Wednesday, Nov 17, 2021 • 29min
Hans Zimmer - Dune
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The movie Dune was released on October 21. It's the most recent adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel from 1965. The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve, and the score was written by Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. Hans Zimmer has scored over 200 films, been nominated for Oscars eleven times. He and Denis Villeneuve first worked together on the film Blade Runner 2049. Dune tells the story of the Atreides family as they relocate from their home world to the desert planet Arrakis. When Hans Zimmer first started working on the music, he made what he calls a "sketchbook" – creating motifs and themes that might occur in the film. And in this episode, he takes us through the first sketch he did for Dune. It’s called "Paul's Dream."
For more, visit songexploder.net/dune http://songexploder.net/dune
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Hans Zimmer
Hrishikesh Hirway
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Hrishikesh Hirway
00:00
You're listening to
Song Exploder
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. My name is Hrishikesh Hirway.Share
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Hrishikesh Hirway
01:07
This episode contains explicit language, but if you haven't seen
Dune
yet, there aren't any spoilers other than a very basic description of the premise of the movie, which I'm about to do now.Share
01:19
The movie
Dune
was released on October 21. It's the most recent adaptation of Frank Herbert's
epic science fiction novel from 1965. The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve
and the score was written by Oscar
winning composer Hans Zimmer
. Hans Zimmer
has scored over 200 films, and he's been nominated for Oscars
11 times. He and Denis Villeneuve's
first worked together on the film Blade Runner 2049
.Share
01:49
Dune
tells the story of the Atreides family as they relocate to the desert planet of Arrakis
. When Hans Zimmer
first started working on the music, he made what he calls a sketchbook, creating motifs and themes that might occur in the film. In this episode, he takes us through the first sketch that he did for Dune
. It's called Paul's
dream.Share
Hans Zimmer
02:30
My name is
Hans Zimmer
, I'm a film composer and that was the job I had on Denis Villeneuve's
Dune
. We have a mutual friend, our editor, Joe Walker. Joe and I we go back, we worked for the BBC
in 1988. Joe actually started out as a composer, and I think that's an important part to know because he cuts in a very musical way.Share
02:56
I remember Joe phoning up and going, "we're a little stuck on this project,
Blade Runner 2049"
and it was somewhere in that time that Denis
said the words Dune
to me. It's a lifetime story really.Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
03:15
Hans Zimmer
first read Dune
when he was 13 years old.Share
Hans Zimmer
03:19
And now if you go forward many, many years, then the very quietly one evening asking me if I had ever heard of a book called
Dune
and me sort of freaking out at him going, "but you don't understand, when I was a teenager, I make my own movie in my head". And one of the things I never did, I never watched the David Lynch
version, I never watched a television version because I had all these images burned into my head and I didn't want them to get extinguished or blunted or disturbed in any way.Share
03:50
But knowing Denis and Denis being a friend, it felt really safe to go on this adventure together.
Share
04:00
You know, usually you have discussions about ideas, you say, "you know, here I have this idea of what do you think? ", but with Denis and me, what kept happening was that he would start a sentence and I could finish it, I would start a sentence, and he could finish it. And it was like we had always heard and seen the movie on parallel tracks, and it wasn't ever about what's the creative approach to the music, it was more about what's the philosophical underpinning of the story.
Share
04:33
It's very much like a teenager dreaming, you know, where your dreams seem to have a profound meaning and sometimes some of that meaning becomes the truth, but very often that meaning is just random noise and very unreliable narrator to your own life or even to your own subconscious.
Share
04:55
The piece I send you is the original demo, but it's just called Paul's Dream. The sketchbook is how I go about figuring out what the architecture of the whole thing is. So the sketchbook gives you all the motifs, it gives you all the sounds that gives you everything, and then from that it becomes the score.
Share
05:19
For this track in particular, the idea partly was that it's a boy that dreams of the desert, and he's not at the desert yet.
Share
05:32
The first thing I put down was since bell plank, which has nothing to do with anything. It's just you gotta start somewhere. Part of my conceptual thing is I know what tempos Joe likes working out when he's editing, I know what tempos
Denis
likes because there's an unhurried nous about his filmmaking, there's a deep sense of letting you experience the image fully, letting you experience the performance fully. So nothing develops at like a lightning speed. So, you know, picking the tempo is partly knowing the people you're working with.Share
06:19
The little quarter notes at the beginning and that low, you know, I don't know that lone droney thingy, they're safe places to start on.
Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
06:33
To me this is like a signature
Hans Zimmer
sound. Do you think of it that way?Share
Hans Zimmer
06:40
Yeah, you know, and at the same time, every movie, I make them make new ones, but they're not that different from each other. It's just I love the low sort of
Tibetan
, you know, look, I can sing it, you know, it's part of my register. I love the idea of that innocent little temple bell ringing at the top and then some of these monks at the bottom.Share
07:11
I needed to go and find some familiar ground, don't calm myself down because here's the thing, this is an enormously ambitious project, making this movie and sort of a childhood dream. So the last thing I said to
Denis
before he went off to shoot the movie, I just looked at himself stoney and I said, "Denis
just one thing, don't fuck it up", but then he came back, and it was the same thing. Now the responsibility had shifted onto my shoulders.Share
07:43
One of the things that
Denis
and I agreed on just that even though the book seems on the surface to be about all these very masculine heroes, it's really the women that are the power that drives the story forward and that drive fate and destiny of everybody forward. So the score should be relying heavily on the female voice.Share
08:12
You have
Lisa Gerrard
, you have Suzanne Waters, you have Edie Lehmann Boddicker and then the great Loire Cotler
on lead vocal and those are really the choir.Share
08:33
If our hero is
Paul
and his mother Jessica, and she actually is not in a scene, I still always kept like an echo of a female voice going just to just maintain that. It felt like the desert to me.Share
09:08
The book is tinged with
Middle Eastern
themes. But first of all, I didn't want to do that cultural imperialism where I was going to go and suddenly rip off every cliché that you find in Middle Eastern music
. Nor did I want to root the thing that firmly in the Middle East
, that's really not the point. The point is, it's on the planet Arrakis
set in the future. There should be just a hint, and maybe it's the Middle East
, but maybe it's not.Share
09:57
John Williams
is, to me, the most masterful composer we have and one of the most masterful scores he's ever written by Star Wars
. But when you're 13 years old, and you're precautious, and you're, you know, you're full of humorous, a little arrogant, and you start thinking all these crazy things.Share
10:13
You know what, I'm sitting there. I'm going in a galaxy far, far away. Why am I hearing strings? Why am I hearing french horns should not be completely different sounds and truly no insult intended to the pleasure, for instance, that I got out of listening to the
Star Wars
and how that is a perfect score for that movie.Share
10:33
But I always at the back of my mind was the thought that there should be a different sound and the only sound that should remain in our galaxy far, far away, an entire out in space should be the human voice
Share
10:48
And again there's this idea that the women's voice is whispering in your ear something. Some secret, you'll never know what the secret is.
Share
11:13
One day I got this sort of amazing chant back from
Lisa
that just became like that would be underbelly, that's Lisa Gerrard
from Dead Can Dance
, Lisa Gerrard
from Gladiator
. I try to make everything tension basically, holding your breath through this dream and then there comes this very obvious card that will lead you to something else, you just know it's building towards something.Share
11:50
We're now in the mid of
Dune
. Now we're on a journey.Share
12:11
I have this band of extraordinary musicians like
Tina Guo
and Guthrie Govan
and Pedro
, you start, and they can do things that other people can't do.Share
12:23
The
Duduk
ancient Armenian
instrument and I keep thinking if it's ancient it will hold its value into the future, it would be something that you can pick up in 10,000 years, and it will still be relevant. So it's actually Pedro
playing two different duduks
, one in one key and one in another key because the tune is just outside, it's ranged.Share
13:04
What I like and folk music is that idea of everybody is playing the same tune at the same time, but they're all interpreting it slightly differently.
Tina Guo
who was very polite, wonderful human being, and then she picks up her cello and the way she picks up her cello, and suddenly it's like a sort. It's an electric cello, so it can become anything I wanted to become. The way she plays, I mean that's not how you're supposed to play a cello and that's what I love about it.Share
13:56
And you got
Guthrie Govan
who's one of the world's finest guitar players a and you suddenly realize, hang on a second, there is a rock band playing.Share
14:30
For
Denis
and myself, it was teenagers reading this book, and we were listening to Pink Floyd
, and we were listening to guitar music, and so the idea of some weird rock opera wasn't so far removed from our thoughts.Share
14:53
Many people have tried to make this movie and two people who have been very influential and to me in this one was
Jodorowsky
.Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
15:02
Alejandro Jodorowsky
was a visionary director who tried to make an adaptation of Dune
in the mid 1970s, but the project ran way over budget and was never finished.Share
Hans Zimmer
15:11
And of course, his idea was to hire
Pink Floyd
to do the music. So, one of the trailers, you know, just to honor Jodorowsky
and the whole thing, we actually used "Eclipse" from The Dark Side Of The Moon. And the other person that was important to me was Klaus Schulze
, you know, who's really one of the pioneers of electronic music.Share
15:30
And he actually wrote an album called Dune but in a another album called X, he wrote a track called
Frank Herbert
. So I thought it was appropriate to do a little bit of class holds, the type Pink Floyd
type electronic sequences repeating ostinatos.Share
15:52
We're now in the real theme for the planet.
