It was very important to me that the music not pay attention to the genre of the film.
What I wanted to do was to engage Hans in a very pure, creative process.
ZIMMER: I was working on a completely different movie and Chris said to me:
"If you were to write one page of something--" He wouldn't tell me what the movie was about.
But just write one page where I give him one day...
...and just whatever came to my mind... I would start writing.
NOLAN: What I wrote for Hans to get him started was some dialogue that I'd written for the film...
...mixed with some ideas behind the film...
...without any indications as to genre or scale, just to free him up from that.
ZIMMER: This is, of course, where Chris gets tricky, really...
...about a father and his relationship to his son.
It's only later on that I found out that the son wasn't a son at all. It was a daughter.
I sat down and I wrote this piece really about what it feels like to be a father...
...and what it feels like to have a son... and I was writing about my son.
NOLAN: When he played me the piece of music, which became the basis for the entire score...
...I thought it was absolutely perfect...
...and captured the emotional qualities of the film that I wanted.
It was at that point that I told him it was a large-scale science fiction film.
But I didn't him any clues about that.
You know, it's not an action film. It's not Batman.
It just isn't any of those things.
NOLAN: I think what that did for him was it set him very firmly in a direction...
...related to the heart of the film.
I mean... I listened to it extensively while I was finishing writing the script...
...and then... uh... when we were in production as well.
[MUSIC PLAYING ON RECORDING]
ZIMMER: One of the things which was important to both Chris and myself...
...was that if you think about--
We spent, what, nine years, one way or the other with the Batman material.
So part of the process was, "Let's leave things out which we have done before.
If we've done it before, just put it aside, you know.
That belongs to those other movies."
To come with a whole new palette was really exciting.
NOLAN: I wanted him to use the church organ.
And l also made the case very strongly for some feeling of religiosity to it...
...even though the film isn't religious.
But that the organ... the architecture, cathedrals, and all the rest...
...they represent mankind's attempt to portray the mystical or the metaphysical.
What's beyond us, beyond the realm of the everyday.
Most films attempt with preexisting music until the composer composes the score for the film.
We don't do that on Chris's films.
Hans comes on early and records just ideas and suites...
...of kind of anything that comes into his mind through conversations with Chris.
And then we start to use that against the images.
And very quickly, you start to see what can work.
And then Hans starts supplying more pieces of music...
...based upon more conversations with Chris as to, "Oh... where you did this, this and this.
It's awesome, but can you make it longer and... you know, give us a rhythm or something?"
With a very talented music editor, Alex Gibson... we will just keep developing it...
...and it becomes this whole backwards and forwards mechanism.
So after a lot of cutting and manipulating... Hans sampled demos.
We went to Temple Church in Central London... and we set up a mobile recording system...
...and spent days in there rerecording the organ.
Hans is a great advocate of this.
The live, real... human will always give you this extra piece of magic.
And we got plenty of magic in Roger.
ZIMMER: Roger was this sort of amazing human being that happened to us.
This humble man who's just an extraordinary player.
The organ has been used in films before.
But, you know, for sort of horror moments and for weddings.
But to be the main driving force of the soundtrack...
...this was special.
ZIMMER: The organ really is a huge, complicated synthesizer.
If you think about it, you have a pipe and air blows through it, and that makes the sound...
...and it makes the sound of one pitch.
And then if you want to shift color, you add another pipe to it, and you add more pipes.
And so it becomes these really very, very complex harmonic structures.
And there was this endless discovery going on for both Chris and me...
...you know, where Roger would take us through all these different voicings...
...and all these different colors.
Let me try something else.
Let's try this.
MAN: There's this one.
[ORGAN MUSIC PLAYING ON RECORDING]
Oh... that one, that one, that one.
MAN: Well... okay.
You wanna hear any more or are you happy?
Well... remember that for when we do wanna hear some more.
You can't stop there.
MAN: Okay, let's find some others.
SAYER: He would play me the sample and said:
"Well... what have you got?'' And l would give him a selection.
