"Fincher initially approached me late fall, last year and I was excited about taking on a project, but I had just stepped off the tour bus, after touring for what seemed like five years of on and off.

I had just got married, and I promised myself I was going to take some time off, and just allow myself to get centred before I dive into another consuming project, which is kind of how I tend to work.

So I got the call from him, and I was excited because I'd always been interested in getting into scoring something, and there'd be no better place to start than with David, who I very much admire and am a fan of his work. So I got the script and the script was excellent and I thought it was an interesting choice because it wasn't what seemed like familiar territory for me.

If it was going to be Halloween for example, I think I'd know what to do in that, but here's a very wordy drama that deals with a lot of greed and entitlement, betrayal. I went, I'm interested in it, but the bottom line was I had to tell him no at that time.

If I'm being honest with myself I was really lacking any confidence and I had to to kind of keep my promise to myself to not just say yes to every exciting thing that comes up.

A few months went by, during which he shot the film and I felt terrible about saying no to him, and I got back in touch just to say: 'I'm in. Once again, I'm sorry, it's not you, it's me. I wasn't in a place where I could give you 110% because I was just burnt out. It's not the material, I'm sorry.' And he said, 'Well, we're still waiting on you to do it; get over here and let's start.'

So at that point the film was shot and he showed me maybe the first 40 minutes of the film in a very rough cut. Now I was familiar with the script and now had a sense of what it looks like and I could see the pace of the dialogue and also how well the actors had made these roles come to life.

We decided not to use an orchestra. David knew what he was looking for; he referenced Tangerine Dream and some synth, iconic type scores.

But the way I ended up arranging it was, in a lot of ways, voiced as if it were orchestral. I can think of several different parts where everything was being treated as separate instruments.

When we delivered the music to the mixing stage we delivered it in a format where it was broken down to individual components enough that everything could be placed around in a 7.1 field, to sit around dialogue.

A lot of mixing actually took pace right in the final mix of the film, so it became probably a bit lengthier. It worked out that the music really sits in there in a nice way that's not overbearing, but present."