You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirway. The film was directed by Denis Villeneuve and the score was written by Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. Hans Zimmer has scored over 200 films and he's been nominated for Oscars 11 times. He and Denis Villeneuve first worked together on the film Blade Runner 2049.
Dune tells the story of the Atreides family as they relocate to the desert planet of Iraqis. When Hans Zimmer first started working on the music, he made what he calls a sketchbook, creating motifs and themes that might occur in the film. In this episode, he takes us through the first sketch that he did for Dune. It's called Paul's Dream. My name is Hans Zimmer, I'm a film composer and that was the job I had on Denis Villeneuve's Dune.
We have a mutual friend, our editor, Joe Walker. Joe and I, we go back. We worked for the BBC in 1988. Joe actually started out as a composer and I think that's an important part to know because he cuts in a very musical way. I remember Joe Furling up and going, we're a little stuck on this project, Blade Runner 2049. And it was somewhere in that time that Denis said the words Dune to me. It's a lifetime story, really. Hans Zimmer first read Dune when he was 13 years old.
And now if you go forward many, many years, Denis very quietly won, evening asking me if I had ever heard of a book called Dune and me sort of freaking out at him, going, but you don't understand. When I was a teenager, I make my own movie in my head. And one of the things I never did, I never watched the David Lynch version, I never watched the television version. Because I had all these images burned into my head and I didn't want them to get extinguished or blunted or disturbed in any way.
But knowing Denis and Denis being a friend, it felt really safe to go on this adventure together. Usually you have discussions about ideas, you'd say, here I have this idea, what do you think? But what was Denis and me, what kept happening was that he would start a sentence and I could finish it. I would start a sentence and he could finish it. And it was like we had always heard and seen the movie on parallel tracks.
And it wasn't ever about what's the creative approach to the music, it was more about what's the philosophical underpinning of the story. It's very much like a teenager dreaming, you know, where your dreams seem to have a profound meaning and sometimes some of that meaning becomes the truth. But very often that meaning is just random noise and very unreliable narrator to your own life or even to your own subconscious. The piece I send you is the original demo, it's just called Paul Stream.
The sketchbook is how I go about figuring out what the architect shaft, the whole thing is. So the sketchbook gives you all the motifs, it gives you all the sounds, it gives you everything. And then from that it becomes the score. For this track particular, the idea partly was that it's a boy that dreams of the desert and he's not at the desert yet. The first thing I put down was sense bell plong, which has nothing to do with anything. It's just you got to start somewhere.
Part of my conceptual thing is I know what tempos Joe likes working at when he's editing. I know what tempos they need likes because there's an unharmedness about his filmmaking. There's a deep sense of letting you experience the image fully, letting you experience the performance fully. So nothing develops at like a lightning speed. So picking the tempos, partly knowing the people you're working with. There's a little quarter notes at the beginning and that low, you know, that low drony thingy.
There's safe places to start on. To me this is like a signature Hans Zimmer sound. Do you think of it that way? Yeah, you're on at the same time. Every movie I make them, I make new ones, but they're not that different from each other. It's just I love the low sort of Tibetan. You know, I can sing it. It's part of my register. I love the idea of that innocent little temple bell ringing at the top and then softies of monks at the bottom.
I need to go and find some familiar ground to calm myself down because here's the thing. This is an enormously ambitious project making this movie and sort of a childhood dream. So the last thing I said to Dini before he went off to shoot the movie, I just looked at him so stony and I said, Dini, just one thing, don't fuck it up. But then he came back and it was the same thing. Now the responsibility had shifted on to my shoulders.
One of the things that Dini and I agreed on was that even though the book seems on the surface to be about all these very masculine heroes, it's really the women that are the power that drive the story forward and that drive fate and destiny of everybody forward. So the score should be relying heavily on the female voice. You have Lisa Gerard, you have Suzanne Waters, you have Edie Lee-Man-Boricka and then the great Noah Kotler on Lead Vocal. And those are really the choir.
If our hero is Paul and his mother Jessica and she actually is not in a scene, I still always kept like an echo of a female voice going to just maintain that. It felt like the desert to me. The book is tinged with Middle Eastern themes, but first of all I didn't want to do that cultural imperialism where I was going to go and suddenly rip off every cliche that you find in Middle Eastern music. Not did I want to root the thing that firmly in the Middle East. That's really not the point.
It's on the planet Arrakis set in the future. There should be just a hand and maybe it's a Middle East, but maybe it's not. John Williams is to me the most masterful composer we have and one of the most masterful Scorsese ever written by Star Wars. But when you're 13 years and you're precocious and you're full of humorous and arrogant and you start thinking all these crazy things, you know, I'm sitting there, I'm going in a galaxy far, far away.
Why am I hearing strings? Why am I hearing French horns? Should not be completely different sounds and truly know and self intended to the pleasure, for instance, that I got out of listening to Star Wars and how that is a perfect score for that movie. I always at the back of my mind was the thought that there should be a different sound and the only sound that should remain in our galaxy far, far away and in time and in space should be the human voice.
And again, it's this idea that the women's voice is whispering in your ear something, some secret. You'll never know what the secret is. One day I got the sort of amazing chant back from Lisa that just became like, let it be underbelly.
