The Travis Scott song that saved Christopher Nolan’s bacon
Anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet—or, for that matter, pretty much any of Nolan’s other movies—will know quite how complicated the writer-director’s approach to filmmaking can be. Time is a strange, intense preoccupation for Nolan, and he plays around with it in ways that are often gripping, but can also be gruelingly difficult to follow, particularly during a first watch. But we, as viewers, shouldn’t feel too bad for struggling to keep on top of Nolan’s plots—it turns out that the man himself can get a little lost, too. And, sometimes, he needs a little help to find his way again. One such instance is connected to the world of hip-hop.
That seems to be what happened during the making of Tenet. As Nolan sought to put the finishing touches to the film, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t quite right about it. Something was missing, and it was only when an unlikely collaborator stepped forward that the issue was resolved: Travis Scott helped pull the movie together at the last.
How to explain what happens in Tenet for those who haven’t seen it? It is not a film easily condensed into a snappy paragraph, but that’s probably how Nolan intended it to be: a movie where time flows in both directions as the conventions of action cinema are temporally subverted. That may not make much sense, but it does rather neatly get across the frenetic weirdness of the film as it unfolds.
A movie quite as odd and unique as Tenet, naturally enough, needs a soundtrack to do the wild plot justice. That is no easy ask for a musician, but Travis Scott was unperturbed by the challenge, despite the fact he’d never previously contributed music to a film’s soundtrack before. He was brought on board, and, somehow, he managed to create a song as suitably weird as the film it accompanies.
It’s one thing for an audience to believe that the song fits the movie, and quite another for the filmmaker himself to think it. But not only did Nolan like the track, it actually, from his perspective, completed the movie. Writing an email to GQ in response to being asked about it, Nolan said of Scott’s song, “His voice became the final piece of a yearlong puzzle. His insights into the musical and narrative mechanism [composer] Ludwig Göransson and I were building were immediate, insightful, and profound.”
High praise indeed. But as the aforementioned composer Göransson implied to that same GQ writer, there was something almost inevitable about how well the collaboration would ultimately work out. As unlikely as it may appear on the surface, it seems that Scott and Nolan may actually be quite similar artists.
As Göransson concluded, “The way that [Scott] connects with art is not in a singular form. He has so many tentacles, and they’re all electric. So when we talk about feeling, [whether that’s] listening to a song or talking about a movie, he can visualize things in so many different fields. So it’s a very special ability. It’s like his own magic power.”