He said... "That's a little too heavy or that's a little too bright or that's a little too harsh."
ZIMMER: You can even go a little darker.
Actually, then we should go for this sound.
SAYER: Once he began to realize what the capabilities of this organ were...
...he began to get more adventurous.
And we began to sort of create as we were going... you know:
"How about this, Hans?" "Yeah... I like that. That's good" sort of thing.
But it's not what he had in mind.
It's very physical because he has to move his arms to go and pull these stops out here...
...to get the air to go into those pipes.
He's crossing over his hands and pulling this thing out.
And he's doing the pedals and everything.
It's super-active.
Pulling out all the stops, I now know what that expression means for real.
Can you just hit that really low tone there playing anything else again?
SAYER: Yup. -Just that--
[ORGAN MUSIC PLAYING]
And take them off the, uh....
Just go to the purest one for a second.
SAYER: You mean... the purest lowest one or--? -Yeah.
SAYER: There's another.
A bit soft.
What about this one?
That's amazing.
ZIMMER: The power of the low notes.
You feel it in your solar plexus.
The windows start rattling... and they start bulging...
...because there's so much air being pushed into the room.
So you have a primeval and really dangerous quality to it.
That thing is gonna blow.
There's something very human about it because it can only make a sound with air...
...and it needs to breathe.
And on each note, you hear the breath.
You hear the exhale.
You feel a human presence in every sound.
And l think that was very important to keep in the film...
...about not just the space that we're looking at but the people in that space.
There's an intimacy to the way he uses it, as well as massive scale.
Sometimes, within a few bars, there's that shift.
I think it really helps orient the audience in terms of what the language of the film is...
...because the film is continually trying to contrast...
...the individual and the particular with the cosmic.
ZIMMER: We poured the orchestra into this beautiful church...
...and set them up amongst the effigies of the dead knights.
These architects weren't fools when they built these cathedrals.
I mean... the acoustic inside these places is staggering...
...because it is supposed to impress.
It is supposed to take you to other worlds.
And we didn't take picture with us, and there's actually really an interesting exercise.
Rather than reacting to what you're seeing in front of you right now...
...the only way you can tell if a take with the orchestra is good or not...
...is you have to recall the scene and you have to make sure that the emotion...
...that the orchestra is giving you fits with the emotion you recall...
...the first time you experience the scene yourself.
[METRONOME PLAYlNG]
Part of our sessions in London... I would say:
"How can we create the sound of a giant metronome?"
Giant clock?
It was just figuring out what you can do with these beautiful violins...
...and those beautiful woodwinds that you weren't supposed to do.
[VIOLlNS PLAYING]
The strings, you know, just hitting the string with a pencil.
Bassist. What happens when you just hit the side of your bass?
Well... it sounds great, let me tell you.
The brass got to the idea.
Rather than blowing through the thing...
...they just hit their mouthpieces.
And just that air coming--
And it's a very spooky sound.
[HORNS BLOWING]
Or we would do it with the choir.
And with the choir, it became really tense because it became this plaintive...
...nearly little cry.
"You are lost in the wilderness" type thing.
Chris and I talked about being alone or being adrift.
I sort of play with false memory.
The further away you go from Earth... the tunes aren't quite the same.
You know, they start to corrode a little bit.
And they start to metamorphosize a little bit the way things do in memory.
You know, the further you get away from the moments that something happens...
...the idea that things shift a little bit.
And okay, what would it sound like if we now try to imitate, synthesize, you know...
...with human beings and real instruments, wind... sound of nature?
[BREATHING LOUDLY]
So breathe it in and breathe it out.
So again... the further you get away from Earth...
...somehow the organic nature of the instruments remind you...
...of everything you could potentially lose.
This score about science is all made with wood...
...and organic and real people playing.
That was really important to us.
It comes as well from this idea, Chris shoots on film.
Shooting on film is akin to me using a real organ or a real violin...
...as opposed to the computer digital simulation of it.
At the end of the day, we speak with one voice.
And all I become is a translator, in a way, for his language and for his vision.