Composer Cliff Martinez has been presented with the International Film Music Critics Association Award for Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Score in 2011, for his score for Drive, by IFMCA member Brian Satterwhite.
Drive represents Martinez’s first IFMCA nomination and first win. The other nominees in the action/adventure/thriller category were Captain America: The First Avenger by Alan Silvestri, Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol by Michael Giacchino, Real Steel by Danny Elfman, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes by Patrick Doyle
Drive is a modern-day crime thriller directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, and Albert Brooks. Gosling plays the unnamed Driver, a stunt driver for the movies who moonlights as a getaway driver for some of Los Angeles’s less salubrious inhabitants, and who finds himself neck-deep in a war between different factions of organized crime, while trying to reconcile himself with his blossoming relationship with his pretty next-door neighbor and her young son
Martinez’s ambient, ethereal electro-pop score was intended to have a retro 1980s vibe, and was performed by Martinez on vintage keyboards to give it an authentically period-specific sound. The score was one of the best-reviewed scores of the year amongst mainstream film critics, earning the composer awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics and the Chicago Film Critics Association, as well as Critics Choice and Golden Satellite Award nominations.
New York-born Martinez began his career as a drummer for rock bands such as Captain Beefheart and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before making his film music debut in 1989 on director Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape. Since then Martinez has composed music for eight further Soderbergh films, including Kafka (1991), King of the Hill (1993), Underneath (1995), Gray’s Anatomy (1996), The Limey (1999), Traffic (2000), Solaris (2002) and Contagion (2011). His other theatrical credits include such critical and commercial successes as Pump Up the Volume (1990), Wicker Park (2004) and The Lincoln Lawyer (2011).
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