Share
16:02
Once
Paul's
family arrives on planet Dune,
on Arrakis
, like all Noble house, you need a fanfare, you need somebody to herald the arrival, you suddenly see a bagpiper and a shot. But the first bagpipes you're here in the movie aren't bagpipes at all, has actually gone through imitating it on guitar.Share
16:35
By the time it actually came to putting anything down, I wasn't in my studio, I was at home in
Covid
lockdown, so this whole score was down in my sitting room. My team turned it into a studio, and it's right next to my daughter spent room. So she will tell everybody that she suffers from bagpipe PTSD because you know, at 5: 30 in the morning, and I'm still blasting away.Share
17:18
For
Denis
, the're shots in the movie that he saw when he was reading the book as a teenager and their sounds and gestures and ideas that I heard in my head when I was a teenager. That's a crazy drum phrase, which it's called worm boy.Share
17:42
It's sort of the anti groove. If you try to dance to that, you will break your ankles. But I always had this idea that, you know, rhythm develops rhythm moves forward and maybe as we evolve, there are rhythms which we've never heard before, that we certainly find interesting.
Share
18:03
Quite a bit of the scores based on this really inhuman pattern of drum beats which are, by the way, completely synthesized.
Share
18:19
There's a piece of score that low are really grabs. And I mean, sings full out and there's a commitment to each note, which is, I mean, it's terrifying.
Share
18:40
It takes a special human being to commit, to expose their soul that way, to be that audacious about their singing.
Share
18:59
It's the same tune it at the beginning now, but now it's the warrior prince is singing it, you know, and
Loire
truly is for me, the warrior woman. There's a whole dictionary that was written for this language, but of course I did what every good rock musician does, I ignored what the words mean and I just picked the words that would sing well.Share
19:23
The professor of linguistics who spent months, months and months writing this language is probably quietly horrified by what I did, but the point isn't that you're supposed to understand the words, you understand somebody is telling you something important.
Share
19:40
And I don't know how you feel, but I mean when I hear
Loire
, uh, you know, grab those notes and those words, I feel I'm understanding that she's telling me a story.Share
20:00
This was done during
Covid
and I have a fabulous photo of Loire
in her clothes' cupboard with all her coats hanging above her head, and she's sitting on the floor, and she's got a microphone in front of her and so this piece which feels like it's being sung across an endless landscape of the desert bouncing off the rocks of mountains, etcetera, was all done in a closet in Brooklyn.
Share
20:46
I'm a great believer in that music should always let you know that you can have an experience, but never tell you what the experience is, but it just says to you, come along, I'm going to take you on a journey, and it's going to be different.
Share
21:09
You never know anything until you played to your partner, your director,
Denis
was in Montreal
, I was in Los Angeles
, but Denis
went, that's it, that is the thing that I've been hearing in my head.Share
21:29
We both approached the movie, not with the hindsight of grown men in their middle age, not with the wisdom of time gone by and all the other stuff we've done, but somehow we had the recklessness and the sense of experimentation and the sense of fearlessness and remember a big message of the book as you know, fear is the mind killer, I shall not fear, you know, this to a teenage boy who was very important. So this is the score that I would have threatened as a 13-year-old.
Share
22:05
Yeah, I didn't fuck it up.
Share
22:13
And now here's Paul's Dream from the
Dune
sketchbook by Hans Zimmer
in its entirety.Share
Hrishikesh Hirway
27:52
To learn more visit songexploder.
net/Dune
, you'll find links to stream or download this track and you can watch the trailer for the film.Share
Break
Hrishikesh Hirway
30:30
This episode was made by me with editing, help from Craig Healy and Casey Deal artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by
Kathleen Smith
and production assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder
is a proud member of Radiotopia
from PRX, a network of independent listener supported artist owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia. fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram @hrishikeshhirway and you can follow the show at Song Exploder
. You can also get a Song Exploder
t-shirt at songexploder
. net/shirt. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway, thanks for listening. Radiotopia from PRX.Share
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