Prior to his breakout success composing the score for Darren Aronofsky’s groundbreaking Sundance Film Festival winning directorial debut, Pi, Clint Mansell was best known in his native England as the front-man for his band Pop Will Eat Itself. And although he earned some cult status following the success of Aronofsky’s independent sensation, it wasn’t until he composed not just the score but the masterful track “Lux Aeterna” for Aronofsky’s follow-up Requiem for a Dream that he’d completed the work which would become synonymous with his name.
Arguably one of the most gifted and inventive composers working in the cinematic medium today with “Lux Aeterna” being used in countless trailers, as the official theme for several sporting events and more, nonetheless despite critical acclaim and awards, Mansell stayed true to his indie roots. While he’s earned enough fans that Wikipedia reported Lakeshore Records was forced to issue a second edition of the Smokin’ Aces soundtrack after the filmmaker, Joe Carnahan received “blatant threats” due to Mansell’s 
relative absence from the original disc release, Mansell still remains one of the industry’s best kept secrets.
Having contributed compositions for such films as Barbet Schroder’s Murder By Numbers (which launched Ryan Gosling), Nicolas Cage’s directorial debut Sonny (starring a then-unknown James Franco), twice collaborating with indie filmmaker Bart Freundlich for Trust the Man and World Traveler, it wasn’t until he reunited with Aronofsky that he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his score to the otherwise largely critically panned film, The Fountain.
However, most recently, he was offered the chance to move into considerably lighter genre territory with the prospect of composing the score for writer/director Adam Brooks’ clever 2008 romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe. To summarize my original review, the film surrounds Will Hayes, a thirty-something father (Ryan Reynolds) who is coerced into revealing the saga of his romantic life to his precocious ten year old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin). Intriguingly opting to avoid the traditional tale of his courtship with Maya’s mother, Will crafts an impromptu love story mystery that features his associations with the three 
women with whom he had any serious attachment: Emily (played by Invincible’s Elizabeth Banks), Summer (Rachel Weisz; incidentally Aronofsky’s fiancé), and April (Wedding Crashers star Isla Fisher). Thus, in the end, Will leaves it up to Maya to decipher which one is her mother since the names and some facts have been changed. Ultimately, like 2007’s Peter Hedges’ romantic comedy-drama Dan in Real Life, Brooks’ Definitely, Maybe turned out to be one of the most sophisticated and intelligent offerings for adults in the otherwise predictable genre overly reliant on gross-out gags and clichéd stereotypes.
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