The Big Picture - Top Five Film Scores. Plus: Hans Zimmer on 'Dune'!

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

Let’s talk movie music. Writer Jayson Greene joins Sean to talk about the art of the film score, the giants of the form, this year’s Oscar nominees, and their top five scores ever (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by legendary composer Hans Zimmer to discuss his Oscar-nominated work on ‘Dune’ and his career (1:07:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Jayson Greene and Hans Zimmer Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the music that makes movies come alive. We have a very special bonus episode today. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a few weeks back that eight categories would not air live on the broadcast on March 27th. And one of those categories was the Academy Award for Best Original Score. And honestly, I thought this was pretty nuts when I first heard it, particularly taking this category off the broadcast in this way, which is so vital to film history and really one of my favorite things about movies. Way back in 2005, I ran a very small blog spot called Settling the Scores, which chronicled my favorite film scores.

This is something I really care about. So before the news that the telecast broke, I had the opportunity to speak with Hans Zimmer, one of the most acclaimed and well-known film music composers of all time, about his Oscar-nominated work on Dune. So I figured what better time than now to devote a whole episode to film music.

Before we get to Hans, though, I wanted to talk to my old friend and colleague, and really one of the best writers about music that I know, Jason Green. Jason, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks, Sean. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man, you too.

Very excited to talk to you about this. Let's start here. What makes a film score great, in your opinion? That is, wow, what an opening bitch. Just don't even, there's zero small talk. Okay, cool. I'm doing great. Everything's good over here. I like movies. Holy shit. What makes a film score great? I mean, Jesus Christ. Okay. I mean, for me, I've obviously spent the last week or so thinking about this nonstop as I prepare to talk to you. And this is obviously a huge pet topic of mine. I think that for me, as a kind of person with a background in classical,

I wouldn't call myself, I mean, my credentials in that world are at this point, I'm getting a little dusty, but I have for many years, I was really immersed in this world. And so I think that for me, it was always one of these places. And I know that you have these places in your life where two interests of yours met in an unusual place. Right. ones that sort of take the movie from a good piece of cinema or a well-told story into something that's more operatic, more powerful, and elevates everything about the movie. That can be done in lots of ways. And we can talk about some of the ways that we think film scores work to intensify or deepen a movie. But basically, I think a great film score has to do one of those two things, probably both of those things, intensify and deepen the movie. So you mentioned that you have a background in classical. This is

really the biggest reason why I wanted to talk to you, because I think you understand this genre of music. But classical isn't the only form of film score that we have. In fact, now we have many types of film score that are not just rooted in Bach and Mozart and all of these things we think of when we hear that word. So I've identified, I think, four kind of contemporary categories and types. I've got them here on this outline. What do you think about what I've put together here? So I've essentially got your classical composer, someone who sits down with a symphony or a big orchestra and creates a massive piece of music, lots of swells, woodwinds, brass, violins, everything, the whole nine. And then you've got, I think what you might define as a more experimental artist,

or someone who's kind of pushing the boundaries of some of those spaces, you know, from Philip Glass to John Cage inside of that. And then there's jazz and jazz musicians who have a long history of working in film, going back to Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in the 50s and 60s. And then I think what is becoming the most prevalent version, which is the rock star turned composer, the recovering rock star who has shifted their attention to composition. Is there anything I'm missing there? Does that feel like the totality of the identity of the people making this music? I mean, I think that if you can bring rock star to include someone like the RZA, who is not a rock musician, but is like a pop culture figure with a certain level of esteem in sort of different levels of

the art world that is brought in to sort of see if his skills their skills translate into film scoring and yeah i mean i think that's everything i could that that covers it for me that seems like it's all the major sort of areas that this music grows out of um when you and i first started talking about this, we were thinking about building a conversation around John Williams, because John Williams is probably the single most famous, most accomplished, most everlasting film composer.

He's still alive. He's still working. We just saw a trailer for the new Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series coming on Disney+, and the Duel of the Fates was, was soundtracking that commercial. And I was like, God damn it. This guy is good. Um, but you know, obviously there may be time for another John Williams conversation down the road, but when I say film composer, like who were some of the other names that spring to mind for you?

I mean, like the, the heavy hitters, I mean, just sort of, I mean, I, there are, like you said, the people who are rooted for me in the very beginning of when music became a big part of movies. And this is sort of when I talked about being a classical nerd. I mean, you're right. It's a tiny, tiny fraction of the kind of music that scores movies, but it's sort of where I go back to. And so, I mean, people like in their, you know, in the early 1930s, like if you were the kind of person who otherwise might've been trying to score a symphony and you moved to America, maybe you just worked for the movies. So like someone like Max Steiner or Eric Korngold, people like that. And Bernard Herrmann would be another example. These people who brought like a vocabulary that they learned in Europe to Hollywood films.

And that's where I think the film music that I love so much, like from as a kid, like it had two things. It was like, it had two, one of them was like John Williams and growing up in the 80s and watching every film that ever like meant the most to me as a kid scored by his music and the other was watching older movies and being like kind of perturbed and hypnotized by the strangeness of the music that was in them and noticing that because old movies when you're a kid are supposed to be boring and stayed but but the music in them was so overwhelming. And so I think that for me,

like I'm rambling. No, you're not. You're not. Yeah, no, I ramble. You invited me.

You ran ramble into your podcast. You were making a joke about one of your co-hosts being like too concise. And I was like, that's not going to be my issue at all. So basically when I, when I say film composer, who do you think of so you've got you've got these right so i've got these legends of the 1930s right yeah and and john williams but you know obviously in between those two eras there's a huge thing so how do you how do you train yourself how do you learn how do you dive deep into this So you start to familiarize yourself with some of these works. Yeah. I mean, someone like Elmer Bernstein is someone who was everywhere for a very long time. He's someone who, for several decades of movie making,

was the go-to for a prestige, not just a prestige picture. It's a guy who did The Kill a Mockingbird, the theme from The Kill a Mockingbird which is like this aching and beautiful piece of music that people really associate with like great film music writing. Um, and really like for me, and I think for everyone who's into film music, you hear, um, something in the music you like, some, you hear some music in a movie that you like, and then you just go chase down that name. And then you look around and you say, Oh my God, this person scored 70 movies. And that starts to open up this realization if you hadn't had it already, that that's an ecosystem, right? Film music is an ecosystem and it's got a whole list of names and you've already sort of spelled some of the

categories out. But yeah, I mean, it runs the gamut from people like Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith, who is another person who is like a composer who worked with orchestras a lot and sort of made your idea of a film score that might be like the one you described. But he also, you know, and he did like Alien and The Omen are two movies that have really famous music. And if you didn't look, you might not think that the same person was responsible for those scores. And I mean, depending on the decade you look at, every decade has a completely different set of iconic film music moments. Another huge one would be like Wendy Carlos. It's another very different kind of soundtrack or score.

And actually, it's funny that I said soundtrack because that was a record that sold really well. And that music sort of came from a whole different world. Right. But it defined the movie just as intrinsically as the big scores of To Kill a Mockingbird or something did. And then you get into the 80s and it changes all over again. By now, the only thing that makes a score a score is that it's made with the movie you're looking at in mind. Composed, not pieced together.

And there's many ways to do that as there are to make music and software and shit. And there's people doing all kinds of things in those different media. That's a good segue to where we're at right now with film music. I want to start with just a brief chat about the Academy Award nominees this year. Obviously, I spoke to Hans for this episode. The score, I think, is I don't know if it's becoming legendary, but there has been an incredible amount of writing about what Zimmer did to create this mythic desert war film music, including literally construct new instruments that have never been

played before. And so he is, you know, Zimmer is probably number two behind John Williams amongst living film music composers. And, you know, in part because of the work he's done with Christopher Nolan over the last 20 years or so, but he's nominated. And I think he is the odds on favorite to win this year. A personal favorite of ours is also nominated Johnny Greenwood for his work in the power of the dog. What do you,

what do you, what do you like about the power of the dog score? Oh man. I mean, to me, it's an example of kind of the music that in the film that introduces a note that isn't played up completely in the acting or the writing right i mean we were talking we were talking about films where the music matches the movie intensifies it and like dune to me is

a great example of that that movie is like pure synesthesia like you go and sit in the theater and like you are living with the Fremen. Like the music, the score is so intense that it like puts you in the desert. And that's the effect. That's the intended effect, right? The music doesn't do a thing where you're watching the movie and listening to

the music and thinking, Oh, there's a subtle tension at work here between these two elements. That's not really what the music is supposed to be doing. Power of the dog to me seems like a great example of the kind of film music music where it's written and you use this word and i like seized on it because it was perfect it's working in counterpoint contrapuntally to the movie right it's like there's an entire psychological dimension here and you'd get it a little bit if you just watch this sort of uncomfortable sort of cloistered um stage play style movie you'd get some of those dynamics for

sure and in benedict cumberbatch's performance you'd get some of that but the place where you really feel its mark on you is in these intense troubled like late romantic 20th century streams that just come in from the side of the movie like like something's leaking through the walls and it really intensifies the claustrophobia in such a profound way and speaks to what's happening between the boy and Benedict Cumberbatch in a way that none of their dialogue can achieve on its own. It's fascinating.

