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(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Pictures)
If you’ve seen any movie ever, chances are you’ve heard a piece of music by Hans Zimmer. The German-born composer is one of the most prolific and respected music-makers in Hollywood, particularly through his collaborations with Christopher Nolan. Zimmer has worked with the British director on six projects, going all the way back to 2005’s Batman Begins. His scores are some of the most memorable parts of Nolan’s films, helping to contextualise the often mad visuals that the maestro comes up with.
The reason why Zimmer is so good at what he does is because he’s smart. Though he’s never had any formal training to speak of, he gets music on a natural level, particularly film music. He knows as well as any director the part music plays not only in what an audience can hear, but how they’re feeling whilst watching it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his masterful score for Nolan’s 2017 movie Dunkirk, inspired by the heroic rescue of British troops from the titular French beach by a fleet of civilian vessels.
One of the many themes of the film (and one that is present throughout Nolan’s entire filmography) is time. Not only is time running for the soldiers on the beach before the Nazis arrive, but the film is structured in a way that plays around with linear form. Three different timelines play out at different speeds, all converging on each other for the film’s grand finale.
The tension of this ever-depleting hourglass is represented in the film’s music. When Zimmer was approached by Nolan about this movie, his original idea was to have the score consist of a singular piece. “The whole movie was originally written as one 100-minute piece of music,” the composer told the MPAA (via IndieWire). “Which seemed like a really good idea at the time, and nobody had done it before.” To stop this ambitious project from going completely off the rails, it was decided there would be one unifying theme throughout the whole thing – the ticking of a clock.
Even when it was decided that the film would have a more traditional score, Zimmer liked this idea. Nolan recorded his own pocket watch for his friend to use in the score, which you can hear throughout the movie, particularly in a piece called ‘The Mole’. Now, there was no question that this was a movie about a countdown – it was right there in the music.
To make audiences feel even more tense, Zimmer used good old-fashioned science. He utilised a special audio trick called a Shepard tone, which Ed Newton-Rex on Medium describes as, “stacking several ascending scales on top of each other, each separated by an octave, and, as the scales progress, fading the higher notes out and the lower notes in.” This creates the illusion of constantly rising pitch. Think of the classic theme from Jaws, the way that starts off low and gets higher and higher. Now imagine that, but going on forever.
Peers and viewers alike were blown away by Zimmer’s work on Dunkirk, even if the movie itself got more mixed reviews. It’s the textbook example of ‘understanding the assignment’. The composer knew exactly how he wanted his audience to feel and used whatever technique, simple or complex, to bring them to the edges of their seats.
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