The Waves Soundtrack Decoded by Director Trey Edward Shults, Song by Song

Kanye West’s Life of Pablo

Shults: One, we thought that, because of the time that Pablo came out, it would have been a big in Tyler’s world with his friends. That would have been a big album for them. That’s why that’s the poster in his room. We actually don’t have any tracks in the final movie from Life of Pablo. We only have the poster. In the script, however, there are probably still tracks from Pablo. 

There’s another thing about Pablo that I love, to me it plays like a man at war with himself a bit, because you go from “Ultralight Beam” being this beautiful gospel hip-hop to crass stuff that’s in his next album Yeezus, and that dichotomy and that back and forth is really powerful to me. To me, it’s like the bipolar-ness of Kanye’s head, and it’s also like our movie. Our movie works in dichotomies, in good and bad, in highs and lows, in love and hate, and everything in between. There’s this sort of messy dichotomy. I thought if there were a Kanye album that would share the spirit of our movie it would be Pablo, a bit.

In the script there was Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1 and Pt. 2, which I love. We had this really beautiful sequence that was meant to feel like the young crazy love that I’ve had in my life, where one minute you’re fighting and the next minute you’re having sex. It was about that instant back and forth, but that’s not in the opening any more. We used to have it. It was just one of all these things you have to cut to save time, which hurt my heart. But even then, there was some really fun stuff that was different from the script. It evolved with the collaboration with Kelvin and Alexa [Demie], but we had to cut it out purely for time.

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