Name: How Hans Zimmer Created the Score for 'Dune: Part Two' | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2024-03-10T01:48:38.000Z
Duration: 15 min 3 s
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Home Depot is where they have pipes, they have things that we use, we can extend the length of a flute.

Home Depot is our secret instrument building site.

Hello, I'm Hans Zimmer, and today we'll be breaking down how we created the score for "Dune: Part Two."

I remember finishing Part One and saying to Denis, "Hang on, we're only on page 156 of roughly 600 pages."

And I just carried on, I carried on writing, and there came a phone call from Denis going,

"Listen, the movie has been out for six months. You can stop writing now."

And I was going, "No, no, no, I really think we're going to get to make part two," because we weren't green lit at that point in time.

And then I wrote a theme, which I really loved, and there's a voice in the first movie,

which is very much the sort of the centerpiece that holds everything together, sung by a woman called Loire Cotler, who's just a phenomenal artist.

A friend of mine saw her on YouTube and went, "This is an extraordinary voice."

She knows the limits of what her voice can do, and she is right at the limit of where she will never ever be able to sing again.

So she dares, she dares to go to that place.

The score for "Dune: Part One," and "Dune: Part Two" is very much the same players, and it's very much the players that are in my band when I play live.

I think what differentiates the score from many, many other scores is it's not an orchestral score,

it's a score played entirely by virtuoso musicians.

You throw a challenge out, they just eat it up like lions, you know?

It's like, "Go crazy. Do something we have never done before." That's the general motto.

Well, let's stick with Guthrie Govan who I've heard play.

I saw him on Facebook, I saw him on YouTube.

I get a reply going, "I know you're just a 14-year-old fan boy. I know you're not Hans Zimmer at all."

So I had to then, blah blah blah, so it went back and forth to prove that I actually was who I was.

Tina Guo, my cellist, I met through a friend of mine.

I was very stuck when I was writing "Wonder Woman."

I didn't know how to write "Wonder Woman."

I did not know how to write that character.

And then I remembered Tina, 'cause Tina is very proper, very gentle, and then she takes her cello, and she turns into a banshee.

But since I know the virtuosos, the people that I'm going to be working with, I very much write with them in mind.

There was a whole very interesting group of French musicians slash scientists who came in, who'd spent 10 years inventing a keyboard that could do all sorts of, you know,

without going into the technicalities, basically, if you do this, all that happens is it's a switch that goes on and off, right?

But they had managed to make a keyboard where you could express pretty much any emotion that you could express on a violin or any of those other instruments that we keyboard players are always so incredibly envious of,

And at the same time, they had speaker systems, which they, it really came from the beginning of the 20th century.

A speaker would be made out of wood and very organic materials.

So all over our studio, there were these sculptures.

And a lot of the instruments we were using ourselves were were made by a sculptor.

There's a man called Chas Smith who lives in Northern California.

He's a pedaled steel guitarist, but he's a welder as well.

And he doesn't just weld bridges and buildings, but what he's really interested in is making strange musical instruments.

And he seems to have some unholy alliance, which I've never quite figured out with the Boeing Corporation who give him scrap metal and things.

And he explains the metal to me, and it has names that I've never heard of and can't repeat.

And part of his whole ethos is that everything has to be made out of scrap.

And so these things which you can bow or play or rub or kick or hit with hammers, or it can be the most gentle sounds, it's truly the sound of the monster under the earth, very Dune-like.

The movie tells you what it wants and what it rejects.

And one of the things great musicians do, it's not how well they play, it's how well they listen, how well they listen to each other.

I usually spend a lot of time looking at color charts or sitting with the DP or just looking at the way things are graded from the previous movie or where we're going now, what the costumes are.

Chris Nolan and Denis, we have this process whereby I don't really read the script.

I ask them to tell me the story, because then I know what's in their head.

And then straight away it's off to the designs and the DP and what's the color spectrum going to be like, because I have this sort of, and it's hard to describe.

Look, all I can tell you is there's a few frames in "The Lion King," the original "Lion King," and I only had a black and white drawing,

and the colors and what the music is doing is completely wrong and it clashes and nobody seems to understand that other than me.

But for me it's fingers down a chalkboard.

So yes, I'm insane, you know, I admit it.

Let's have a quick look at this sequence here, which is "The Quiet Between The Storms."

And I see here it's still labeled as "Hans Zimmer Love Theme," which might give you a hint.

I was trying to create the sound of sand and just atmospheres, nothing, you know, just this stillness, this wind going across the desert.

And the tune really comes from the original bagpipe tune, which used to be fast.

And then at one point, Loire and I sat down and said, "What happens if we perform this tune very slowly," and then of course somehow in the way we work,

it's like somehow it ended up with Pedro saying it would be good on the duduk, but of course it cannot be played on an ancient instrument because it doesn't have all the notes.

So we went to Home Depot and had to modify his instrument.

So Home Depot has been very important in creating the score for "Dune."

So if I just play you this by itself, you'll hear the beauty of.

And the thing about Pedro is there's a heart, there's a soul, there's a loneliness, there's a longing in his performance, which is so extraordinary.

I mean, I put the barest minimum of things around him.

It's just this little high note above him.

And to me, it felt like the endless gaze across this planet.

So when Paul and Chani are sitting there talking to each other.

And the way they mixed it, the way Denis mixed it as well in the film is it's like the whole atmosphere shifts and it just becomes this incredibly intimate moment between these two characters.

And it's just how he placed those first notes here.

I mean, there's real poetry and you just hear Tina very slightly behind on her electric cello.

I've done a lot of movies and I love doing movies and I love writing music, and you know why?

'Cause I still haven't written a thing that I think is really the most beautiful love theme.

I'm still searching, I'm still investigating,

I'm still exploring, I'm still experimenting.

The advantage I have is that I have a partner in Denis Villeneuve who is sort of on the same side.

One of the things which was interesting about the way Denis built "Dune" was the first movie really is an introduction.

It introduces the characters, introduces where the plot is probably heading.

The second movie actually gives you the grit, gives you the action, gives you the [speaks German], as we would say in my home country.

And this is "Harvester Attack," and because it says attack, you might not think it's a love theme.

We were going to embrace a complete punk.

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How Hans Zimmer Created the Score for 'Dune: Part Two' | Vanity Fair

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