Prisoners (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the soundtrack album to the 2013 film Prisoners directed by Denis Villeneuve and featured a musical score composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson. The album was released through WaterTower Music and ASG Records on September 16, 2013.
Contents
Development
In April 2013, a contributor from Film Music Reporter announced that Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson would compose music for Prisoners. Villeneuve contacted Jóhannsson via his agent after he listened to some of his scores and offered the film before it began production. He then wrote a couple of pieces much earlier that was used in the final edit, so that there was almost no temp music used. Jóhannsson settled on three themes—"The Keeper", "I Can't Find Them" and "Through Falling Snow"—which served as the basis of the score. He visited the sets of the film in Atlanta, to have a clear idea of the film's atmosphere and get the sense of the locations. He eventually listened to most of the church music, old Icelandic hymns and Renaissance-sacred music and integrated them into the themes. Calling "The Lord’s Prayer" as the difficult piece, despite being the simple theme, he recalled that he went to a small island with about 20 inhabitants in the North Iceland to isolate himself and rewrote the theme 15 times, until the final version was zeroed on.