‘I’m sitting in a hotel in New York, and I can’t go out,’ Hans Zimmer tells me over Zoom. ‘When you do a movie that nobody wants to see, nobody wants to talk to you, and that’s really sad. But you can walk around and you can leave the hotel and there’s nobody standing outside wanting to get your autograph. It’s a blessing and a curse. But at the end of the day, it's a blessing.’
There are not many film composers working today who are hounded by autograph-hunters. But then again, Zimmer isn’t quite like any other composer. For the past 40 years, he’s been crafting music for films people have not only wanted to see, but loved — The Lion King (1994), Inception (2010) and Gladiator (2000) are just three such beloved entries on his long, enviable list of credits. It’s why he sells out arenas anytime he goes on tour, with thousands of fans flocking to experience his greatest hits performed live.
Unbeknown to anyone who attended Zimmer’s most recent tour, it’s also where he premiered the first piece of music for Dune: Part Two, the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel. Zimmer won an Oscar for Dune: Part One but he’s not resting on his laurels; he’s built on what came before while introducing new themes for important characters. In addition to talking about his music for the critically acclaimed sequel, our conversation spans how reflective he’s feeling after 40 years in the business, his decision not to return for the upcoming Gladiator 2 and why Curzon is his favourite cinema.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AMON WARMANN: You had already started writing music for Dune: Part Two when Part One was premiering. How much of those initial musings wound up in the final score?
HANS ZIMMER: I went on tour. I played the O2. You might have come, you might not have come…
AW: I was there on the night you proposed on stage!
HZ: Oh that one! Everyone remembers that bit. That’s not the bit you’re supposed to remember! The main theme of this movie is just [assistant dialogue editor] Luana [Barnes] singing very quietly by herself. So I thought I won’t tell anybody what that piece of music is, but I’ll play it all over Europe. And maybe when you go and see the movie, you won’t remember the notes. But maybe there will be an emotional connection. I come from the Christopher Nolan School of making movies, where we shift time forwards and backwards. I saw nothing wrong with writing a theme and presenting it to an audience before the movie was even made or greenlit. I had fun making the audience go, ‘What am I listening to here? What is this weird thing?’
So yes, I kept writing [after Dune: Part One was released]. After about six months, Denis said, ‘You can stop writing, the movie has come out!’ And I said no, I’m not writing that movie. I’m writing things that hopefully will inspire you. I always think that part of the composer’s job, other than making music, is to inspire the director. The composer’s job is to listen to the director, when he first has the ideas, and he’s all excited, and he’s just about to go off on the journey of shooting the movie. And three months later, he comes back and he is exhausted and tired and beaten and broken. You sit down, and you try to remind him about the conversation the two of you had before he went out when he was still full of excitement.
I didn’t have to do that with Denis. I know he read the book when he was a teenager, as I did. I think making this movie catapulted us back into being those reckless, fearless, emotional teenagers. The flip side of this was of course that we had done enough work, we had proven ourselves making movies, that somebody would listen to us and give us the money to actually go and make this one. Because making movies is not the cheapest hobby you can think of.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AW: It was money well spent! The main theme for Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya) is so warm and stirring. How did you land on the instrumentation for it?
HZ: I didn’t want to do an orchestral score. I thought it was inappropriate. But what I did want to do is work with my band, which is full of the most extraordinary virtuosos. I can ask impossible things of them. The Duduk can’t actually play those notes, so we had to go and modify it. A lot of the process on this movie was building or modifying new instruments. The main part about it is not the machine or the instrument. It’s my friend Pedro, who plays with all his heart. When you get a hug from Pedro, the world is suddenly OK! At the end of the movie, you actually hear that theme being passed around Pedro, Luala – who did that Banshee scream originally – and Guthrie Govan, the world’s best guitarist. And I can say that, because other guitarists keep saying that!