That's Lisa Tarrard from Dead Condence or Lisa Tarrard from Gladiator. I try to make everything tension, basically holding your breath through the stream and then there comes this very obvious chord that will lead you to something else. You just know it's building to something. We're now in the meat of Dune. Now we're on a journey. I have this band of extraordinary musicians like Tina Goua and Guthrie Gov and Pedro Yastash and they can do things that other people can't do.
The Duke, ancient Armenian instrument and I keep thinking if it's ancient it'll hold its value into the future. It'll be something that you can pick up in 10,000 years and it will still be relevant. So it's actually Pedro playing two different dukes, one and one key and one and another key because the tune is just outside its range. What I like in folk music is this idea of everybody is playing the same tune at the same time but they're all interpreting it slightly differently.
Tina Goua, who is a very polite, wonderful human being and then she picks up her cello and the way she picks up her cello it's only like a sword. It's an electric cello so it can become anything I wanted to become. The way she plays I mean that's not how you're supposed to play a cello and that's what I love about it. And you got Guthrie Gov and who's one of the world's finest guitar players. And you suddenly realize there is a rock band playing.
For Dene and myself it was teenagers reading the book and we were listening to Pink Floyd and we were listening to guitar music and so the idea of some weird rock opera wasn't so far removed from our thoughts. Many people have tried to make this movie and two people who have been very influential and to me in this one was Joderowski. Alejandro Joderowski was a visionary director who tried to make an adaptation of Dune in the mid 1970s but the project ran way over budget and was never finished.
And of course his idea was to hire Pink Floyd to do the music. So one of the trailers, you know just to honor Joderowski and the whole thing we actually used a clips from Dark Set of the Moon. And the other person that was important to me was Carl Schulze, you know who's really one of the pioneers of electronic music.
And he actually wrote an album called Dune but in a novel album called X he wrote a track called Frank Robert. So I thought it was appropriate to do a little bit of Claus Schulze the type Pink Floyd type electronic synth sequences repeating ostinatos. We're now in the real theme for the planet. Once Paul's family arrives on the planet Dune on Arrakis like all noble house you need a fanfare you need somebody to herald the arrival and you know you suddenly see a bagpiper in a shot.
But the first bagpipes you hear in the movie aren't backpipes at all it's actually got three imitating it on guitar. By the time I actually came to putting anything down I wasn't in my studio I was at home in COVID lockdown so this whole score was down in my sitting room.
My team turned into a studio and it's right next to my daughter's bedroom so she will tell everybody that she suffers from backpipes PTSD because at 5.30 in the morning and I'm still blasting away you know the whole house is shaking. For the me the shots in the movie that he saw when he was reading the book of a teenager and there sounds and gestures and ideas that I heard in my head when I was a teenager that's a crazy drum phrase which I it's called world boy.
It's sort of the antique roof if you try to dance to that you will break your ankles but I always had this idea that you know rhythm develops rhythm moves forward and maybe as we evolve there are rhythms which we've never heard before that we we suddenly find interesting. Quite a bit of the scores based on this really inhuman pattern of drum beats which are by the way completely synthesized.
There's a piece of score that law really grabs and I mean sings full out and there's a commitment to each note which is I mean it's terrifying. It takes a special human being to commit to expose their soul that way to be that audacious about their singing. It's the same tune as at the beginning now but now it's the warrior princess singing at you know and law truly is for me the warrior woman.
There's a whole dictionary that was written for this language but of course I did what every good rock musician does I ignored what the words mean and I just picked the words that would sing well.
The professor of linguistics who spent months and months writing this language is probably quietly horrified by what I did but the point isn't that you're supposed to understand the words you understand somebody is telling you something important and I don't know how you feel but I mean when I hear law you know grab those notes and those words I feel I'm understanding that she's telling me a story. I'm understanding that she's telling me a story.
This must have done during COVID and I have a fabulous photo of law in her closed covered with all her coats hanging above her head and she's sitting on the floor and she's got a microphone in front of her. So this piece which feels like it's being sung across an endless landscape of a desert bouncing off the rocks of mountains etc was all done in a closet in Brooklyn.
I'm a great believer in that music should always let you know that you can have an experience but never tell you what the experience is but it just says to you come along I'm going to take your journey and it's going to be different. You never know anything until you play to your partner your director. Denis was in Montreal I was in Los Angeles but Denis went that's it that is the thing that I've been hearing in my head.
We both approach the movie not with the hindsight of grown men in the middle age not with the wisdom of time gone by and all the other stuff we've done but somehow we had the recklessness in the sense of experimentation and the sense of fearlessness and remember a big message of the book is you know fear is the mind killer I shall not fear you know. This this to a teenage boy was very important so this is the score that I would have written as a 13 year old. I didn't fuck it up.
And now here's Paul's dream from the Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. The Doon sketchbook by Hans Zimmer in its entirety. To learn more visit songexploder.net slash Doon.
You'll find links to stream or download this track and you can watch the trailer for the film. From Wondry and Dr. Seuss comes to the Grinch Holiday Podcast. Listen every week as the Grinch hosted by Saturday Night Lives James Austin Johnson. Goats hilarious celebrity guests as they try to get the Grinch to turn his sour Grinchy frown upside down. Will they succeed or will he grill them like chestnuts on an open fire?
Follow Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was made by me with editing help from Craig Ealy and Casey Deel. Artwork by Carlos Lerma, Music Clarence by Kathleen Smith and Production Assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a network of independent listener supported artist owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at RishiHairway and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a song exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm RishiKHairway. Thanks for listening.