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

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.

[gentle ethereal music]

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.

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 sort of the centerpiece

that holds everything together,

sung by a woman called Loire Cotler,

who's just a phenomenal artist.

[Loire singing]

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 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 finally wrote to him on Facebook.

It took three months.

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,

[Hans imitates small explosion]

and she turns into a banshee.

[Tina playing cello]

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, [piano chimes]

if you do this, all that happens is 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 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 Osmose.

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.

You have to listen.

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.

[interviewer laughs]

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.

[gentle ethereal music]

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.

Home Depot is where they have pipes.

We can extend the length of a flute.

Home Depot is our secret instrument building site.

So Home Depot has been very important

in creating the score for Dune.

It really has.

So if I just play you this by itself,

you'll hear the beauty of.

[gentle ethereal music]

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.

[gentle ethereal music]

And to me, it felt like the endless gaze

across this planet.

[gentle ethereal music]

And it felt incredibly intimate.

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.

I'd very much like to be equal to you.

Maybe I'll show you the way.

[epic uplifting music]

There is this sort of a gentle chorus.

[gentle ethereal music]

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

[gentle ethereal music]

There's such longing.

[gentle ethereal music]

I mean, there's real poetry

and you just hear Tina very slightly

behind on her electric cello.

[gentle ethereal music]

You know something?

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 learning.

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.

We never butted heads over anything.

Sometimes the quality of a wine, maybe.

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.

[epic music]

We were gonna be completely fearless.

We were gonna 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 I was a bit more, was in a punk band.

And some of that stuff came back,

and that mentality when you wanna go

and do an action scene comes in very handy.

What's appropriate for the way I think we worked on Dune

is that 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 Sheila E. as well,

who was Prince's drummer.

So it just seemed appropriate

to have my wonderful female percussionist come

and give this a bit of energy and a bit of just rage,

which is what it needed.

[upbeat epic music]

Richard King, our sound designer,

who is, I'm just gonna 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.

And of course, when you see a huge harvester,

there's this huge machine.

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 constant sense

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 always wanted

to really have a laugh about it.

And it was a track which was impossible to play

by a real orchestra.

And I'm listening to this thing

and it's better than my version of it.

And I'm looking, and it's somebody called Steve Mazzaro

who did this arrangement.

So I hunt him down in Los Angeles,

and at first he took me,

afterwards, he told me later,

he thought I wanted to sue him or something,

that he got a phone call from Hans Zimmer.

But I said, No, no, 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.

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 moment, at that moment, he was like,

Sell your ticket, come into the studio,

you got a job.

We're gonna be friends,

we're gonna 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 plane?

[Interviewer] 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?

Second day of shooting,

Denis puts Dune Messiah on my desk,

doesn't say a word.

I know where we're going.

[light ethereal music]