One of the things that was so important to Denis and me was that the female characters are the strength of the movie. In the first movie, it’s [Rebecca Ferguson’s] Lady Jessica, and in the second movie it’s Chani. Anytime you hear anything percussive, it’s three wonderful, beautiful women from my band – two drummers and one percussionist. They’re dangerous. They’re tigresses. Don’t get in their way when they start whacking their instruments. It’s different than just having your session guys do the thing. This was so personal. And with Denis in the room, and our editor Joe Walker, who I first worked with at the BBC in 1988, there’s a feeling of safety to try the impossible.
AW: That final track you mention – ‘Kiss the Ring’ – has an inspired use of bells. Where did that idea come from?
HZ: There’s a spirituality that runs through the story. I just liked that sound. It reminded me of when I was a kid, and I would go to church and hear the little bells. There’s something pure about it. Plus you don’t expect it on a planet like that. A lot of it is just going, Let’s try this out, it works, I have no idea why it works.’
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AW: This is one of the best spotted movies I’ve ever seen. What questions were you asking Denis and the rest of the team in those sessions?
HZ: It’s all of us, but a lot of it is Joe Walker, our editor. Joe and I have known each other for so long. But the difference between Joe and me is that he went to music school. He actually has a proper musical education, while I have my two weeks of piano lessons. So his cuts are very musical, and we discuss sound as a whole, then the picture as a whole. And we pull in Richard King, who’s our sound effects supervisor, and Richard and I have worked on six Chris Nolan movies. So again, there are so many words we don’t have to use, because we have used them in the past. We know where we go with this, and we know how to stay out of each other's way. We also know the power of silence. And we know when our actors are really doing their business. Let’s not distract them. There are certain rules that are unspoken, but apply to everybody who works on the project – don’t get sentimental, don’t get fancy, don’t do anything stupid. Try to follow Denis’ vision, which is very clear.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AW: Which sort of music do you enjoy composing more – the hummable kind, or the more evil, atonal, metallic kind, like what you have for Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen here?
HZ: If you can write a good tune that’s not sentimental but profoundly emotional, you’re winning. And they’re really hard to come by. They take weeks sometimes. But that’s where I feel I’ve accomplished something. On the other hand, going back to my guitar-punk roots or doing crazy electronics… that’s a lot of fun for me.
When Chris [Nolan] called the second [Batman] movie The Dark Knight [2008], I thought he was talking about me! I nearly ruined his brain forever on that one. I’d written all these experiments – one more horrible and violent than the next – and bought him an iPod, because he had to fly to Hong Kong to finish the movie. And he bravely listened all the way there and all the way back. I can get pretty out there.
Gladiator (2000)
AW: When Gladiator 2 was announced, I was really excited about the possibility of you returning to score the sequel. Why did you opt not to?
HZ: It’s really very simple. I’ve done that world. And I think I did it well. And all I’d do is set myself up for either trying to repeat myself, which I don’t want to do, or getting slaughtered by critics who say you didn’t do it as well as you did the first time. We have a gladiator fight in Dune: Part Two, right? We have a gladiator fight in Gladiator obviously, but they couldn’t be more different! I liked the idea of moving on and not getting compared to my own work. One way or the other I’d had enough of that, doing three Batman movies or four Pirates [of the Caribbean] movies or four Kung Fu Panda movies. And Gladiator takes a special place in my heart. I think it’s completely undisciplined. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had written the most amazing score, because the music in the first movie sticks in people’s hearts.
I had that experience doing the live[-action] version of The Lion King. I tried to step out of my own vocabulary. Every time I did, it just didn’t work. So all I could do was repeat myself. You owe it to yourself, and to the audience, to try to do new things. And I want to say something about [Gladiator 2 composer] Harry Gregson Williams, who started out as my assistant. He was very good friends with both Tony and Ridley Scott. Harry is family for me. He’s a phenomenal composer. That film is in really good hands. Trust me. Harry and I have spoken about it. He feels the old score barking at his heels a little bit. So he’s on his A game.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AW: Do you ever find yourself feeling reflective? Do you ever find yourself listening to some of your old work?
