Bella asked Isaac Marion:

Hey! I was wondering if you get inspired by music when you're writing? Did you find the movie stuck pretty well to the soundtrack you had in your head for Warm Bodies?

Isaac Marion It can be hard to switch gears abruptly from real life to fiction. It's hard to leave a fun breakfast with friends and sit down with a big smile on my face and write a tragic death scene. I use music to trigger and sustain a mood. I have a collection of songs that I use like a painter's palette; I pick a song that fits the tone of the scene I'm working on and play it on loop until the mood shifts. Although anything with vocals will scramble my linguistic center so it all has to be instrumental. It's a desperate hunt sometimes, trying to keep my palette well stocked, because the "paints" dry up after a while--I get sick of them--and I have to find replacements.

As for the movie, I think they did a great job with the soundtrack. I wouldn't say it "matches" what I had in my head--I had a vintage vibe in the book, Sinatra and such, and they went with a cross-era eclecticism in the movie--but I think it worked really well. It evoked the right emotions at the right times and added a quirky unpredictability to a genre built on cliches and expectations. The highlights for me were the Yamaha Spirit song, which seals the deal on one of the film's best scenes, and The National's "Runaway" which they used as a score for the whole ending sequence and which perfectly captures that melancholy hopefulness. The National was already one of my favorite bands at the time and I used a lot of their music as inspiration while developing the sequels. Whenever I hear them I imagine it's R singing.

I also have to give huge props to Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders for the score. When they heard they were doing a zombie movie they probably thought "loud brass and scary noises" so I was so pleased they were able to abandon expectations and give the emotional scenes sincere depth and beauty. The music when R has his first "dream" has a sense of profundity and wonder that took real boldness to put in a zombie flick.

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