Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on Working With Omar Apollo and Caetano Veloso for Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’

And there was a few more weeks of getting it recorded remotely, and then you know the result. Luca was thrilled. The idea was Luca’s. He felt [Caetano’s] voice was perfect for the song, and he felt what Caetano means was perfect for the film.

Atticus Ross: When Luca sent through the last page of the journal—a rumination on love, which interestingly would be the last thing that Burroughs wrote—I was like, “I’ve got no idea how somebody could make a song from this at all.” And then to hear what Trent did was pretty remarkable, I think, in terms of how well that lands not just as a song, but how well that lands the emotion of that last bit of the film and leave the cinema with.

“Te Maldigo,” the Omar song that recently came out—was that the song that was supposed to be in the film?

Reznor: Yeah, the video of that is is what they filmed that would have been in the film, before [Daniel Craig’s character] Lee meets him and picks him up in the bar.

Ross: So he’s singing a torch song in the bar that Lee takes him home from.

Were you familiar with Omar’s work prior to him being in the film?

Reznor: Yeah, when Luca mentioned, “I’m going to have Omar Apollo,” [I thought,] great. He just lives across the town and he came in here. He was a joy to work with. We had a really fun day in the studio with him. Yeah.

You guys aren’t strangers to unexpected collaborators—I love that Halsey album, you have that song with Lil Nas X. But I thought it was so interesting that you guys worked with Omar. He has, in his own work, such a soft touch. I was so curious what that tension would bring out of the song. What was your impression of him as a singer-songwriter?

Reznor: Yeah, and we had the framework of a track together, and it was in English.

I was familiar with his work, but I hadn’t sat in a room with him, and so we kind of prepped up a demo of, “Hey, here’s what this would sound like,” with a singer that sounds like him and a key that would work just to make it, “Hey, this could be easy to step into this role.” But then he came in and it transformed into him, and he embellished and contributed and wrote and reconfigured some things.