Varèse Sarabande Records will release Non-Stop Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, available digitally and on CD February 25, 2014, it was announced today. The film features an original score by John Ottman (Jack the Giant Slayer, The Usual Suspects) and arrives in theaters on February 28.
Global action star Liam Neeson stars in Non-Stop, a suspense thriller played out at 40,000 feet in the air. During a transatlantic flight from New York City to London, U.S. Air Marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) receives a series of cryptic text messages demanding that he instruct the airline to transfer $150 million into a numbered account. Until he secures the money, a passenger on his flight will be killed every 20 minutes. Non-Stop reunites Neeson with Unknown director Jaume Collet-Serra and producer Joel Silver, and co-stars Golden Globe Award winner Julianne Moore.
Ottman described scoring Non-Stop: "The obvious instruction was to keep the energy going throughout the film. This would be a challenge, being that the music always had to go somewhere further, constantly pushing or creating the tension in a simple and confined environment. The other feeling was that the score should reflect Bill Marks, played by Liam Neeson, as an imperfect character with a checkered and painful past... but who also is a 'tightly wound spool,' as producer Joel Silver put it."
The right-hand man—as both composer and editor—of Bryan Singer, John Ottman has scored such iconic modern films as The Usual Suspects, X2, Superman Returns and Valkyrie. Ottman has proven himself equal to the challenge of horror (Gothika, Orphan), comedy (The Cable Guy, Bubble Boy) action (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), thrillers (Unknown, The Resident), superhero films (Fantastic Four 1 & 2) and animation (Astro Boy). He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his score to the ABC series Fantasy Island. Ottman edited and scored Singer's large-scale fantasy film, Jack the Giant Slayer. Currently, Ottman is working on Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Ottman's childhood in San Jose, California, was marked by a love of both music and film. After graduating from the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Ottman connected with Bryan Singer and forged a fateful collaboration that saw Ottman enter the field of film scoring—resulting in the thriller classic The Usual Suspects. Singer says: "John astounds me with his seemingly endless ability to do anything. Not only does he constantly surprise me with his genius as a film editor, but he has invariably gone on to flabbergast all of us with his evocative and inspiring music."
"The biggest hurdle was the opening scene that introduces Bill sitting in his car and then walking to the terminal. We decided that establishing a bass propulsive sound underneath would provide another signature of the score and could therefore be part of the opening from the onset. This went though a few versions until finally I landed on a sort of modern and gritty treatment where the theme almost became a backdrop to the synthesizer and bass pastiche. Intellectually this made sense, as it's Bill in his most fragmented and unclear state," explained Ottman. "Aside from Bill's theme, there are brief motifs or sounds, namely for the unseen texting perpetrator. I wanted the texter immediately identified by a sound, so I introduced a sort of sonar pinging and woody rattling sound when the texts were initiated."
"The final balls-out iteration of Bill's theme (Non-Stop) is my favorite part of the score," described Ottman. "It's a sort of fusion of throw-back synth sounds, percussion, strings and brass. It's actually the end title music, but I thought it would be a fun way to start the album."