It is hard to find ambition in the film industry as great as the man composing this year’s soundtracks for “Dune: Part Two”, “Kung Fu Panda 4”, and the new live action “Lion King”. The 66-year-old Hans Zimmer has been the mastermind behind some of the most acclaimed films of the past 30 years, and in his most recent compositions, he is outright inventing new instruments and sounds. These various innovations spanning across some of the most famous films of the 21st century will now be touched on.
In Christopher Nolan’s 2010 Oscar-winning “Inception,” the heavy bass drones used during scenes when time would slow down were created to a dramatic extent previously undone. Zimmer took ten brass players into a studio, having them unanimously play into a piano with a brick on the sustain pedal, causing all the strings to vibrate to create a thunderous sound.
“That is something I have always wanted to do, invent sounds that don’t exist,” the composer tells Vanity Fair in an interview for the Academy Award winning epic “Dune.” From the devilish Sardauker chants, to the ethereal bagpipes of the royal house Atreides, and to the “wind whistling” desert flutes, Denis Villenueve’s Dune is adorned with Zimmer’s daring musical accompaniment. Most notably though, flutist Pedro Eustache played multiple wind instruments invented specifically for the desert landscape of “Dune”’s planet Arrakis. Taking the ancient Armenian Duduk flute and putting into the base of a long PVC pipe, Eustache then cut differently shaped holes into the sides of the elastic tube to create what he claims, “Is an Instrument that doesn’t exist anywhere.”
The galactic space odyssey “Interstellar,” also directed by Christopher Nolan, sees Zimmer reaching for the stars, composing the iconic score on a massive organ in a microphoned cathedral. Every instrument, the drones, the oboes, the synthesizers, and even the horns and strings, were all different voicings of the same organ in the Salisbury cathedral.
Other works Hans Zimmer is famously known for are “Gladiator”, the original animated “Lion King”, “The Prince of Egypt”, “Pirates of the Caribbean”, “The Dark Knight Rises”, “Blade Runner 2049”, and many more.