Dunkirk Composer Hans Zimmer Knows How the World Is Supposed to Sound

Hans Zimmer feels like talking. I have him for twenty minutes, but just as I get ready to wrap up and ask him some rapid-fire questions, he hits me with a proposal: "We are victims of deadlines all the time, so how about this? Let's just chat. Let's just talk, and not look at the watch." We end up running over two hours, at which point his extremely patient assistant intervenes.

Zimmer's career has spanned just about every genre, every mood, every beloved film franchise you could care to mention. He's the man behind "The Circle of Life"—in fact The Lion King earned him an Oscar for Best Original Score. He accentuated Gladiator's tandem violence and emotion with a balanced score that, in the wrong hands, could undoubtedly have turned that movie into a disaster. Of course, he's the musical technician behind the scenes of Christopher Nolan's body of work, delivering beauty, anger, and everything in between for movies like The Dark Knight, Interstellar, and, of course, Inception.

With just two weeks of formal training in his entire career (he took piano lessons very briefly as a child, but hated them), he has made a living from finding new ways to enhance the very concept of a "film," to relay experience, to speak to his audience. Hot off the heels of Blade Runner 2049, Dunkirk (for which he received his 11th Academy Award nomination today), and a live tour that took him from the desert of Coachella to the splendor of Radio City Music Hall, Zimmer shows no signs of slowing down. GQ spoke to Zimmer about his most intense project yet, the hidden secrets he likes to pepper into his work, and, of course, the now world-famous (and meme-ified) Inception noise.

GQ: Between the Grammy nominations for Hidden Figures and Dunkirk, and the success of Blade Runner 2049, it's a big year, even by your standards.
Hans Zimmer: And, don't forget, people actually got me out to go and do a tour, so... It's not bad for a 60-year-old.

That's true.
Dunkirk was, obviously, a monumental task instigated by the great Chris Nolan. Of all the projects I've ever worked on, this was the most all-consuming. I think for all of us even Chris will admit to that, in a peculiar way, it was the hardest thing we've ever done.

Let's talk about the Dunkirk score. It's unrelenting, with that ticking clock motif running through the entire film.
The thing that I'm proudest about Dunkirk is you can't separate it from the film. Chris and I have now been working together for 16 years and it's always been our ambition, somehow, that the score and the images become one total experience.

I will also say, even the music of Dunkirk is Chris's work as much as it is mine. We managed to make a movie where you see the score and you hear the images, where it's so closely intertwined. We've been trying to do this for so long and we've been sharpening our pencils and working towards this sort of goal forever. I think this time we actually managed to achieve it. And here comes the funny thing: When you talk about a movie as a composer, you're forever talking about serving the vision of the director or something like that. Of course, vision is exactly the wrong word for what we did, because it is as much visual experience as it is an aural experience. The two are inextricably linked.

How did you even start to approach the Dunkirk score? You sound stressed about it even now.
I am! [laughs] Chris said to me it's going to be a 90-minute movie. I did not believe him. Okay, so, he nearly stuck to his word. It's a 94-minute movie. By our standards, it's a very short movie. With that in mind, with the simple story, he wanted it to be rich and complicated behind the scenes.

So I went to Dunkirk. I took some sand and put it in a little glass jar and brought it back to Los Angeles and sat down. Chris liked this idea I had for the score—that it's based on a mathematical idea—which seemed like a really good idea when I blurted it out. It created nothing but trouble for me. Every 10 seconds I would come up against an insurmountable problem and there were no solutions, because nobody had ever tried to solve any of this stuff. I keep hesitating to call our first 100 rough cut "music." It wasn't really music at the time, but it certainly was something that existed simultaneously to the film.

What kind of mathematical ideas are in the score?
Well, you were right that it starts off with Chris' watch—that's actually his watch we use. But... Okay, I'm hesitating in some of my answers, let me tell you why.

Sure.
There are a couple of ideas in there that I want to keep hidden for two reasons: One, I don't want you sit you and watch the movie and try to work out what the mathematics of it are, because that destroys the elegance of having an experience.

Secondly, ever since we did Batman Begins, anything Chris and I did somehow has managed to find its way into other people's movies in one shape or the other. If you think about the crazy low brass section in Inception, that is a story point. It was a story point in the movie. It was written in the script, and suddenly it turns up in everybody's trailer. I am going to tiptoe around a couple of things, but I am going to give you as much information as I possibly can.