HZ: Rarely. Sometimes I might listen to my work because I think this might be really good if it’s performed live. There are things I did in the Eightiesand then Nineties that people probably didn’t hear, but I actually sort of like. There’s a score for a movie called The Peacemaker [1997], which is really more than just a cousin of Crimson Tide [1995]. But people don’t know it because they don’t know the movie. So I’m thinking of maybe revitalising some of these things, shoving them in front of an audience and seeing if they can stand on their own two feet. That’s when I listen to things.
AW: You’ve been in the composing business for over four decades now. Since then, you’ve evolved as a composer and a person. What do you think the Hans Zimmer who just composed his first score for a short film in 1982 would think about the Hans of today?
HZ: Well, I think Going for Gold [1987] is a classic. I think My Beautiful Laundrette [1985] is a classic. I loved when we started out in independent filmmaking, and it was very political. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher, and we had things to fight and rally against. We still do in a way. It gets harder to come up with really original stuff. When I got to Hollywood I did Black Rain [1989] with Ridley Scott, and it was my first action movie. I thought I found a real language, and that Hans Zimmer’s language for an action movie is different from other people’s. And by the end of the year, every action movie was sounding like my movie! The audience doesn’t care, they don’t read the name of the person who did it. Every music editor in Los Angeles knows it’s called the forbidden cue. Don’t temp it into somebody’s film, because the only way you can sound like ‘Journey to the Line’ is by ripping it off. So I had to change style, because everybody else was doing it.
Every once in a while, there are little snippets where I go, ’Oh yeah, that's pretty good, I can live with that.’ Interstellar. I can live with ‘Time’ from Inception. I mean, actually, all of Inception is pretty exceptional…
Inception (2010)
AW: I keep telling people! ‘Dream Is Collapsing’, ‘Mombasa’... it’s an excellent score.
HZ: Yeah, that works. But they’re weird ones too, like A League of Their Own [1992] for Penny Marshall, a movie about a girl baseball team in the Forties. I said to Penny, ‘I’ve got no idea what baseball is all about. I have no idea what it’s like to be a girl. I have no idea about jazz and swing in the Forties.’ And she goes, ‘Exactly. That’s why you’re the right person.’ So that was a lot of fun. Writing The Lion King for my six-year-old daughter, and suddenly finding out that the thing I wasn’t taking seriously, I have to take incredibly seriously because it’s about the death of a father – my dad died when I was really young, and I never dealt with it. So The Lion King is much darker in its musical subtext than just ‘Hakuna Matata’.
So looking back, it’s the same every time. Somebody comes to you, and they have a fantastic idea, and you start having ideas yourself, and then you just get terrified that you can’t pull it off, or you’re not good enough, or it’s the wrong idea. At the same time, I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I love, love, love, love, love it.
Going to the Curzon – which is my favourite cinema – and experiencing things there… It's sort of my second home. Cinema lives. Everybody’s talking about streaming and all that stuff. The experience of cinema is a singular art form that we invented in the 21st century. And we haven’t even started yet. There are so many possibilities that we haven’t explored yet. There’re so many stories that we need to tell, because we’re human beings and human beings need to hear each other’s stories.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
AW: Is that what’s motivating you these days?
HZ: Denis and I FaceTime a lot. There was a moment when I was going, ‘You know that scene…’ and he went, ‘No, stop. We are not talking about the movie. We are only talking about friendship.’ And in a funny way, that moment persuaded me even more to delve into the movie and give my very best. I don’t work for the money. I work for friendship. And I work for the people who work hard during the week and, come the weekend, they have a choice. They can go to the pub and get plastered, or they can go shopping, or they can do whatever they want to do with their hard-earned money. Or they can come to one of our movies. And if they come to one of our movies for two hours – or in this case, 166 minutes – I want to be able to transport them. I want to be able to give them their money’s worth, and give them an experience.
WATCH DUNE: PART TWO IN CINEMAS
