Elon Musk, the richest and arguably shittiest man on the planet, is the subject of Musk, a new epic-length documentary from Alex Gibney, a filmmaker who won an Oscar for 2005's Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and whose other works include Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief and The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley. Musk is 235 minutes long, and Gibney calls it a "definitive and unvarnished examination" of the man. Musk himself has already called it a "hit piece." I hope it is! The film will include a new David Byrne song that's apparently made up of nothing but Elon Musk quotations.
Variety reports that David Byrne teamed up with Daniel Pemberton, the composer whose credits include Project Hail Mary and the Spider-Verse movies, to write a new song called "Let Me Sell You A Dream." Byrne apparently performs the song in the movie, and he says, "I asked for good quotes from the Martian and found more of them online. I’m sure he loves dropping these wild statements, and those became the lyrics. All his own words. No editorializing. Straight from the man’s mouth to mine."
Gibney tells Variety:
I was thrilled when David agreed to write (with our composer Daniel Pemberton) and perform the final song in the film. I am a huge fan of his. My wife and I were at the Pantages for the filming of Stop Making Sense, so I sensed that he would find a musical way into what the film is trying to say. And he did. "Let Me Sell You a Dream" is kick-ass. And, in writing the lyrics, David dug deep into the sayings of Musk himself to get to "extremely hard core," foot-tapping sardonic poetry.
The Variety report seems focused on whether the song could figure into the Oscar race. Along with his collaborators Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su, Byrne already won the award for Best Original Score for 1987's The Last Emperor. He also got a Best Original Song nomination for teaming up with Mitski and Son Lux to write "This Is A Life," from 2022's Everything Everywhere All At Once. But if Byrne won the Oscar for "Let Me Sell You A Dream," would he have to share the award with Elon Musk?
Musk opens in theaters 10/16. In other David Byrne movie news, Brady Corbet, Oscar-nominated director of The Brutalist, has shot a 70mm concert film of Byrne's recent live shows, filmed over multiple nights at the Hippodrome in Byrne's Baltimore hometown. It's in post-production now. Given that Jonathan Demme and Spike Lee have already built great concert films around Byrne, Corbet is in good company.