Do you regret the Inception brass?
Do I? No. It makes me smile. When it's in one of a thousand trailers, it just becomes a device. A noise. There's a big difference between a story point and just some random sound effect that sounds good. I don't regret that we did something which was weird and crazy and atonal and actually quite a horrendous, angry sound. Suddenly, everybody jumped on it and started to embrace it. Sometimes they embrace it too much.

Why do you think it took off?
I think it's primal. Ron Howard once said to me, "Trailers are like dreams. You can jump from anything to anything." I think that primal sound, it's ballsy as hell. It's hard to ignore. It lets the guys who make the trailer jump from one non-sequitur to the next.

Here's a thing about me: Even if the movie is a huge success I always will go, "Yeah, it's okay. I think we could have done better." For once, I can honestly say, Dunkirk, I think we left no stone unturned. It was seven months of working ridiculous hours and then going home, then going straight to bed, and dreaming about it all night long. It never left me alone.

All my friends quite rightly deserted me. I was unbearable to be around. I was losing my mind: "Hang on. They got all these guys off the beach in a week. Why am I still here seven months later and I haven't gotten anybody off the beach yet?"

Would you consider Nolan to be your most significant collaborator?
Maybe. That's a tough one because it depends on which part of me you're addressing. If it's a comedy, I will go and tell you that Jim Brooks is a lot better at writing a great funny line than Chris Nolan is. As Good As It Gets was just as intense in a funny way, even though it was a comedy. Working with Ron Howard on Rush was a different thing. It addresses different parts of me.

Actually, you made me realize something just now, that each one teaches me how to be better for the next project. I leave each project behind going, "Yeah, this is as good as I could have made it at this moment in time." I leave each project with a list of questions, with a list of things that, with a list of new ideas, with a list of possibilities that didn't have room in that project.

One of the really important things is a friendship I have with the directors that I worked closely with because, I don't know, I'm German, I'm dark, I'm gloomy, and I despair and you need somebody who cheers you up or somebody who intellectually can at least talk the enigma through with you.

Tell me more about your tour this year.
It was my musician friends who had gotten on my back and said, "Hans, eventually, you owe it to the audience to look them in the eyes. You can't hide behind a screen for the rest of your life."

I thought [it'd be] interesting to see if music can stand on its own two feet and we don't show a single image of film. I am terrified that we're losing the relevance of orchestras, that orchestras are just going to disappear. Hollywood, whatever you want to say about it that is horrible—and all those things are true—but the one thing you can't take away from Hollywood is that on a daily basis, it commissions orchestral music.

When you were looking those people in the eye in the desert, what was the energy that you were getting back from the crowds?
I mean this with great love, but it was astonishing to see grown men cry when we played The Lion King.

Did you feel emotional too?
I did. The set I did on tour is very personal. I finished with that piece "Time" from Inception which, again, I'm never going to tell you why it was there because it's so personal to me. "Time" finishes just with me playing the piano for far too long and far too quietly. To have complete silence. It was the deafening silence during that piece that got to me, where I thought we were really connecting.

I saw earlier that you shared the soundtrack to The Holiday on Twitter.
Yeah! Look at us. From Dunkirk to The Holiday in one conversation. It just shows that I have a little scope.

What makes a good Nancy Meyers score compared to a good Christopher Nolan score?
Actually, Nancy's coming over in a little while. She had an idea that she wants to talk to me about. The key is to write a romantic score without it becoming sentimental. I actually get to be a little more funny than people expect me to be. The downside of having worked with Chris on The Dark Knight and Inception, all these things, suddenly people expect the only emotion I'm capable of is absolute German bleak darkness, that everything I do is tinged by some Kafkaesque hole that we all disappear into.

The Holiday also has Jack Black playing a film composer, I'm sure that was weird.
It was! It was really weird there for a moment sitting here writing a piece of music with Jack Black sitting on the couch behind me. The experience at that moment of having Jack sit there and me writing what he would be later on be writing in the movie was akin to some of the stuff Chris pulls in Interstellar.

Am I writing for Jack? Am I writing for myself? What am I writing about here? In a lot of things, it's trivial and personal. I have kids and they loved that movie. The only reason I did The Lion King was because I was a dad and I couldn't take my six-year-old daughter to the premiere of, I don't know, a Black Hawk Down or something.

We keep coming back to the idea of these things being very personal for you. You said that there were mathematical parts of Dunkirk that you can't talk about and you won't talk about what "Time" is about in Inception because it's so personal.
Actually, I'm having a nice time. I'll tell you what "Time" was about in my live set. The set was the shape of my life. The timeline. I started off with Driving Miss Daisy and I ended the set with "Time."

I met this publicist, Ronni Chasen, who was [Richard D.] Zanuck's publicist. She heard me play Driving Miss Daisy and she said, "Hey, you're good. I want to be your publicist." So, she turned from publicist into one of my best friends. Right while we were doing Inception, she was murdered and the last thing she heard was me play "Time."

So, every night, I would play it in memory of her, of our friendship and our relationship. It's my way of remembering and playing something for somebody. I remember that Chris and I were at some function and Ronni was there and Clint Eastwood was there and Chris said to me, "Oh, wow. Look. There's Clint Eastwood." I said, "Oh, Ronni knows him. She'll take you over there and introduce you." I remember standing there seeing Clint Eastwood and Chris Nolan talking to each other as filmmakers. Ronni was standing there in her element. I was thinking, "What a dame. She's at the top of her game. Here she is introducing two great filmmakers to each other and having the time of her life." Literally within days, in some crazy, senseless robbery, she was murdered. So, yeah. Life happens while you write music and you cannot... I don't want to distance myself from the life that I live and not put it into the music because otherwise, when I get to the end of my life, none of those experiences will have mattered. Rather than writing words or writing a diary or writing a book or anything like this, I tell you the story of my life through music because for me, music is my language. Here we are: You're talking to a German in English. But the way I can express myself best is through music, which for me, is a legitimate and autonomous language. So, there you have it. It's dark and it's a tragedy.

But I'm not willing to forget the tragedy and I'm not willing to forget the person and I'm willing to, every night on the road, just remember that she was my friend and I wouldn't have gotten to Radio City Music Hall without her, without her barking at me, "Tuck your shirt in," before an interview. Spitting on her handkerchief and wiping my cheek clean because I'm messy by nature. All these things.

By extension of that, you said that you worked on The Lion King for your daughter— I took the job not just because I wanted to show off as Dad. There's another layer to it. The movie is really about the death of a father. My father died when I was six years old. I don't care what any psychologist tells you. There's no way a six-year-old can deal with it. Suddenly, there I'm sitting in front of a cartoon with fuzzy animals and my past hits me like a truck and I'm suddenly writing about the experience of what it felt like. So, this score for kids, this score with fuzzy animals suddenly became my way of having to deal or having to confront it, having to deal with my past. So, the death of the father in the movie is, for an animated movie, it's a fairly unusual piece of music. It's completely and utterly personal.

When's the last time you did something you consider a failure?
A true failure? I'm pretty obnoxious at not letting anything leave my studio which I think is complete and utter crap. I remember working on The Da Vinci Code. I remember the first time playing it to Ron Howard. Literally from the first moment, I just knew it was wrong. Halfway through the movie, I just stopped and I said, "Please don't say anything. I'm just going to start over."

Your process seems fluid. It seems like a conversation. Then there's that this element, which is the audience speaking to you and who you're speaking to as well. There doesn't seem to be any beginning or end.
No. Why should there be? It's all process. I'm writing one long score. It's called my life. How many deaths have I written? How many kisses have I written? Each one, I try to do it differently. I try to get closer to the reality. I try to get better at it. "Better" is the wrong word. I'm trying to find out what's hidden from me and what's hidden from the audience. I'm trying to peel back the layers and actually get to the essence of what it all is.

You've lived a lot of lives.
Which other crazy guy do you know that at age 60 suddenly decides, "Okay. Let's go and play Coachella." Remember, the operative word in music is play. You play music. All we try to do is get better at being playful. It might not be the worst way to live your life. I keep looking at people who don't play music and I'm saying, "Just because you don't play music doesn't mean you can't go and take a little bit of that onboard. Make it playful. Make it an adventure. Make it stand of the abyss of the blank page and see what happens."