Charlie Clouser on Saw, and Breaking John Williams’ Record

Charlie Clouser knows that the Saw movies aren’t for everybody. “It has its dedicated little weirdo fanbase that is rabid about it, but it’s very much a niche within a niche, and it’s become even more so as the franchise evolved.”

It’s an evolution he’s gotten to observe intimately, as the composer who’s worked on every film since the original Saw, released 19 years ago this October. And with Saw X, Clouser breaks a big record, as he’s now the first American to score 10 films within the same franchise — beating John Williams’ iconic run on nine Star Wars films. “Obviously, I certainly wouldn’t put myself on John Williams’s level in any department other than the sheer number of sequels within a single franchise,” he says. “But I think I’ve always kept a running tally — each time a new Star Wars film would come out, I would think, ‘Okay, let’s see, am I catching up to him yet?’”

If you’ve ever heard Clouser’s industrial compositions for the Saw films, then it won’t come as a surprise that he was a part of the band Nine Inch Nails from 1994 to 2001. However, Clouser actually began his career as a composer prior to getting involved with the band — his first job making music for money was working on the 1980s series The Equalizer.

“Stuart Copeland, the drummer from The Police, had scored the first few seasons and done the theme, and then he left to do whatever, and another composer was brought in, an Australian record producer,” Clouser says. “I was working with him doing the sound design and all the rhythm programming. Not the thematic composition, but all the high tech studio wizard type stuff around the central themes.”

He exited that gig, he says, for “a 15-year detour into making records.” Then, in 2001, he left NIN to focus on composition. “I already had some experience and knowledge of, you know, how the sausage gets made — I had been under the gun on a weekly TV series deadline,” he says. “So from a compositional standpoint, at least I wasn’t strictly a refugee from bands. I wasn’t trying to figure out how to do reverse chorus guitar solo kinds of arrangements.”

It also helped that Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor “was a little bit unconventional” — specifically in regard to how Reznor arranged and organized pieces of music. “It wasn’t the standard verse, chorus, guitar, solo, chorus, kind of rock songwriting,” he says. “And of course Nine Inch Nails is also very heavily dependent on musical sound design, and unusual sounds used in a musical context.”