Cliff Martinez | Interview | On Demand

From a cock-sock-wearing drummer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the mid-’80s to an A-list film composer, Cliff Martinez has made quite a career shift. The frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator scored four films last year, most notably Soderbergh’s epidemic thriller Contagion and Nicolas Winding Refn’s lean, stylish Drive. Martinez’s Eno-esque ambient swells and arpeggiated Tangerine Dream ticks complement Drive’s shifts from lovesickness to violence while bridging the soundtrack’s ’80s synth-pop throwback tunes by the likes of Chromatics and Desire. The 57-year-old was enjoying some deserved rest at his California home-studio when he called to chat in advance of Drive’s release on DVD and on demand.

Besides kicking your feet up, how do you recharge your creative batteries?
Detaching from music altogether. I usually have to make all new friends because my social life atrophies. Composing demands a degree of isolation.

Did the solitary nature of composing make it easier to get into the mind-set of Ryan Gosling’s loner character, Driver?
When I saw him crush somebody’s skull with his foot, I really didn’t see much of a connection. [Laughs] But I certainly tried to put myself in Driver’s seat, so to speak, get into his head. I have a roommate—but no kids, no family, no distractions. And I live in Topanga, a city in the greater Los Angeles area. It’s all canyons and mountains, but really I’m only about five minutes from the 101 freeway. So the isolation is just an illusion, but it’s conducive to writing music.

Refn never learned to drive, but you do?
Yeah. I work at home but average 15,000 to 18,000 miles per year on my Honda.

What’s the soundtrack when you’re behind the wheel?
Audiobooks: Raymond Chandler and The South Beach Diet. [Laughs] I’m too much of a fussbudget to listen to music being drowned out by an engine. I know so few people who actually give music their undivided attention, so I’ve been trying to just park myself on the couch between the speakers and listen.

What’s been in rotation?
This morning it was Wilmoth Houdini. He’s a calypso artist from the ’30s, but he sounds like a rapper: “Girls, shake that thang!” I don’t listen to anything trendy or hip.

When it comes to the music business, you’ve said film composers are “the last of a dying breed that still receive a paycheck.” Are you happy you got out of the pop-music gambit?
Pop music is a fashion, and fashions come and go. The public retires you as their tastes change. Meanwhile, I saw composers like John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and Elmer Bernstein, who had been in the business for decades, were still considered A-list.

Does the punk-rock ethos still influence you?
Definitely. I often experiment on instruments that I don’t know how to play. My best stuff usually starts as an accident. As George Clinton would say, “That’s the funk.” Anyway, I have to be in Beverly Hills at 1 o’clock, which is an hour drive. Time to listen to some Raymond Chandler.

Drive arrives on VOD, DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday 31.