Greenwood is not likely to win, though he is becoming more prolific and more prevalent in film scores. This is, I think, that's actually three films this year that he's contributed scores to. So Nicholas Bertell is also nominated uh previously a guest on this show probably most famous for being the composer of the succession

theme though he's of course worked with barry jenkins many times over the years and adam mckay he's now worked with adam mckay again on don't look up i don't have you written about burtell because i when i hear his music somehow i think back to conversations that you and I were having 10 or 11 years ago about this intersection of classical orchestral music or piano music and the contemporary. He's often considered a very modern figure. Never actually written about him, but I'm fascinated by him for sure, for some of those same reasons. And don't look up, the movie was not for me personally. It's just nothing about it was hitting for me personally um it's just not nothing about it was like hitting for me but the score actually liked a lot i like a lot more in the movie um and to me like

that's a great example of like the score doing the thing the movie wants to do the score kind of does it it's got this shrill blaring quality um that works better with the brass section than like with satire doesn't always need to be shrill and blaring. But you're right to speaking to the sort of, it does have this sneaky sophistication to the writing. Like I sort of hear like there's a lot of hot jazz feel to it. Like it's very intense and, you know,

like energy spilling off of a small stage, you know, but there's also some sort of weird, like sardonic feel to the music that reminds me a lot of like Kurt Weill, which is, you know, you think of something like the three penny opera, which was this very sardonic, everyone is rotten, you know, to the core, nasty, pitiless sort of satire. And the music, I mean, I don't think Don't Look Up even approaches good satire, but I think that there was an intention behind that movie to really skewer as mercilessly as possible, oblivion and all these various elements of media culture that I think if you're going to point to one thing in the movie that actually kind of succeeded at capturing that tone, it's Brattel and his score.

Interesting. So one of the nominees that was probably the biggest surprise was Alberto Iglesias' work for Parallel Mothers, which is the Pedro Almodovar film, which I think is widely considered a huge long shot. But one of the insurgents in the category is Germaine Franco's composition for Encanto. So you're the father of a young child. Encanto is in your life, I presume. When we think of Encanto, we think, you know, we don't talk about Bruno and the songs and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

But what do you hear in the score of that film? I mean, I'm stepping carefully because, as I said, I do not want to bite the hand that is feeding my child. I have, like many parents, I suspect I have what I would consider a surprisingly fraught relationship with the music and work of Lin-Manuel Miranda because he's omnipresent in a way that is both impressive and oppressive in equal measure. He's everywhere, dude. I mean, just this year, it was like Vivo, the animated film about the rapping monkey entered our, excuse me, Kinkachu entered our lives. And I was listening

to that music over my shoulder. And that movie is a rough one. It's a rough one to listen to over your shoulder while you're washing dishes. I'm just going to say like, but there is this sort of nearly diabolical cleverness and competence to even the stuff that I sense that Lin-Manuel Miranda is just writing because he got a big, he got a big check from Disney or whoever it is. And I'm not saying that to sound cutting. I actually think that his music is somewhat amazing. He does these things where he's influenced him. I mean, I can't speak authoritatively really because, but to me, he's much more influenced by like Broadway, classical Broadway and the way that in like the best Broadway, like, I mean,

Leonard Bernstein seems to be a huge touchstone for him because he wanted these contrapuntal voices. And that's like what identify it with a Lin-Manuel Miranda movie. There's always a point where like, you realize that this song that you heard earlier from the rapping monkey and this song you heard later from the pink haired girl go together and become one new song with the two parts interlocking. And then sometimes there's even a third song that sails in and locks in. And he does this thing where there's so much narrative

information which is honestly to me huge respect um huge respect for his ability to cram narrative information into songs and to move a plot along through songs and i think that lin-manuel miranda through his work through vivo through moana through through encanto honestly um which is like my second favorite if i'm like ranking those three movies that I just listed, it's good. It's, you know, we don't talk about Bruno is it's not, I didn't hear it and think, Oh my God, that's new. Let it go. Like that did not occur to me, but respect that it is. It's amazing that that song has become so huge.

And I only discovered how huge it was because Harrison, my son came home and excitedly told me that the other kids in the playground were singing that song. And he wanted me to know that they knew it as well, you know, because it's a streaming experience. We don't all have this experience having gone to the movies, you know, you just show up and oh my God, of course, everyone else in the entire world is watching this at home repeatedly. But yeah i mean that song is great um i think every song in that movie is at least very good and that's the thing with lin-manuel miranda uh is that even the stuff he does because he kind of carbon copies his style repeatedly from project

to project but even the stuff he just sort of does is really good baseline really good he puts way more effort into what you might consider someone's hack work with air quotes than he then he needs to for you know for the work um and i thought uncountable was great do you think that these five nominees are representative of where film music is going is it like a negotiation does it feel like a a call back to the past that's a i don't um to think about that one geez uh i don't know the answer really. Um, I think that the person that's not really represented in, in, in these categories, I guess Johnny Greenwood counts. No, I mean, I was about to say, see, Johnny Greenwood has made

the transition so completely in my head to composer because he's been working in this lane for years and he's been commissioned by symphony orchestras like the way that composers who only work in like orchestra worlds get compositions he's not just like you know um he's not just stepping away from radiohead for a while to do this thing he has an established career so when i looked at his name i thought of him as a composer and i was about to say that there isn't like that recently crossed you know that person who straddles the two worlds and johnny greenwood to me in 2014 or so was more the person or even earlier i suppose um around the time of there will be blood was the person who straddled those worlds because he was very much in the middle of being the guitarist in the world's most um you know esteemed and beloved

rock band and he was writing this ligigeti inspired score um so he's here and in some ways it's like a legacy pick for that kind of figure um but like I mean Mika Levy didn't have a a movie to be considered this year Zola though I think there's less music in Zola than there was previously in Jackie or something like that. Right. Time means nothing, but you're right. That was this year. But I feel like that's the figure that might be not represented as fully in this list. If there is one.

Right. Someone like boldly progressive in a way like these, there's something a little bit more traditional maybe about these five nominees. I mean, would you say so? That's, that would be,

that is sort of what I see when, you know, but it's the Academy. I mean, I'm impressed that, you know, I'm impressed that the power of the dog is nominated in some ways. I think you're right, though.

He's become like a hallowed figure in the world of film composers, you know, like Greenwood now has a huge reputation. But honestly, the Academy Awards has always been pretty generous and pretty open minded, I think, about interlopers. You know, this is the group that rewarded Isaac Hayes. You know, they celebrated Burt Bacharach. You know what I mean? Good points. There are, you know, evangelists who we'll talk about. You know, maybe not the traditional, not exactly what you think of when you think of film composition.

But these are, like, celebrated and often rewarded artists who are working in the space. So, it's always been one of my favorite categories. That's why I wanted to talk about this because it's so open-minded. I was just going to ask you, like, Sean, do you consider this to be like, in your like encyclopedic knowledge of the Oscars, is this the most inclusive category or the most?

It's up there. It's certainly up there. I mean, it's always celebrated artists from different styles of music, but part of that is because you don't have to see anyone who's making the music. Ooh, what a pointed observation. It draws blood almost. There's a reason why it was a little bit easier to celebrate Isaac Hayes in a way that they

maybe were not celebrating Black performers or Black filmmakers. But that's kind of neither here nor there. I mean, as far as the nominees this year, I feel like it's an interesting balance. You know, I feel like both Brattel and Greenwood are leaders of a kind of fifth generation of film composer. You know, they work very frequently. They often work with high-minded auteurs. Their music is extraordinarily present. It doesn't seep into the sounds necessarily like you can always kind of identify they have signatures they have motifs that they return to over and over again so it's cool to see them it's not surprising to see a disney film especially

one um with some some lin-manuel miranda compositions and zimmer is zimmer is zimmer i mean he's been nominated many many times he's won previously i think that this is considered like his um i don't know what what is it what is it what is it called when a like a professor retires you know like the sort of like the some sort of convocation of some kind you know or it's like okay we just have to say this guy actually deserves two Oscars he's one of the best he's dominated movie music for a long time but there's a whole host of I think like not quite contemporary young figures in the world, but people who are pushing the boundaries.

So I want to talk about them a little bit. You talked about Mika Levy. They are probably the most exciting composer in the space right now. What is it about Levy's music that speaks to you? Maybe put a little context around some other scores that they've done. Yeah. So the first score that I ever noticed, and I think the one that Mika Levy probably got

the most recognition for was the Under the Skin. That's correct, right? Absolutely. That's correct. Yeah. Formerly leader of the group Mikachu and the Shapes, so came directly out of the indie world sort of, and crafted this just terrifically unsettling score that to me is a benchmark. I mean,

still, I just think that the sort of alien quality that like strings and tone clusters can have, so like written all around a chord, not necessarily in a chord. So your ears, like I'm not in a, I'm not in like a stable space right now. You know, it's like you think about Ligeti and the Shining is a classic example of that kind of string writing and what it evokes in a viewer and like the way that they use those sounds to evoke Scarlett Johansson's alien character. That movie, I mean, I can't even imagine that movie's existence without that music.

And I remember hearing that and being like, how, I must have not known something very important about this person, Pikachu, you know, and the shapes, if this is the kind of music they're capable of. It was just so stunning. And I think what I love about their work, and they've gone on to do this work for the Jackie biopic, if that's what that was, that really intense sort of portrait of Jackie. And as you pointed out recently, that movie Zola, is that they're extraordinarily good at creating psychological space with the music that they write.

And they tailor their approach so well to each project. The music of Zola, it seems like it's halfway inspired by the Twitter chime, right? And it builds this weird sort of sing-songy world out of trap beats that keep hitting the score. But, you know, it's almost like scrolling through a TikTok feed. You hear two seconds of music, two seconds of music, completely unlike the language that they used to write under the skin, completely different, like seemingly school of thought. Like the fact that they can do those two things and both like elevate both

movies in a similar way. Like Zola also has its sort of nightmare carnival feel a large part to the music that Michael Levy wrote for that movie. And that to me is why they're the most exciting like similar to johnny greenwood but i mean i don't want to pit them against each other but arguably more diverse in the way that they use sounds in movies i think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about another rock star experimental transitioning figure who sort of dominates right now when you think of film music. And I wonder if you think Trent Reznor and his composition partner Atticus Ross, like, do they sit at the vanguard?

And where are they now as composers? Well, it's interesting you say that, because I feel like if we'd done if there was such a thing as a podcast in 2010, if we'd done this podcast in 2010, like we'd be talking about Johnny Greenwood and Trent Reznor in the way we're now talking about Mika Levy. Like they have had an incredible 2010s. I mean, those two, like Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor working as a partnership and Johnny Greenwood have had an incredible decade in the movies. And in some ways they've defined the decade. So by now, I mean, you made this point to me and I had to go back and remember this was true, right? To me, the archetypal score that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wrote was the social network back in, you know, was that 2010, Sean?

It was, yes. My fact checker, my fact checking cuz, thank you. And, you know, then you pointed out to me, because I went on a long sort of rhapsodic riff about that music, and you were like, oh, right. And now they're making Soul, the music for Soul, which has this amazing sort of like Microsoft startup music sort of vibe for, you know, what's it called? The in-between space. I haven't seen Soul in so long. Oh, I don't remember. That one's not resonating for harrison anymore

oh well you know harrison went through an intense time with soul um and i wish he was still watching it no disrespect to incanto but soul the music for soul is amazing and yes the fact that that's trent resner as well it was already a bit of a shock to people in a good way when trent resner of nine inch nails who at that point was known for Nine Inch Nails and for his like, his, his sort of his, his movements are in and around the digital music world where like, those are the two areas that he had sort of distinguished himself when he branched out. I remember people were making jokes about it, you know,

when he branched out into film scoring, I was like, you know, so is it going to be closer playing over the credits of the social network? You know, it seemed unlikely at the time, which is what made it so amazing and surprising when he turned out to be so adept. And so, yeah, I mean, I think of intensity and anger a lot of the time. And a kind of like... Yeah. And like expelling these dark feelings. And when I think of his film music, I think of concentration and a calmness. And a sort of like...

There's still an intensity there. There's still like a propulsion there. But especially now. And I thought about this a little bit with Mank too. So he does Mank and soul in the same year and mank is this this evocation of something that's gone now something that you were citing earlier you know the max steiners of the world or the franz wachsmans of the world or you know these these 1930s and 40s european film composers who were crafting movies for the golden age of hollywood and it's incredible that he's capable that he and atticus are capable of that it's incredible like this dude can do like

max steiner cosplay like excuse my voice just cracked on the words max steiner cosplay that's one for the record books but like he can do this score that's straight up like it you know it's like the music for i mean this is i was about to say it's like the music for citizen came but let's start that from the record because that'd be is, I was about to say it's like the music for Citizen Kane, but let's take that from the record. Cause that'd be the dumbest possible thing to say about the movie Manc. But it's totally like a love letter to this moment that Manc is about this moment when all these like intellectuals and,

you know, literary Bohemians and composers started bringing their talents to this studio machine there's this great story that i love where like arnold schoenberg who's like the guy who invented 12 tone you know the music that sounds like a you know a creaky door hinge to most people you know like famously i mean atonal music just the forbidding intense bespectacled, you know, professor of high modernism. He came to Hollywood because he was escaping the war and lived next to Shirley Temple, which I think is delightful. And he met with Irving Thalberg. And Irving Thalberg wanted Schoenberg to work for him. He wanted him to adapt

Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, like make a prestige picture. And Schoenberg was like, I want $50,000 in 1935 or whatever. And he got laughed out of a room. But when you hear that story and you look at Mank, I mean, that scene could be in the movie. You know, it is so of that world. And the music is the fact that that's from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is spectacular to me. Like it's given me a whole new appreciation for like the musician that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is spectacular to me. Like it's given me a whole new appreciation for like the musician that Trent

Reznor, I mean, in, in partnership with Atticus clearly is and his sensibility, which is so much broader, like than the world he was working with as a rock star. So we've named a couple of emerging iconic figures. I think there's a handful of others that I'll just briefly note that are,

I think at the, at the center that I'll just briefly note that are, I think, at the center of this stuff right now. You know, Alexander Desplat was not nominated this year for his work on a Wes Anderson movie, but he is frequently nominated. He is frequently working. He's from a much more traditional mode, I would say.

There's something like a little bit more like delicate and mannered, I think, about a lot of his music. Someone who we didn't talk about when we were prepping was Emil Mosseri, who's someone I really,

really like, who now I catch his name all the time. I think he composed the music for Minari two years ago and The Last Black Man in San Francisco three years ago.

He's really exciting. There's a couple of other people like Daniel Hart is a great shapeshifter who works with David Lowery quite a bit. Someone that you cited to me, which I think is a great call,

who doesn't work on a ton of films, but when they do, it's huge, is Jeff Barrow. I guess X of Portishead? What do you like about Jeff Barrow? I mean, similar to maybe Mika Levy, just this intense suffocating dread that comes through. I mean,

it's not always the flavor you want, but when you do have a movie that calls for something like that, like, um, the score that really, I think made me appreciate him, um, most was, um,

annihilation, which we talked about a little bit. Um, I'm a huge stand of that movie. Um, and I think that, yeah, I think it i think it's um uh better than the book um which may or may not be a hot take i'm not entirely certain how people feel about uh um the southern reach trilogy in your audience but um but totally i think that that movie was so much

more vivid and surprising and strange authentically strange feeling than the book, which is so rare. And I think a lot of that had to do with like this similar world, you know, of like sort of like, it's almost a subcutaneous, like a thumping, like a heightened pulse to the beats.

And which again, they're very similar to the work that Jeff Barrow might be doing in Portishead in the sense that they come from. It's, you know, those beats would not be out of place on a project of Jeff Barrow's, but like transposed to this world, they have a whole new life. I mean, that final sequence of the movie where Natalie Portman is doing this weird fricking ballet with her t1000 uh duplicate like is you know it's an insanely beautiful um piece of filmmaking um with the music sort of to thank for it it reminded me a little bit of um altered states um it had some of the same sort of um operatic nightmarish things going on with it, but using very different tools. Great call for altered states.

Late William Hurt just passed away. That's my favorite performance of his. That's what made me think of him, yeah. One other figure I want to talk about before we get to our top fives. So you mentioned this guy, and he is certainly among the most prolific composers right now and someone who's having a bit of a moment

because of his work on the Batman that's Michael G Aquino. What do you, what do you like about Michael G Aquino? What distinguishes him? Oh man. First of all, best part of the Batman in my personal opinion,

but I know you just had a pot about the Batman. We won't go into that, but that the score he did for was awesome for that. I thought, and he's someone who I've known about for a super long time because like you said he's incredibly prolific he actually I first gained notice of him working as a video game composer and then he sort of achieved more recognition I remember the first time I remember reading about him was Alex Ross wrote about him in the New Yorker because the music for the TV show Lost

was so spectacularly good and that that was Michael G Kino. And from there, you know, I mean, you look at his IMDb page and he scored everything including things that you would not have even noticed there was music in and not to be like throwing shade. But like he did Spider-Man No Way Home, which was, I mean, I've never cried more in a Marvel movie. Just say that for starters. That movie devastated me, but I don't know that the music had much to do with it.

It was just there. It was very good. It was very competent because he's working so often. He's interesting to me because he's also written some scores. Like the music for Lost is, it's serialized. It's a TV show. It's different, but it's still scoring a visual medium. And it was so terrifying and had so much to do with why that, you know, why we wasted years of our lives watching

that show. Um, but yeah, I mean, Michael G Aquino, um, I feel like as somebody who has a lot of style at his fingertips to use when the project he's given calls for, um, he does a lot of work for Pixar, um, for instance, and he wrote the score for the Incredibles. Um, and he wrote, which I loved like the entire theme for the Incredibles. Again, it's like this perfect little, like reminiscent of spy TV shows and 60s TV shows. And then he did Inside Out and Up, arguably two of the most emotionally gut-punching Pixar films ever made. The music for Inside Out will always devastate me. It's the sound of realizing you can't make your child happy all of the time. I mean, the theme, the string theme for that movie is amazing. And it was very delicate and very ethereal and very not straightforward. I mean, it was,

it was straightforward film writing. It wasn't like they were, you know, Michael G. Kona was out there making new instruments, like say Hans Zimmer to make these scores. But it testified to me that this is a guy with like a lot to say when when he's given and he's really good to me when his music is playful and i think that his playful music is some of his like best film music um and there's you know in a way what he did with the batman was one of the movie's only playful elements like something in the way you know was like in the trailer it was you know cool and blindingly obvious sort of at the same time in a way that those needle drops tend to be and the movie had a little bit of this plotting sort of it was you know very clear in its aims like it's never not raining there's no light bulbs in the city you know we get that it's dark and like the shot that i'll always remember is batman's wet boots stomping because it's synced

to the two cords of something in the way that mich G. Kino has strung out. And so he almost made something poetic and playful for me out of that movie's somewhat plodding pace. I just loved his score for that movie. So those are things I really like about him. Okay, so let's talk about our favorites. There's obviously, you could make a 10-year podcasting series about the history of film composition, and that's not the purpose of this episode.

But I think some of the names on our list will speak to the big history. I think we've got a pretty balanced list. We do have one crossover. So when you get to your number four, I'm going to tell you to hold it tight because it's going to come later in my list. I will.

When you were putting this list together, were you trying to represent a series of eras? Was it a purely emotional act? How did you figure out what were your favorites honestly i was frantic i felt like i was grabbing dollars in a wind tunnel i'm like there's a hundred years of film score writing you know the idea that i had to do one film by bernard bernard airman was like ludicrous to me um because you know there's lots of movies out there, but ultimately, yeah. I mean, I feel like what I chose were movies that had the most immediate impact on me, which is all I can really do, you know? So that means that, you know, there are movies out there

that I didn't see in a time of my life when I was the most impressionable. And, you know, I'm actually really interested in a couple of the movies on your list because, you know, in one case I hardly even knew of it. But in watching it, I was like, this music is absolutely incredible. But, you know, for better or for worse, I feel like I sort of, I tried to pick the movies and the figures, like that was the two ways I did it. Like the composers who I knew their music had had

something profound um to say and then movies that like had imprinted himself on my brain and there was you know a lot of overlap there but um yeah i mean let's let's let's start sharing them then because you mentioned bernard herman and and he's at the top of your list number five so what film and why this one dude you know this one was the worst for me i mean how easy would it be to just a top five airman i mean he did psycho he did vertigo he did the day the earth stood still and he did citizen fucking game like picking one of his scores feels straight up disrespectful you know like psycho invented every slasher horror film um you know it invented the sound of a knife

going into a helpless naked woman's torso. That's what that sound is. Vertigo. I'm going to make a crazy proclamation here on your podcast, and I hope you can handle the blowback. But that's a piece of late romantic string writing worthy of Schoenberg's Verklare Nacht.

Just going to go ahead. I threw it down, said it. I don't know what that means, but I believe you. I threw it down, said it. I don't know what that means, but I, I believe you. So with that said, you know, and the day the earth was still, again,

it was like, if people think of the theremin as this sci-fi instrument, it's largely because he thought to use it that way, but I had to go with my sentimental favorite and that's taxi driver. So that was my number five. That score to me um embodied a certain sort of new york sleaze um as depicted in film um a certain um fatalistic hopelessness as depicted on film um and it's had such a long half-life. I mean, all of his music has, but the world of that score,

which famously and somewhat like tragically was Paramount's last ever. He died before he could be considered for the Oscar for that one. He wrote it in two days, you know? And like, that's the theme song of travis bickle who is one of the most haunting upsetting and enduring archetypes in you know in american culture and in movies in particular um and you know like you still hear that music which is jazz primarily's like, but a sort of CD, almost like a blacklit poster evocation of a certain kind of jazz. It's like almost exaggeratedly lurid with the way the saxophone plays in the score. It's still sampled in hip hop records to this day. You know, you can still hear snaps. Is that dialogue alive in, you know, street rap today. And for me, for that alone, I feel like the sound of Robert De Niro narrating over that music is one of the most important sounds in movie history.

And so for that reason, that's my five. It's a great pick. If you had not picked this, I would have considered picking it. My number five is my Ennio Morricone pick. We didn't talk about Morricone at all, though he is, of course, one of the giants of film composition. The one I picked is Once Upon a Time in the West. This is my favorite Leone movie. This is not from the Man with No Name trilogy. It's a different film. This is a film that stars Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda. And the reason I picked it is because it's a great example of how essential the music is to the movie because the music plays a role in the movie. The Charles Bronson character is named Harmonica in this movie. And he is well known for playing his harmonica either before or after he kills someone. And the critical moment of this movie,

the sort of final confrontation with the big bad of the movie features this harmonic composition, which is so haunting and so powerful. And then there, you know, the film employs this flashback technique that shows us kind of the quote-unquote origins of the harmonica and where it comes from and how this relationship between this you know this quiet and distinctly non-heroic hero figure and this villain character

and their showdown and it's all in the music and And there's also, you know, the expected, like, massive, huge compositions, kind of soaring, almost operatic compositions that Morricone is known for, employing these, like, big soprano vocals. Yeah. As we see the huge Leone vistas. But it's the harmonica stuff that really sings to me. And... That's awesome. Morricone is, like, he's simultaneously overrated and underrated. He's done so much work.

He passed away in 2020 and was roundly celebrated when he passed. But there are so many unknown or lesser known scores outside of, I think there's a handful that are very, very well known. Of course, Tarantino brought him back into the mainstream, I think, in a big way in the last 20 years.

But people always cite The Mission as a big a big one for him i think obviously that the man with no name trilogy is a big thing for him maybe once upon a time in america another leone movie is something that's often cited yeah um but for me it's it's always been once upon a time in the west so that's my morricone pick i'm glad i wanted you to tackle morricone i like it was the world was too big i was like i have to Sean. He can eat the Morricone part of the lunch. I couldn't handle it. That's an amazing pick. So I'm going to hold on to my number four as we discussed. Hold on to number four

because I think it's a good conversation for us. My number four is, I guess, the most obscure of my picks here. Although, it's one that I think resonates to this day. It's Michael Small's music for Clute. Which is the Alan Pakula 1971

paranoia thriller starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. The reason I like this music is because it's the ultimate mood score. there's something lingering and unresolved in every piece of music there's one that very sort of particularly famous set called the tape which is this almost like um i don't i don't know i guess it's a xylophone is the is the instrument that's used and it's not a xylophone in the sort of like

playful child music kind of composition there's something like it's's not a xylophone in the sort of like playful child music kind of composition there's something like it's like stalker xylophone yes exactly there's something very unnerving about this music um you know when sam esmail directed the first season of the tv series homecoming he picked and chose a lot of film compositions from various paranoia thrillers from the 1970s. Oh, cool. Yeah. And so he plucked the tape out of this movie and dropped it into his show as a direct callback.

Oh, no way. And that was when I got reminded of it. It clued one of my favorite films. And Small had an incredible run as sort of like the, he was kind of the Morricone of this period. You know, he also did the score for the parallax view. He did this night moves marathon, man. He was extremely present.

You know, the Walter Hills, the driver, the China syndrome. He, he worked on a lot of great prestigious thrillers in the 1970s. And I was going to say the prestige thriller lane in the early seventies. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and he's kind of fallen out of fashion or fallen out of favor, but I love this music. It's like, it's a little, a lot of film scores. This is something I do. I've talked about it in the past, but I often, if I'm writing something, I often write to film scores. I've written to the social network many, many times over the years because of that propulsion. This is one of the

few scores that I love that I find hard to write to because it's somewhat upsetting, but it's very, very beautiful as well. So that's my number four i love that can i say thank you for making me go watch glute which i it's obscure enough that i hadn't seen it um and man yeah i mean it wasn't very long before i was like oh this is exactly why he picked it you know um and i love hearing that there was um the call back to homecoming, um, because that, you know, a show again about like surveillance, um, you know, and like that theme plays over the visual of the tape winding,

um, over and over again, you know, incredibly menacing stuff. Um, your number three is not so obscure. What, what,

what is it? My number three is a little film called Rocky. Yeah. And this is one of those ones where I almost didn't put it on here. And then I was like, who am I kidding? Like, what am I going to put in here instead of Rocky? Like, the most rousing theme I've ever heard. The reason I love this theme, and

Bill Conti famously said, this is a movie about a loser. That was what he said when he was asked about his music for Rocky. You had to believe in the third reel for just a minute that he could win. The music is the sound of believing you can win.

Convincing yourself you can win. You know, I mean, the convincing yourself you can win. There has never been in terms of like how much weight a score can lift to do the movies work for it. Has anyone deadlifted more emotional thematic weight than Bill Conti in Rocky? You know, I've watched Rocky's two through five because of Bill Conti, not because of, you know, Clubber Lang or whatever. I mean, the music is to credit and to blame for the existence of the franchise. I don't think there's any Rocky two without Bill Conti.

You know, the biggest moment in Creed, the hugest moment was when that theme began playing. It wasn't when he threw a punch, wasn't when he got in the ring. It was those strings theme began playing. It wasn't when he threw a punch. It wasn't when he got in the ring. It was those strings and those horns. Again, sampled onto eternity because you can't get more hype music than that. You can't do it. It's also emotional. The string theme is profoundly emotional. I mean, anyway, I could go on, but there's no way I couldn't put Rocky on there. I love it. I love that you were unashamed to pick something so obvious and yet so great. It's undeniable. Rocky's a great pick.

Another very obvious pick, but also someone we haven't talked about. And we haven't really talked about this sort of the man alone or more minimal composition. So my number three is John Carpenter's Halloween score. Carpenter, of course, the do-it-all of the horror film directors and someone who you know writes directs produces and also scores many of his films though not all of his movies the halloween score in the same way that the bernard herman score from you know vertigo and psycho and north by northwest i see them in this kind of trilogy of hitchcock tension pictures um yeah these anxiety movies carpenter is uh like the absolutely boiled down chemex version

of this you know like you can you can feel him pulling out the little pieces of tension that herman you know uses 40 instruments and basically just uses one synthesizer or one keyboard to compose some of the most haunting music of all time. And again, like so hugely influential, like every single slasher in the 80s feels like it is operating on Carpenter's shoulders because of, in part because of the way the movie is written and cut and the tension and the anxiety of the film itself. But the music is so, so important.

And he essentially like invents an entire subgenre of music with that halloween score so i figured we should cite it here and i feel like it's a good match for herman as well dude and what i love about him is that i don't think he sat down and was like i'm gonna make minimal terrifying music he had like a weekend and one synthesizer and he didn't want to pay somebody to write the score and so he just sat down and made that music, which is like, to me, you know, it's like one of those stories of B-movie filmmaking that's so good. It's like fucking Johnny Appleseed. It's like a myth. It's impossible to believe that someone who had a weekend and one bad synth could sit down and write in three notes, the Halloween film score, right?

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. Yeah, but not always, right? But it was in his case, for sure. I'm excited to hear your number two. Yeah, let's hear number two. This was originally my number one before, again, I had to get real with myself. But Vangelis and the score for Blade Runner. So if you've ever used your synthesizer

to make your movie sound foreboding since Blade Runner, you were influenced by Blade Runner. I think there's just no getting around it. And that's both because, I mean, Blade Runner is like, you know, I'm not saying anything that isn't universally known is one of the most like influential aesthetic movies of all time. But also because it came at this time in the world of music and music technology um where synthesizers were just starting to become

things that you could buy they weren't really still they were like cadillacs sort of like and there was a specific synth that Vangelis loved that kind of became the Vangelis synth. And that's what the Blade Runner soundtrack was made on. And the Chariots of Fire soundtrack a new one was basically like buying a car. It was like 220 pounds. It was an absurd thing. It was like a fricking Maybach with cross with a spaceship. It was an insane thing. Stevie Wonder had four of them. He famously like used it so much. He broke ribbon control knob off of one of them. And the reason people loved them was that they were what they were. And I promise this is going somewhere somewhere this fucking disquisition on synthesizer technology is that they were pressure sensitive which meant that when you touch them lightly they made quiet sounds you hit them harder they made loud sounds which sounds very simple maybe now but at the time was revolutionary and so evangelist took this

instrument and became like the poet of it and blade runner is his masterwork i mean it sounds variously like um pedal steel guitar in places, the way it sort of weeps in these long lines that don't have clear attacks or decays. It sounds like, you know, but most importantly to me, it sounds so fucking cool. It helps the movie feel so much cooler, which is, you know, a near impossibility given the way that it's lit and it's filmed, but like the synesthesia of that score, I think, and if your goal is synesthesia,

which we've talked about, sometimes it's not, sometimes we want the music to jump out in front of the movie and point something out. But if your goal is immersion, then I'm not sure there's maybe only one person who was my number one, who's done a better job of that. Like you can't even see those shots of the wind, uh, like the rain, you know, rain street city or those ships without hearing those tones in your head. It's a great pick.

Um, I admittedly don't know very much about Vangelis at all. So your, your disquisition on, on the synth technology is honestly awesome. Uh, I'm glad I could bring something to the game here. You know,

you're bringing so much. My number two is, uh johnny greenwood for there will be blood obviously one of my favorite movies ever made you probably could pick any number of the greenwood compositions for the paul thomas anderson movies i think there's a strong case for the master there's probably a really strong case for phantom thread i know that's a favorite of yours too which is a much more sort of beautiful and lush and elegant composition. There's something much more foreboding. I think about the work that he does for there will be blood in the master, something really unsettling about that music.

It's obviously hugely, hugely inspired by Penderecki, who is a Polish composer who he's actually worked with in the past. And this, it's almost like the whole score feels like a building is about to fall on everybody. You know, it is so intense and it feels like we are right on to fall on everybody. It is so intense.

And it feels like we are right on the edge of doom as we're listening to it. From the very opening shot of that mountain in the film. And you can sense that something is just not right here. We're about to enter a world that is very upsetting. And it's interesting that he has moved so far away from that you know i think he still is interested in the concept of doom if you have seen i don't know if you've seen spencer yet but spencer is sort of like the jazz doom score you know that's where he's he's deploying you know like um like like a doom like clarinet which is

a slightly different register but right you're right that he's he's entered the establishment and he is a much more well-known brand but when this film first came out and we did not know him it was it was shocking that he was doing nowhere yeah so obviously i just had to recognize greenwood um you want to go to your number one? Yeah. You know, I feel like I'm setting up like a nice softball for you to compliment me on how brave I am in my obvious choices. No, no, it's necessary. Somebody had to do it and you've done it. So what is it? Yeah.

So my number one score, you mentioned john williams for me the register he works in um it's childlike wonder and you know these sort of those feelings that you want to feel and movies that want to inspire them right in some ways the entire like current film landscape is designed to try to evoke these feelings that's like the entirety of the modern blockbuster, you know, everything in movies kind of comes back to this feeling that I think only John Williams owns. I mean, Spielberg obviously is associated as a director with this sort of sense and George Lucas is too,

but I don't think any one person embodies that sound or that feeling more than John Williams does. And the movie I picked for him, and this is the thing I had to really think about, I just settled on The Empire Strikes Back. I figured it had to be Star Wars. I mean, I love his music for Indiana Jones, obviously, which is super fun. But the music for Star Wars, I mean, I his music for Indiana Jones obviously which is super fun but the music for Star Wars I mean I feel like that's we can't not have a conversation

about Star Wars and a conversation about film scoring probably and I picked Empire Strikes Back in part because a lot of the music that you associate with like maybe the original Star Wars wasn't in that film it was

actually in the empire strikes back you know um the imperial march only is heard in the empire in the empire strikes back you know if you watch the first star wars again you'll drive yourself crazy whenever darth vader comes on screen waiting for those notes and they don't come because he didn't come upon that he didn't come upon that theme which is so elemental seeming to the franchise until that movie. It's also like the Leia and Han Solo theme. It's the one that plays when she says, I love you. And he says, I know that's the music playing over the back of it. And he wrote that theme for the Empire Strikes Back. Basically, the reason I picked this movie is because this movie created all the lump in the throat Star Wars movies. The idea that you would even maybe get choked up watching a movie in which, you know, a dude and his space dog shoot lasers at a man in a large helmet, like would make you cry.

Like, I think it's because of the music more than anything. Um, and for me, that boils down to like John Williams is music. And I could go on about him, but it's the right, it's the right pick. I mean, from 1975 to 1980, here's what John Williams did.

He did the score for jaws in 1975. And then he did a score for star Wars in 1977. And then he did the score for close encounters of the third kind in 1977. He did the score for Star Wars in 1977. And then he did the score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. He did the score for Superman in 1978. And then in 1980, he does The Empire Strikes Back. And then in 1981, he follows it up with a little thing called Raiders of the Lost Ark. We didn't talk

about Jurassic Park. We didn't talk about T. We didn't talk about all of the incredible work. I mean, you could talk about Harry Potter. Yes, 100%. I mean, to come back to childlike wonder again, because I feel like that's the corner of, um, Oh,

jaws is a perfect exception that foils my narrative there. But I guess to me, it's almost the counterpoint. He also owns childlike dread. Nothing is more primal than the fear of the shark in the water. And, uh, so,

um, for me, I come back to like my son who is now into star wars and has been for a couple years um and he wants me to play star wars soundtracks over my stereo system while he plays with the star wars legos and like he will take out the figures from his lego bin that accord to the music because he's five and a half years old. But if I play duel of the fates on Spotify, he knows which characters in the movie are fighting.

And that's insane to me. Like the level of identification for a five-year-old to pick up on is insane. Right? Like picture any character in costume in star Wars, and you can hear the music that their character has in your head. There's no greater accomplishment than that. That's insane. And so we were watching Harry.

So the reason at the point I'm going to get to, right, that's my son's relationship to John Williams. We watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time this past weekend. Two minutes in and he's never said this to me. It turns to me and goes, I love the music for this movie. That's pretty great. Incredible. I mean, it's the right pick. I'm now salivating at the idea of showing Alice, my daughter, all of these

movies. I don't know if she'll be as into Star Wars as Harrison. I hope so, though. That would be exciting for me. Okay, my number one is your number four. It's a film I've talked about many, many times on this show. So listeners will know Anton Karras' score for The Third Man, the 1947, I don't know, spy thriller, paranoia movie, post-war emotional breakup between two seemingly good pals.

It's a film that's set in Vienna, Austria. And so, of course, Carol Reed, the filmmaker, sought out an Austrian composer. And in fact, an Austrian zither player. There's nothing, of course, about his decision decision it's part of what makes it so great it's so unlikely you use the word contrapuntal earlier and there's nothing more contrapuntal than the zippy jaunty bizarrely cheery folkloric sounds of the zither playing throughout this deeply dark and cynical movie about what

people are really doing underneath the surface. I love this score. I think it's entrancing. I think it's a perfect choice for a story like this. Why do you like it? I mean, I love it. If I,

if it weren't for the stranglehold that, you know, LucasArts has in my my childhood memories i would have picked this from a number one as well um because to me this is like if i'm not leading with my pure like feelings about um movies this is the one for me too um both because of like the audacity of the decision which like that's a behind the scenes element of the thing where sir carol reed who's i believe filmmaking royalty or at least stage acting royalty um he he goes if he doesn't enlist an austrian composer to score like but by then would have been a very established move right you make

a noir see i've always thought of third man as a noir for some reason although maybe that's a misnomer it absolutely seems like it's about societal rot. He doesn't get the dark, foreboding expressionist score. He gets a guy who literally is a street corner musician who plays for Beer and Sausages in Vienna. He's like, that guy, he's going to score this film and also Orson Welles is going to be in it. The visionary aspect of that

for me is amazing. He knows exactly what he's doing because the first scene, the first visual of the movie is strings vibrating, right? There is nothing more intentional than that. This is like what he wants you to look at. And like you said, it's contrapuntal. It's like, if you boil this movie down in my, you know, cause I think about the first time I saw it in like film study class and 12th, you know, and senior of high school. Um, if I boil that movie down to two essential elements, it's the zither. And then it's, um, it's Harry Lyme, Orson Welles' character

with the cuckoo clock speech. And because Orson Welles has this sort of apple cheek sort of cheeriness in that speech, when he's talking about basically the degradation of all moral boundaries that the non-existence of a good and evil um and a completely chilling machiavellian view of the world in the most jaunty voice and then the score is the first thing you that excuse me i misspoke the zither playing the score is the first shot the movie is those two things to me like everything else that movie is brilliant but those are the two essential characteristics of that movie i'm with you completely there was an amazing callback to that when i was watching the beatles get back and they just randomly started performing the hairy lime theme do you remember this part

from part one that was great that was bizarre i was like is that was this was this created for me it was an incredible intersection of my interests. Anyway, Jason, this has been great. You've been great. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for bringing your expertise, your insight, and your enthusiasm. Do you have anything to plug?

What do you want to tell people? Where should they check you out? That's a great question, Sean. What should I plug? I feel like I'm on Hot Ones right now. Minus the great tasting chicken. Yes, you are. Minus the great tasting chicken. Yes, you are the great tasting chicken. Um, I could use some of the stuff they have for my throat, not, not coincidentally, but, um, no,

I'm writing a novel that I want to sell to people. And then when it comes out in year 2020 X, I want the world to buy it, read it. But that's kind of like saying I'm working on a spaceship right now. So, um, no, I mean, I'm Pitchfork again, and I'm really loving it. I feel like I took some time off to do some things. I ghost wrote a book that was all experience. And then in the end of that, I kind of went back to music writing. And I'm kind of an incurable to my own dismay. I kind of can't stop doing this. I love it very much. And I've been most excited lately to be writing things for the site that I've been writing for for the longest, you know, in my day to day. Well, thank you for doing this. Check out Jason's writing on Pitchfork.

Now let's go to my conversation with Hans Zimmer. It is an honor to be joined by the great Hans Zimmer. Hans, thanks for doing the show today. I'm very, hang on, the honor truly is all mine. I mean, you know, that anybody wants to hear anything that I have to say, well, maybe they don't, but let's find out. Let's find out. So I spoke with Denny a few months ago, and we talked about this film. The trapper said.

Well, he said the first person he called was you. That's true. Actually, it wasn't quite like that. He didn't call me. We were standing somewhere, and he very quietly said to me, had I ever heard of a book called Dune? And my reaction was somewhat akin to like a small puppy getting crazy and chasing its

own tail and like yapping and going, but you don't understand when I was a teenager. No, no, no. It was so vastly important to me. I think I scared him a little bit, but I obviously didn't scare him enough to not come back. The other thing is, he wasn't talking about a movie. He literally was saying, had I ever read the book?

And I think it was actually at a time before he was asked, would he do the movie? So it was just something that was sort of floating in the air. And I don't know if you know this, but Mary Parent at Legendary finally secured the rights, and it was very difficult to get. And that day, she read somewhere in a paper that Denis me you know he felt the one person who was so obsessed with the book that i'd never seen the the david lynch movie i never seen the television

show because i had made this sort of movie in my head and i didn't want that vision to sort of get blunted um but i mean you have spoken to denise you, so you know that there's a grace and there's a sort of gentleness with which he speaks. And so when it actually came to the next part of that statement, which was months and months later, which was, we're going to make a movie, I felt totally safe and secure that he was going to make, he was the one who was going to make the closest to what that movie was that I had seen as a 13-year-old in my head. And so rather than approaching it with the sort of hindsight and the knowledge and the wisdom of age and the experience of having made lots of movies. Both of us, I think, dived right in.

Like we regressed to become reckless teenagers and we took chances and we experimented and we did things which aren't quite on the roadmap to how do you write a film score, for instance. And it became a very different, right from the word go, it became a very different way of working, whereby rather than, you know, like so much of filmmaking evolves around discussion. You know, I have an idea.

I put the idea out to my director and he questions it or we discuss or we build on it. And I keep thinking that Denis and I would, either he would start a sentence and I would finish it or I would start a sentence and he would finish it. So it wasn't like a discussion. It was just like we were just honing in on having experienced the book the same way and trying to figure out how to present this to an audience. Because, I mean, you know, we all know the stories of great and fantastic filmmakers having struggled with this material and like Don Quixote,

fought battles with this as like the big windmill out there, the movie that cannot be tamed, the movie that cannot be made. So that was really, as far as I was concerned, I think it helped that I knew the book so well, which meant I didn't have to resort to the idea, which is normal film composing. You write themes forosing. You write themes for everybody. You write motifs for everybody. You write

themes for situations. Here comes the attack. Here comes the car chase. Here comes the love scene. Here comes whatever. You write all these different themes. I didn't do that. I thought it'd be much more interesting if we embraced the idea.

Sorry, I have to get a little bit technical here. No, I want to hear it. I embraced the idea that every musical instrument is really a historical device of technology, right? Violin is a piece of technology of its time. The pipe organ is a piece of technology of its time. And so now here we are making a movie in the future. So don't we have license to go and invent instruments? So all these instruments either synthesized or made out of metal or whatever you want, all these things were invented. With the one exception, which was the human voice

and specifically the female voice. So all these abstractions, these sounds that you've never heard before, were really there to frame the one thing that for Denis and me was vastly important, that we always had the suspicion that the true driving force of the story was the female characters. And that we should, in a funny way, celebrate that or bring that to the foreground. And then rather than having all these motifs and all these dotted I's and cross T's and dealing with facts all the time, all I did was I would change the tone color.

I would change Lady Jessica, which would be, she is change, you know, Lady Jessica would be, you know, she is a mother. So that would be one type of sound. You know, she is the royal concubine. That's another type of sound that can coexist with being a mother. But, you know, beyond all that, and that's part of what all these characters are, they all have their secrets. So there's that other layer, the Bene Gesserit layer, which is thousands of years of DNA. So where appropriate, I can go, I literally turn on a dime. I could go and change the colors as opposed to change the melodies. I love how deeply you've considered all this. You can tell that the material is so important

to you and Denis from a young age, but you mentioned something, which is that you've considered all this you can tell that the material is so important to you and denise from a young age but you mentioned something which is that you've been seeing the movie in your mind and that's one of the reasons why you didn't watch those original adaptations when you see a movie in your mind as a teenager or as an adult does that movie have music on it um sometimes yeah you know yeah, it has a sonic world. It absolutely has a sonic world. I wouldn't necessarily call it music, but, you know, not everything that is in this film that I have been nominated for, as far as music is concerned, I would consider music.

But it certainly is, you know, sometimes I think of them as sound sculptures or just painting with sound or something like that. So I've done this for a long time, you know, whereby you want to world build. You want to go and say, you know, and that's why it's important, you know, that the sound design team, you know and that's why it's important you know that this uh you know the sound design team you know you know mark and and theo and and my lot we were all working really closely together because in a funny way you know we we had to create this world from scratch and and there's nothing more exciting than well look there's nothing more exciting than, well, look, there's nothing more exciting than playing God for a second. Somebody says, go and do that.

But I mean, that wasn't really, that was just like a cheap line I got to throw you. But I think the idea of, I mean, I do that with every film. I really think it through. I really think it through. the idea of, I mean, I do that with every film. I really think it through. I really think it through. And I think it through as well,

very much influenced by the design and by the color scheme and by the cinematography. In this one, for instance, it was important to always take a little bit of top off. Don't make it too bright, you know, and, and, and, and, and get a bit of grit under the fingernails when you play. It feels like sand almost. It sounds like sand. You use this phrase impossible sounds a lot when talking about this film. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by that.

But impossible sounds? Yeah. If I could explain, I wouldn't have used that phrase. No, no, no, no. I mean, it's only impossible because, look, I come from synthesis. I come from sound design. I didn't study to become a composer or musician or anything like this. I used to go and rip computers to pieces and shut down city grids. If it didn't catch fire, I didn't think the score was going to work out. So I come from that. So the only reason I'm saying impossible sound is because it's actually quite boring to say to you,

well, Tina Guru, she's a cellist, and I didn't want her cello to sound like a cello. I wanted it to sound like the way I imagined a Tibetan war horn to sound sound but i don't even know if there is such a thing but i like the word but i knew that if i set up a bunch if i if i got a very smart man in berlin to write me a piece of software which would be basically all these resonating chambers i could go and mangle tina's cello and make it sound like it wasn't a cello but some tribal thing that was made out of bronze and blown and maybe there's such a thing as the Tibetan Bohon that sounds like that. So there's a lot of that. There was a lot of, you know, Ch smith who is a musician he's a sculptor he's a welder and i relied on his welding skills tremendously to go and build me instruments made out of he has a you know i call

it an unholy alliance with boring and lockheed and other people who built, you know, spacecraft, et cetera. Because everything he builds, he builds out of recycled metal. And the metal is usually things that we can't even pronounce or we didn't even know exist. And so he builds these vast instruments, and these vast instruments reside in his house, which again is built as a, the whole house is a musical instrument. So it's not like, you know,

you phone Chaz and say, can you nip around and can you quickly play this line for me? It's not like that at all. It's like, Chaz, it's a bit like turning the Titanic around or anything except, you know,

Chaz, fire up the house. We're going to go and record a note. You know? So when I say impossible, part of it is it's impossible to explain, but part of it is it's impossible to actually... I really got Denis... I just forgot to tell him.

There's the shot of the bagpipe player in the film. But what you hear is not the bagpipes at first. What you hear is actually this phenomenal guitarist Guthrie Govan.

Okay, admittedly he's Scottish. But the sound you hear is an electric guitar, brilliantly imitating bagpipes. And then, yes, you know, there are 30 bagpipe players in a church in Edinburgh, you know, and all that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, the impossible sound, truly impossible sound, is the sound of Laura Kotler's voice. She became like the call for me of this movie. You know?

And what she does is, you know, and I know this, I mean, she told me, it's so close to damaging her voice forever. So, you know, nobody came along on this one just for the ride.

Everybody was totally committed. I mean, shooting in the desert is not for the faint of heart. So I've heard. So I've heard. I'm curious also, you also recorded this score at a very strange time in our history

and you had to do so over a number of continents and had to use Zoom. And I think people imagine the work of someone like yourself. And I think if you're not standing in front of the orchestra, you're behind a glass booth that is observing the orchestra and telling them where to go and where to move. And that wasn't what you had to do here.

Can you just talk about how that was different and what was good about that or what was not so good about that? Before COVID, before any of that started, I really made up my mind that I wanted to make it the sort of chamber score with. And I felt that the reckless teenager in me felt that I needed equally reckless musicians who would play each note, you know, however weird with complete commitment. That was the only way we were going to get away with it. So I had my band together and I knew these people well and they knew me well.

So I think that was vital. I mean, if you need to look at a timeline that, you know, one of my musicians I've been working with since 1978, Joe Walker, our editor, we worked together for the first time, created chaos more than likely in 1988, you know, and so there was something good about we knew each other, you know, actually vital. I don't think we could have done it had we not known each other so um that because the the zoom is not a good way to communicate with i mean it it's it's like it's it's it's like a cheap yeah it's the difference between a cheap hamburger and uh you

know like a really good steak or whatever i don know, like decent bottle of wine or something that comes out of some plastic thing, right? It pretends that we are communicating on a human level, but we're not really. You know, we pretend we are looking into each other's eyes, but we're not really because there's a time delay. It's these tiny time delays that ruin any communication. So that's just to say, yes, we worked across many continents, and it could have been difficult had we not known each other so well in a funny way

having made up my mind beforehand that it wasn't going to be an orchestral score because I felt that was inappropriate but you know that the groundwork the intellectual conceit of the whole thing was already there actually helped so work, I mean, the intellectual conceit of the whole thing was already there, actually

helped. So, basically what happened is we just moved my studio into, we cleared out the sitting room and my sitting room became my studio and my daughter still says

that she has saduka voice, PTSD, because, you know, at 5.uka Boys PTSD because, you know, at 5.30 in the morning, you know, a little girl comes out and goes, Daddy, I got to get to school tomorrow. Oh, you know. So, yeah, you know, it's, but the idea, the idea of us working together, and luckily Denis and I, we knew each other well enough that communication was very easy. I wanted to ask you about that a bit, actually, because, forgive me for framing it this way, but you are very, very, very, very well known in your field. You are extraordinarily successful. you have been widely celebrated and so when you're on a project even

if you're working well even if you're working with someone as as as decorated and and admired as denis what happens when you compose something or suggest something and he says no and then is there do you have a battle of the egos? How do you communicate through a disagreement creatively? Actually, it's a good question, which doesn't apply, but I will answer it nonetheless. Because we never disagreed. What I found through all the movies I've done

is that I think my way through very carefully. I built an intellectual construct. I am an architect at heart, I suppose. And then very often, you know, I write a piece of music and John Powell said this to me sometimes. He said, you know, because I was saying to him, God, I sit there like two weeks sometimes to write eight notes.

You know, why does it take me two weeks to write eight notes? And he goes, well, you just haven't gotten it. You haven't gotten the film under your fingers yet. And I thought that was a really good, simple way of saying it. And so the same thing happens, you know, if your director questions, your director doesn't usually, you know, if you're sure about the story and you're sure about what story you want to tell cinematically, you might just not be quite good enough yet to write that.

You know, you need to do a bit of, you know, let me put it this way. A few years back, I found a tape, you know, if you remember what tape is, tape is what you record things onto. I found a tape that had 48 different versions of Lion King main theme. And none of them were bad. None of them were, you know, in the words of Gore Verbinski, who once said that to me,

they were all serviceable but ordinary. And it, you know, and I i had it took me 48 perfectly good tunes before i went before i i went hang on this this is the one this one takes all the boxes and they're not they're not boxes for somebody else you know they're not i don't you know i don't I'm not a musical secretary. I don't go, hey, Denis, do you like this? It's like I have to like. This happened two hours ago. There's another something coming out and

somebody had sent artwork to Denis and me, and he answered going, wow, this is beautiful. Then he wrote to me going oh I'm sorry um you should have answered first no no it's your movie so so so you know you know we are we are we are we're very cautious that we we're all aiming for the same thing which is protect you know protect the story protect the story with your life. But we're all aiming in the same direction. So ego doesn't come into it.

You know, I probably shouldn't say this because people might just take advantage of this. But I know when it's not quite there and I know when we need to go and throw it in the bin, even if I work around the clock for like weeks on it. And I'm just going, wow, I love, you know, hey, I'm in this because I love movies and I love writing music. You know, all that's happened is somebody says go write another piece of music what else am i gonna do that does remind me of something i wanted to ask you which is in this long career that you've had are there any that you wish you could have another shot at or that you would do differently if you could do it over again probably all of them and in one way or the other yeah um

it was interesting you know i i did have, I did have a shot at something twice, which was Lion King. Because of the stage show? Well, no, actually three times, yes. Okay. Sorry, I forgot the Broadway show. No, because the, you know, a so-called inverted comma life action version.

Right, okay, sure. So. Did you change anything? Yeah, I fixed a few things. I don't think people really noticed. In the original one, and it's just because I'm very sensitive to it,

we were working relatively fast. There was one scene that wasn't, when I was writing it, it wasn't in color yet. It was still in black and white. And then when I saw it at the premiere in color, it was like fingerstyle or blackboard because the music and the colors on the screen

were just screaming at each other. And I was incredibly embarrassed. And nobody else has ever noticed. It's just me. So that got fixed. And then I had this idea that, especially in animation, everything is manufactured. Everything is art. Everything is artifact.

Everybody knew the music, right? So everybody in the orchestra, everybody knew the music. So the first few days were spent the way you do. You go one piece after the other and investigate it. And on the last day, I said, okay, I'll tell you what we're going to do. Just put your music in order in front of you. Take a deep breath. We're going to play this movie from start to finish without stopping

as if we're doing a live performance of it. And if there are wrong notes, too bad. If people fall over, somebody has a heart attack, whatever, we're not stopping for anything. Earthquakes, fires, here we come. And that was great because there was a real rush of energy that you suddenly got. And weirdly, the opposite applies to Dune, where we were all in isolation,

where Loa was singing in her closet. I have a photo of coats touching the top of her head. So there was a lot of that, but there was a weird energy that was going on as well because everybody was just fighting against this idea of social distancing. You know, like musicians don't understand the idea of social distancing because what we do is, you know, we gather in a circle

and we make noise together. So we were forced into social distancing, which we then very quickly realized was actually not social distancing at all. It was physical distancing and socially we needed to get, we needed to find ways and methods and whatever to get closer. And the only way to do that was, you know, turn up your guitar, play, you know, just just go for it, you know, commit to every note, commit to every drumbeat that you hit, you know, just do it. And just know that

being used to having the person sitting next to you is not going to happen this time. But you still could react to what they were playing, you know, we weren't all playing together, but you would get a recording. I just remember Guthrie Guttman, the guitarist, I'd asked him to do something, and he, as usual, came back with something really quite extraordinary, really phenomenal, and sending it to Tina Grohl, the cellist, and saying to her, can you ghost what he did? I mean, and I was playing the same notes.

And she phoned back and she said, there are notes in there that don't actually exist in the normal vocabulary. And so it was things like that, where people were working so at the edge of the impossible, which just sort of made it a delight as well. Plus, we weren't confined by the bureaucracy of working within the session environment and the three hours

and then you have to take a break and da-da-da-da. The only thing that confined people was, you know, their own, you know, we all practiced a lot. This was actually a score where everybody had to practice. It was really good, you know, and we gave each other time to practice and get things under our fingers. Hans, I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for doing the show. Congratulations on your nomination and on Dune in general. Thank you so much for doing the show. Congratulations on your nomination and on Dune in general. Thank you

so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you to the great Hans Zimmer, Jason Green, and the maestro of this podcast, our producer Bobby Wagner for his work. Stay tuned to The Big Picture. Got another episode coming to you later this week. It's a recommendation episode featuring 10 movies from 2022 that you have to see. We'll see you then.