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

Home Depot as as where you know they have pipes they have things that we use we can extend the length of a flute we can go Home Depot is our secret instrument building [Music] site hello I'm Hans simmer and today we'll be breaking down how we created the score for Dune part two I remember finishing part one and saying To Deni Hang on we're only on part page 156 of roughly 600 pages and I just carried on I carried on writing and uh there came a phone call from Deni 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 so I just carried on writing and then I wrote a theme which I really loved and there's a voice in the first movie which is very much the the sort of the center piece that everything together sung by a woman called L Cotler who's just a phenomenal [Music] artist friend of mine found s saw her on on YouTube and went this is an extraordinary voice she knows the limits of what a 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 dun part two is very much the same players and it's very much the players that are in my band when I play life I think what what differentiates this 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 you know they they just they just eat it up like lion you know it's it's like go crazy do do something we have never done before that's the general motto well let's stick with kathri Gavin who I've heard play I saw him on Facebook I saw him on YouTube I finally wrote to him on Facebook it took 3 months I get a reply going I know you're just a 14-year-old fan boy you know I know you're not handsome at all so I had to then s went back and forth and to prove that I actually was who I was tinao my chist I met to 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 remember Tina cuz Tina is very proper it's very gentle and then she takes her cello and she turns into a [Music] 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 um French musicians SL scientists who came in who' spent 10 years inventing a um a keyboard that could do all sorts of you know without going into the technicalities basically um if you do this all that Happ says it's a switch that goes on and off right or you can play a little quieter but they had managed to make a keyboard where you could express pretty much any emotion that you could express on a violin or you know any of those other instruments that we keyboard players are always so incredibly envious of because they can express true emotion it's a keyboard called the Osmos and at the same time they had speaker systems which they 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 where these SC they're really sculptures and a lot of the instruments we were we were using ourselves were made were made by a sculptor there's a man called CH Smith who lives in Northern California he is a pedal steel guitarist but he's a welder as well and he he doesn't just weld you know like 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 Boe 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 um part of his um 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 head with hammers or it can be the most gentle sounds or it's truly the sound of the the monster under the Earth very dunik the movie tells you what it what it wants and what it rejects you have to listen and one of the things great musicians do is 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 noan and den 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 look at the Des signs and the 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 and The Lion King the original Lion King and I only had 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 handsomer Love Theme which might give you a hint [Music] I was trying to create the sound of sand and and and just atmospheres you know nothing you know just just this Stillness this wind going across you know going across the desert and the tune really comes comes from the original bagpipe tune which used to be fast and then at one point LA and I sat down and said what happens if we if we if we perform this tune as very slowly and then of course somehow you know in the way we work it's like somehow it ended up with pedr saying it would be good on the dedok but of course it cannot be played on an ancient instrument because it doesn't have all the notes so you know we went to Home Depot and uh had to modify his instrument Home Depot is is where you know they have pipes we can extend the length of a flute we can go Home Depot is our uh secret instrument building site you know so Home Depot has been very important in in creating the score for um Dune it really has so if I just play you this by itself you'll hear you know the beauty [Music] of [Music] and the thing about Pedro is there's a heart there's a soul there's a loneliness there's a there's a longing in his and his performance which is so extraordinary I mean if you if I I put the be nearest minimum of things around him it's just this little high note above [Music] him and it and to me it felt like the endless gaze across this planet and it felt incredibly intimate so when Paul and CH are sitting there talking to each other and the way the way they mixed it the way didn't he mix as well in the film is it's like the the whole atmosphere shifts and it just becomes this incredibly intimate moment between these two characters I'd very much like to be equal to you maybe I'll show you the [Music] way there is a sort of a gentle [Music] [Laughter] [Music] chorus it's just how he placed those first notes here there's such longing I mean that's real poetry and you just hear Tina very slightly behind on her electric [Music] cello you you know something I've done a lot of movies and I I love doing movies and I love writing music and you know why cuz I still haven't written the thing that I think is really the most beautiful love theme I'm still learning I'm still I'm still searching I'm still investigating I'm still exploring I'm still experimenting you know the advantage I have is that I have a partner in Den ner who is sort of on the same side we never buy buted heads of a anything um sometimes the quality of a wine maybe one of the things which was interesting about the way Deni 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 St Dr 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 be completely Fearless we were going to go and embrace dissonance we were going to embrace a complete Punk oh God here I am giving it away yes there was a period in my life where I wasn't wearing a nice jacket and there was a bit more was in a punk band and some of that stuff came back and and you know that mentality when you want to go and do an action scene comes in very handy what's appropriate for the way I think we we we worked on dudis is is that you know the female power is a really important story component and certainly my three percussionists are female and they hit things harder than most guys ever hit things I used to work with Shila as well who was Princess drama so it just seemed appropriate to have my wonderful female percussionist come and give this a bit of energy and a bit of uh just Rage which is what it needed Richard King our sound designer who is I'm just going to say it who's the god of sound designers for me I mean we've done so many movies together we've done all the Christopher Nolan movies together there's a great amount of inventiveness that is going on in what he does sonically and there's an enormous amount of bandwidth he uses up you know and of course you know when when you see a huge um Harvester this this huge machine you know leave some room for Richard you know and at the same time he is a gentleman and he will leave some room for me so there's this this constant sense of of of trading off and collaborating there's a record company that makes cheap knockoffs of my tracks because they make some money out of that so it always makes me laugh because they sound terrible so a while back this is many years ago I put on one of them because I wasn't wanted to really have a laugh about it and it was a track which was impossible to play by real Orchestra and I'm listening to this thing and it's better than my version of it I'm looking and somebody called Steve mazaro who did this Arrangement so I hand him down in in Los Angeles and at first he told me after he told me later he was he he thought I was I wanted to sue him or something that he got a phone call from H Zimmer but I said no no you it's absolutely brilliant I think your work is absolutely brilliant I think you should come over to the studio and I think we should have a chat and he goes well actually I've been here now for two years and it hasn't worked out you know my career it hasn't worked out he was working in the computer filing Department of an accounting firm so that was obviously not what he had aspired to as a great musician so he had packed up everything and bought his return ticket to Ohio or Oklahoma or something with an O and so just that that moment that at that moment you know it was like sell your ticket come into the studio you got a job you know we're going to be we're going to be friends we're going to be working together and so a lot of the creativity of this one is down to Steve's Brilliance and everything but am I lucky that he didn't catch that played I know you said when you finished the first dune score you kind of were still in the world of Dune still composing are you still dreaming in Dune uh second day of shooting den puts Dune Messiah on my desk doesn't say a word I know where we're going oh

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: austin butler, dune 2, dune composer, dune movies, dune music, dune part 2, dune part 2 cast, dune part 2 composer, dune part 2 music, dune part two, dune part two review, dune part two score, dune score, dune soundtrack, dune: part two, florence pugh, hans zimmer, hans zimmer composer, hans zimmer interview, movies and entertainment, music, music composition, oscar, oscars, timothee chalamet, tv and movies, vanity fair, zendaya

Id: JGLEVXJoetU

Length: 15min 3sec (903 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024