Song Exploder - Hans Zimmer - Dune

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

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.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. 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. The movie Dune was released on October 21st. It's the most recent adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic science fiction novel from 1965. The film was directed by Deneuve-Ville-Nive, and the scorework. 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 first worked together on the film Blade Runner 2049. Dune tells the story of the Atradis family as they relocate to the desert planet of Aracas. 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. My name is Hans Zimmer. I'm a film composer, and that was the job I had on Dini Rennie Nive'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. I remember Joe phoning up and going, we are a little stuck on this project, Blade Runner 2049, and it was somewhere in that time that Denny said the words Dune to me. It's a lifetime story, really.

Hans Zimmer first read Dune when he was 13 years old. And now if you go forward many, many years, Denny 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. And 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. But knowing Dini and Dini being a friend, it felt really safe to go on this adventure together. You know, usually you have discussions about ideas, you say, you know, here, I have this idea, what do you think? But with Dini 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. 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.

The piece I send you is the original demo. 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, it gives you everything. And then from that it becomes the score. For this track particular, the idea partly was that it's a boy that dreams of the desert, and he's not at the desert yet. The first thing I put down was since bell plonk, which has nothing to do with anything.

It's just you've got to start somewhere. Part of my conceptual thing is I know what tempos Joe likes working at when he's editing. I know what tempos Dini likes because there's an unhurriedness 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 temper is partly knowing the people you're working with. Little quarter notes at the beginning and that low, you know, I don't know, that low droney thingy, they're safe places to start on. To me, this is like a signature Hans Zimmer sound. Do you think of it

that way? Yeah, you know, and at the same time, every movie I make I make new ones, but they're not that different from each other. It's just I love the low sort of Tibetan, oh, 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. I needed to go and find some familiar ground to 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 Deney before he went off to shoot the movie, I just looked

at him so sternly and I said, Deney, 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 mightfulness. One of the things that Dini and I agreed on was 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 drive the story forward and that drive fate and destiny of everybody forward. So the score should be relying heavily on the female voice. You have Lisa Girard, you have Suzanne Waters, you have Edie Lehman Borica and then the great Loire Kotler on lead vocal. And those

are really the choir. 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 to just maintain that. It felt like the desert to me. 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 country. cliche 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. John Williams is, to me, the most masterful composer we have, and one of the most masterful

scores he's ever written was Star Wars. But when you're a 13-year-old, you're precocious and you're, you know, you're full of humus and a little arrogant, and you start thinking all these crazy things. You know, and I'm sitting there, I'm going, in a galaxy far, far away, why am I hearing strings? Why am I hearing French horns? Shouldn't that 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. 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, in time and in space, should be the human voice. And again, it's this idea

that the women's voice is whispering in your ear, something, some secret. You'll never know what the secret is. One day I got this sort of amazing chant back from Lisa that just became like that would be underbelly That's Lisa Gerard from Dead Can Dance or Lisa Gerard from Gladiator. I try to make everything tension, basically holding your breath through this dream.

And then there comes this very obvious chord that will lead you to something else. You just know it's building towards something. We're now in the mate of Dune. Now we're on a journey. I have this band of extraordinary musicians like Tina Guo and Guthrie Govan and Pedro Eustache. Pedro, you start, and they can do things that other people can't do. The Duduk, ancient Armenian instrument, and I keep thinking, if it's ancient, it'll hold its value into the future.

It'll 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 du duks, one in one key and one in another key, because the tune is just outside its range. What I like in 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 is very polite, wonderful human being,

and then she picks up her cello. And the way she picks up her cello, suddenly it's like a sword. 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 chess. And that's what I love about it. And you got Gathri Gavon, who's one of the world's finest guitar players. And you suddenly realize, hang on a second, there is a rock band playing. Dini 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. thoughts. Many people have tried to make this movie and two people who have been very influential and to me in this. One was Yoderovsky. Alejandro Yoderovsky 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. And of course his idea was to hire Pink Floyd to do the music. So one of the trailers, you know, just to honor Yoderowski and the whole thing, we actually used a clip.

from Dark Side of the Moon. And the other person that was important to me was Klaus Schulze, who was really one of the pioneers of electronic music. And he actually wrote an album called Dune, but in another album called X, he wrote a track called Frank Herbert. So I thought it was appropriate to do a little bit of Klaus Schultzer type, Pink Floyd type,

electronic synth sequences, repeating our sonatas. We're now in the real theme for for the planet. Once Paul's family arrives on the planet Dune, on Arrakis, like all noble house, you need a fanfare, you need somebody to herald the arrival. And you suddenly see a bagpiper in a shot. But the first bagpipes you hear in the movie,

aren't bagpipes at all, is actually Guthrie, imitating it on guitar. By the time I actually came to putting anything down, I wasn't in my studio. I was at home in COVID. COVID lockdown, so this whole score was done in my sitting room. My team turned it into a studio and it's right next to my daughter's bedroom, so she will tell everybody that she suffers from bagpipe PTSD because at 5.30 in the morning

and I'm still blasting away, you know, and the whole house is faking. Deney, there are shots in the movie that he saw when he was reading the book as a teenager and There are sounds and gestures and ideas that I heard in my head when I was a teenager. That's a crazy drum phrase, which is called Worm Boy. It's sort of the anti-grove. 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 suddenly find interesting.

Quite a bit of the score is based on this really inhuman pattern of drumbeats, which are, by the way, completely synthesized. There's a piece of score that Loire really grabs and, I mean, sings full out, and there's a commitment to each note which is, I mean, it's terrifying. It takes a special human being to commit, to expose their soul that way, to be that audacious about their singing. It's the same tune as at the beginning now, but now it's the warrior princess singing it. 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.

The professor of linguistics who spent 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. And I don't know how you feel, but I mean, when I hear Loire, you know, grab those notes and those words, I feel I'm understanding that she's telling me a story. This was done during COVID, and I have a fabulous photo of Loire in her close, covered 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 a desert bouncing off the rocks of mountains etc was all done in a closet in Brooklyn I'm a great believer and 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. You never know anything until you play it to your partner,

your director. Deny was in Montreal, I was in Los Angeles, but Denny went, that's it. That is the thing that I've been hearing in my head. We both approach the movie, not with the hindsight of grown men in their middle 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 is, you know, fear is the mind killer, I shall not fear. You know, this to a teenage boy was very important. So this is the score that I would have written as a 13-year-old. Yeah, I didn't fuck it up. And now here's Paul's Dream from the Dune sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. Learn more, visit Songexploader.net slash Dune.

You'll find links to stream or download this track, and you can watch the trailer for the film. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that.

It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April. And I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage.

And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode was made by me with editing help from Craig Ely 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 at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexplloder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway.

Thanks for listening.