hired to score the famed director's first theatrical release, 1989's Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Martinez's longstanding relationship with Soderbergh has continued through the years and they have worked together on ten theatrical releases including Kafka (1991), The Limey (1999), Traffic (2000), Solaris (2002) and 2011's Contagion, as well the Cinemax series The Knick (2014–2015). His nontraditional scores tend towards being stark and sparse, utilizing a modern tonal palette to paint the backdrop for films that are often dark, psychological stories like Pump Up the Volume (1990), The Limey, Wonderland (2003), Wicker Park (2004) and Drive (2011). Martinez has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media (Steven Soderbergh's Traffic), a César Award for Best Original Music (Xavier Giannoli's In the Beginning (2009)), and a Broadcast Film Critics Award (Drive). He earned a Robert Award for Best Score for his work on Only God Forgives (2013). Martinez's use of audio manipulations, particularly for percussive sounds, has been evolving through the years and is evident by the hammered dulcimer of Kafka, the gray-areas between sound design and score for Traffic, the steel drums and textures of Solaris, what Martinez called "rhythmi-tizing pitched, ambient textures" of Narc (2002), and "using percussion performances to trigger and shape the rhythmic and tonal characteristics of those ambient textures," as he described his score for 2011's The Lincoln Lawyer. Martinez served as a juror for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and served on the International Feature nominating committee for the 27th Independent Spirit Awards in February that same year. Martinez's recent films include Robert Redford's The Company You Keep (2012), Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage (2012), Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2012) (co-composed with Skrillex), and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon (2016).