Many of Buck 65's songs - a great mix of rhymes and Tom Waits-style junk yard sounds - are so full of images, they're like three-minute movies. So it's no wonder that music-loving film director Doug Pray, who made the fantastic films Scratch (about DJ culture) and Hype! (about the Seattle music scene), called on the Haligonian hip-hopper to score his latest film.

Big Rig, one of the features to premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival (March 9-17), is a documentary about the lives of long-haul truckers - shot over the course of several two-week tours that covered 48 states. According to the production company, the film will explore "a profession that faces difficult government regulations, low pay, skyrocketing gas prices and freeways jammed with unsympathetic ‘four wheelers.'" Along the way, it looks at the allure of the road and where the world - as well as most of its goods - are headed.

Buck 65 was already a huge fan of the director's work when Pray called him up out of the blue. "I owned his DVDs and all that kind of stuff, so obviously I didn't hesitate when he put the offer in front of me," he said in a CBC Radio 3 interview. "But really, this one just completely fell out of the sky for me."

The process of scoring the film was very collaborative, says Buck, with Pray even including him in editing decisions as he pieced together the footage - which includes stunning scenery from across the United States.

"[Pray] has this uncanny knack for piecing together music and images, and making that marriage work in a way that verges on serendipity," he said. "He'll pick up on some tiny detail in the music and match it with some tiny detail in the images. To notice things in my own music that I never noticed before, even when I was making it myself, is quite a strange and wonderful feeling.

"I've never really witnessed something come together and come to life quite in that way, and it's also been a great learning process," said Buck, who is also performing at the SXSW Music Festival. "So it's just a real thrill."

In addition to work that Buck composed especially for the film, Pray also used one of our Buck 65 faves, "Blood of a Young Wolf", in the film.  Here it is for the road: