by Jenny Nelson
Just as Zimmer may raise a few eyebrows by not composing with pen and paper, Nolan defies tradition by turning his back on temp scores, the standard way for a director to explain what he expects of the music. This technique, in which music is borrowed from other composers, may be in part responsible for the pervasive ‘Hans Zimmer sound’ aped by other composers, as they’ve been given Zimmer cues in temp scores and have wittingly or unwittingly imitated them to achieve the desired effect. As Zimmer explains, Nolan insists ‘that no music shall ever be near the movie that wasn’t written for the movie and in the past, for instance in the Batman movies, if I hadn’t written a few reels they would just cut with no music’.
Another feature of Zimmer’s and Nolan’s collaborative world is that it includes other key members of the crew, notably the sound design and editing team. Lee Smith has been Nolan’s editor since Batman Begins and Zimmer, who describes him as the director’s ‘number one’, also has a long-standing rapport with him, the pair having first met over twenty years ago when Smith was director Peter Weir’s sound editor: ‘We all come from this sort of sonic world, and I think it’s helpful. He can cut in silence because he can imagine it.’ If Smith and Nolan reach a creative impasse, Zimmer can step in to offer a fresh perspective. On Batman Begins (2005), the director describes ‘what I consider to be a great musical moment when the bats first surround Bruce Wayne, and we had a lot of trouble with a big wide shot at the end we were cutting to, trying to achieve the right grandeur. We kept putting it on the music and saying, “How do we do this, how do we hit it?” and Hans finally said, “Can you just have the bats fill the frame so it goes to black?” Lee and I looked at each other and thought, “Well, we missed that!” So we do that and magically Hans’s music was already perfect.’
The piece in question is ‘Barbastella’, one of the stand-out moments from a decidedly un-heroic-sounding score. The cues are all named after different types of bat, and other musical highlights include ‘Vespertilio’, used during the flashback of the bats, and ‘Eptesicus’, which starts in a gentle manner then builds in strength as Bruce Wayne begins his training. The music is never overbearing but matches the action and emotion as and when required, and it’s no surprise that Zimmer was immersed in the sound and editing as well as the scoring, or that Nolan would want him to become a regular part of the team. As the director puts it, ‘That’s the kind of creative collaboration you’re looking for from the people you work with. I don’t think it’s possible for a composer to just be in their musical lane; I think you need somebody who’s part of the team and more involved.’ Many of the partnerships examined in this book have flourished because the composer stays within their creative realm while the director respects and acknowledges the importance of their music; it’s interesting that Nolan actively encourages Zimmer to contribute to other parts of the film-making process.
Of course, Zimmer had the added benefit of collaborating with another composer on this score, and Newton Howard has previously explained that ‘the combination of the two of us has become the voice of the score’. They worked on some themes separately, in offices across the hall from each other at the same studios where Nolan was working on post-production. Having two composers opened the scoring process up to a wider conversation, and the pair worked so closely they have said they can’t remember which of them wrote specific cues in the film.
Following the critical and commercial success of Batman Begins, which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography and three BAFTA nods including Best Sound, the pressure was on for the second instalment in the trilogy, and it’s safe to say Nolan raised the bar, and then some. The highest-grossing film of 2008, The Dark Knight is considered one of the finest superhero films ever made, and impressively for a film of this genre, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two, for Best Sound Editing and Best Supporting Actor, for Heath Ledger who played the Joker.
Once again, Zimmer threw himself into the score. He created ‘The Joker Suite’, around 10,000 bars of music that he has described as ‘mayhem’, which was his way of getting to the core of the villain’s character and depicting his anarchy and fearlessness. Nolan apparently spent a long-distance plane journey dissecting around ten hours’ worth of music and selecting the bars that he felt had impact, and this became a nine-minute piece, ‘Why So Serious?’ Throughout the film, the Joker’s actions force characters to make difficult ethical decisions and the music reflects the escalating tension and chaos by employing the aforementioned Shepard Tone along with near-deafening crescendos, such as in the mighty ‘Aggressive Expansion’, when swathes of strings, interspersed with pulsating rhythms, build to a crashing wall of sound.
Nolan was reportedly initially reticent to embark on a third film in the DC Comics universe, but together with his brother Jonathan and David S. Goyer, a story was devised that further explores the concept of heroism and expectations of a superhero film, as well as providing all the special effects required from a blockbuster action movie. Newton Howard was invited to return with Zimmer for the third film but declined, having seen how well Nolan and Zimmer gelled, not least with their work together on the interim film, Inception. For his part, Zimmer was keen to put his own stamp fully on the final instalment. He incorporated some of the earlier themes in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), such as the bat-flapping motif that accompanied the opening logo for all three films, but the inclusion of new characters allowed for the musical universe to be expanded. ‘Gotham’s Reckoning’, the principal theme for villain Bane, is big, bold and portentous, whereas ‘Mind If I Cut In?’, Selina Kyle’s theme, encompasses gentle piano with repetitive percussion and frantic strings, creating an intense aura of foreboding.
Again, Zimmer was hands-on with more than the score. Nolan acknowledges that ‘there have been many things that have come from Hans, and not all of them musical, some of them really relating to story. He’s an all-round creative collaborator.’ One particular contribution was the scene at the start of a football match, just before the stadium is blown up by Bane. The director had been considering different options for this sequence and asked Zimmer to suggest well-known names who might want to appear singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. After throwing a few ideas into the ring, the composer called him to say the most fitting choice would be for a young boy to stand on the pitch singing the national anthem because this got right to the core of the story’s emotional heart, and as Nolan acknowledges in the album sleeve notes, ‘It was the sort of priceless contribution that gives you goosebumps and reveals your dangerous dependence on a collaborator.’
Zimmer is equally full of praise for Nolan’s talents, and acknowledges that the director builds the environment in which the composer can participate and create – easier said than done in the world of big-budget films and major Hollywood studios: ‘Here is the main thing that Chris does: he takes the terror away. He protects me. He surrounds me with a way to keep me safe.’ Creating this place of safety and the two-way bond of trust involved in doing so is central to their collaborative success and strengthens their dynamic.
Zimmer describes the relaxed world they inhabit when working on a project together: ‘Chris makes his movies in his garage – that’s where his cutting room is – and my studio is very much set up like a living room . . . it’s just two friends having a chat, and I’m near the keyboard and in the middle of the chat an idea will come. So there’s a playfulness involved, and we are really rigorous at maintaining our privacy. People think Chris is very secretive but he’s not secretive at all. To do what he does, you have to have the luxury of trying things out and some of these ideas might not work. You don’t want to do that in front of the studio or the public, you want to do that within the family that is your core team.’
Having displayed his prowess at superhero scoring, Zimmer was the obvious choice when Nolan was working on a reboot of the Superman story. The score for Man of Steel (2013), co-written and co-produced by Nolan, works on a similarly br
oad palette, with sweeping action cues that are mini emotional journeys, such as ‘Terraforming’, and the brilliantly named ‘What Are You Going to Do When You Are Not Saving the World?’ Zimmer teamed up with fellow composer Tom Holkenborg (under his pseudonym Junkie XL) on the follow-up, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), of which Nolan was executive producer. Despite the poor-to-middling reviews for the film, the music fused orchestral and electronic sounds to powerful effect; if you are ever in need of a musical call to action, seek out ‘Is She With You?’
In between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan and Zimmer stepped away from Gotham City to collaborate on one of the most original films of the decade. A science-fiction heist film packed with intelligence, action and mind-bending special effects, Inception (2010) cemented Nolan’s status as a writer and director with verve, vision and near-limitless imagination. He had submitted his idea of ‘dream stealers’ to Warner Bros. shortly after completing Insomnia but acknowledged such an ambitious project required more experience, so turned his attentions to Batman Begins. His original idea had more of a horror bent than the final dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams tale, which incorporated his trademark tropes of film noir and suspense, and on release Inception was many critics’ film of the year, standing out as a one-off, complex blockbuster in a world often dominated by reboots, adaptations and sequels. Inception received eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Zimmer for Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay (Nolan’s second nod in that category) and the coveted Best Picture nomination, and it won four: Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound Editing.
Encouraged by Nolan to try out new ideas (understandably, given the film is about stretching the boundaries of reality and perception), Zimmer created an electronic score with an emotional heft. Driving rhythms and guitar give cues like ‘Mombasa’ a breathless urgency, and in the case of ‘Time’, waves of strings and glassy piano notes offer a moment of reflection before the sudden ending erupts into ambiguity. Most notable is the now ubiquitous Braaam sound that found fame in the trailers but was created by Zimmer in the opening track ‘Half Remembered Dream’. Nolan had written Edith Piaf ’s song ‘Je ne regrette rien’ into the script and the aim was to introduce a different, slowed-down part of the song within each layer of dream in the film. Experimenting with that concept and aiming to create a sound of distant horns, Zimmer started with a piano in a church, put a book on the pedal and asked brass players to ‘play into the resonance of the piano’. He added some electronic magic, and Braaams were born. They are now so commonplace in movie music that their origin is a bit of a touchy subject: composers Zack Hemsey and Mike Zarin were brought in to work on the music for the different Inception trailers, so some people place the credit with them, while others refer to trailers from earlier films, such as District 9 (2009), to point out ‘braaamsian’ – if you will – qualities within them. For his part, Zimmer claims that he is the ‘godfather of braaams’, and that the inception of the famous, focused foghorn was born of Nolan’s plan to use the Piaf song and Zimmer’s subsequent experimentation to see what would happen if it was slowed down.
With Inception, Zimmer created impact and emotional connection through the layering of sounds, effects and music, and the digital manipulation thereof, as opposed to a ‘typical’ score – a technique he would later employ for Interstellar. The resulting soundscapes owe their success to neither director nor composer treating a film’s music as a stand-alone entity: ‘What I’m always interested in’, Zimmer explains, ‘is that we really try to create a whole sonic world.’ As he points out, both Inception and Interstellar deal with complex subjects and at times the audience may feel confused or lost within the intellectual framework of the story. Zimmer’s belief is that the music should act like a river, moving the audience through the film: ‘Like all journeys sometimes it might get a bit stormy, a bit rocky, but let’s make sure if you enjoy the journey, there is something that guides you emotionally all the way through.’
After dreams and superheroes, Nolan took us into space with Interstellar (2014). The tagline on the movie poster was ‘Go Further’ and that’s clearly what the director set out to do. The story of a group of astronauts searching through a wormhole in the universe for a new home for humanity, when planet Earth becomes unsustainable, embraced vast themes and scientific possibilities, so it was even more crucial that the music got to the heart of the story. As Nolan describes it, ‘When you’re working with someone like Hans who is a great talent, a great genius . . . the challenge really is to challenge him . . . to find a way to destabilise him and destabilise his process, which he hates but he thanks you for it in the end!’
By this stage, composer and director had complete faith in each other, and both were keen to try out something different. ‘One of the games we played,’ said Zimmer, signalling that he and Nolan had fun as well as pushing each other creatively, ‘because we felt what we had done for the Batman movies and what we had done for Inception had sort of seeped into the general film-music consciousness a little too much, was to go, “What are we not going to do?” Simple things like no string ostinatos, no action drummy things, there’s none of that going on.’
Nolan was keen to get Zimmer involved as early as possible, due in part to his dislike of temp scores but primarily to allow him creative freedom that wasn’t dictated by the narrative but, rather, fused within it. He set an unusual challenge, as the composer explains: ‘He started off by coming to me and saying if he were to write one page but not tell me what the movie is about, would I give one day and write whatever came to mind? Of course I said yes, it sounds like fun, so he sent me this letter and inside it was this beautifully typewritten, rather thick piece of paper, [which] described the relationship between a father and his son. And a lot of the things which resonated in that with me were things that Chris knew very well about me and about my relationship with my children.’ Zimmer spent a day writing and then called Nolan late on a Sunday evening to play him what he’d come up with. As Zimmer notes, ‘It’s always precarious when you play something to somebody for the first time’, so he asked for Nolan’s thoughts with trepidation: ‘His answer was, “Well, I suppose I’d better make the movie now.” To which what I said was “Well, what is the movie?”!’
As Nolan recalls, ‘He didn’t even know it was a science-fiction film. That was very important to me. So he wrote the piece of music that actually forms the basis for the entire score without even knowing the genre of the film, and that was a fascinating thing to do.’ Zimmer was initially confused about the scale of the story and the deceptively simple piano tune he’d written, ‘Day One’: ‘At one point I said to him, “Hang on a second, I’ve just written you the most intimate, tiny, personal theme, really, about my son”, and he said, “Yes, but I now know where the heart of the movie is”, and in a funny way that became an important cornerstone for the score.’ Nolan listened to ‘Day One’ as he worked on the script, so music influenced content, just as he’d desired. Somehow, it’s fitting for a story that takes the audience over space and time that the music and story are so intimately entwined, and the composer described the process of creation – with script and score determining each other – as ‘two musicians jamming together. We know the song we sort of want to play and then we go and improvise on that.’
The score sounds a universe away from the Zimmer Braaams and is elevated by the ethereal power of the pipe organ. The director suggested using the instrument before the composer had written anything apart from the initial piano piece because ‘it always seemed to me that he should have written an organ score and he hadn’t until that point. In talking to him it became apparent that [he] had a huge connection emotionally with the pipe organ, but hadn’t really used it in scores other than in small ways.’ A young Hans used to play a 2,500-pipe baroque organ belonging to a family friend, an elderly organist whom he credits as influencing his choice of career path, and as well as having s
uch a personal connection to the instrument, he explains that the very structure of the organ, and its role in history, resonated with a film about scientific and technological breakthroughs: ‘By the seventeenth century the church organ was the most complex human creation, and it maintained that pivotal position of complexity until the telephone exchange was invented, and one of the things that was really important to us as a subtext for the movie was to celebrate human endeavour.’
Of course it’s not just what the organ represents but its sound – and what a sound! Nolan hadn’t initially appreciated the magnitude of using such an intricate instrument: ‘What I didn’t know because I’m not a musician is how unbelievably difficult and cumbersome it is to write to and work with . . . It required a radically different approach from him and it was amazing to watch Hans rise to that challenge.’ Zimmer completed the score on his computer, gleefully experimenting with the sounds from thousands of individual pipes from the organ in Salisbury Cathedral, which had been painstakingly recorded by sound engineer Brett Milan, whose software recreates digital equivalents of existing organs such as the 1877 Henry Willis instrument at Salisbury. Zimmer’s organ works were dubbed onto the final film, and many crew members thought the score was done and dusted, but then the composer and director decided to go to the UK to see whether a church acoustic could enhance the electronic score.
Zimmer admits in the Interstellar sleeve notes that he was nervous about the recording sessions at the Temple Church in London because his music had not been limited by the practicalities of playing an organ – ‘I never censored my imagination by wondering if it was even humanly possible to play’ – and he voiced his concerns to Nolan. The pair agreed to temper their ambitions, deciding that if they returned with only one interesting sound or experiment, it would still have been worth it. But as Zimmer later revealed, he needn’t have worried, thanks to the talented organist Roger Sayer: ‘In the best English understatement, after Roger looked at the parts, he said, “Maybe I should go and try some of this”, and he was absolutely extraordinary. From the first note we knew it was going to work.’
