This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Army of Thieves, No Time To Die, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=122490
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.

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Dune (2021) - ***
Hans Zimmer; add’l music by by David Fleming, Steve Mazzaro, Andrew
Kawczynski, Steven Doar & Omer Benyamin; technical score engineer Chuck
Choi; technical assistants Alejandro Moros, Fabio Marks & Aldo Arechar; synth
design Kevin Schroeder, Matt Bowdler & Howard Scarr; orchestrated & prepared by
Booker White, David Giuli, Jennifer Hammond & Johanna Melissa Orquiza; digital
instrument design Mark Wherry; additional digital instrument programming: Mario
Krušelj; digital instrument preparation Taurees Habib & Raul Vega; digital instrument
preparation assistants Soya Soo, Jacob Moreno, Alfredo Pasquel, Michael Gloria &
Jeremy Katz; featured vocalist Loire Colter; vocalists Suzanne Waters, Lisa Gerrard,
Stephanie Olmanni, Michael Geiger & Edie Boddicker; instrumental soloists including
Pedro Eustache, Guthrie Govan, Tina Guo, Satnam Ramgotra & Chas Smith;
Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s assistant; thank you to Czarina Russell & Klaus Schulze

Blade Runner 2049 was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=119141

Hans, talking to editor Joe Walker in November 2021 about their experiences with this film - “You did say, ‘Maybe we can move away from D minor for just a little bit.’”

Me, describing this film in 2021 - “DOON”

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Frank Herbert’s famed science fiction novel has a long history of adaptations either not getting off the ground or resulting in so-so final products. So for director Denis Villeneuve to not only make a new version but to have it be generally considered competent was a minor miracle, and in fact his Lawrence of Arabia-sized spectacle covering the first half of the story emerged to solid box office and significant awards consideration. Its music ended up being one of its most awarded components, but even if that hadn’t been the case it still would’ve stood out for another reason: its fracturing of the partnership between Hans and director Christopher Nolan. Production on Nolan’s time-inverting Tenet overlapped with work on Dune, and in July 2019 Hans acted like he had to pick one and went with Dune owing to his decades-long love of the book and his affection for Denis and editor Joe Walker, saying reuniting with the Blade Runner 2049 crew “feels like family. It doesn’t matter how high the stress gets. Denis leads with unspeakable kindness.” The exhausting process of composing for Dunkirk was never mentioned, but it’s hard not to wonder if that played a part; maybe Hans and Chris needed a break.

Hans, who never saw the infamous 1984 film version or heard its music by the band Toto, claimed that for decades he’d had a vision in his head for decades of the score he’d write for a Dune film. “I must have seen Star Wars not that long after I read Dune. Look, John Williams is my hero, the music of Star Wars is undeniably a masterpiece, but with the hubris of a teenager, as I was reading ‘in a galaxy far far away…’ I was going, ‘Wait a second, why are we hearing trumpets and cellos?’” He’d already gone down the opposite path before lockdowns struck. “Denis and I wanted a score where the instruments weren’t the instruments of now, [but] the consistent, recognizable thing should be the female voice. The motor that drives the story forward is women. [Dark Phoenix vocalist] Loire Colter came over, and [she] and Edie Boddicker and Suzanne Waters were trying out ideas. We made the architectural plan.” But then COVID hit, and then Zimmer got a very serious case of the virus, and even after he’d recovered the musical landscape was still impacted. “I couldn't work in my normal way, so I turned my sitting room into my studio. The only other person allowed in was my assistant. [The band] was people I'd been playing with for a long time who can all record at home.”

And thus began months of remote brainstorming with Hans throwing out a bunch of odd ideas and seeing what interesting things emerged. Guitarist Guthrie Govan said Hans requested he “sound like sand” for one cue. Chas Smith would build instruments out of items like saw blades and space engine material. Hans and team experimented with bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, guitar distortions, and other things for as long as they could before the filmmakers made them score to picture, an approach perhaps aided by the film’s multiple pandemic-related release delays. At some point Hans even wandered into a desert for a while to get a sense of “listening to nothing. It’s not method composing, but I’d know there was something missing had I not done it.” Perhaps no score had its sound more impacted by COVID than this one, but Hans had a decades-long penchant for not doing the expected, never mind that he’d been injecting non-Western sounds into Hollywood films you wouldn’t think asked for them since Rain Man, so it’s possible this was exactly what his teenage vision for the music had been.

Hans would also come to see this approach to making music as altruistic. “Guthrie, his life is being on tour or being social in the pub. Guthrie was stuck at home. This movie saved a lot of people’s sanity by giving them purpose.”

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Going off of the demo album released to coincide with the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival a month before its wide release, Dune was going to be all the Hans scores, and also none of them - a host of familiar elements used in very different ways (not too far from what the music of Avatar was for James Horner). Synths ranging from Vangelis-inspired to the high-pitched stuff of Hans’ early days to the rumbling bass of his later years. Skittering electronics. A gong. A duduk, though here a supersized version built by Pedro Eustache. Brass-like sounds in unison. Bad guys backed by low repeated patterns. Very slow tempos. Awe-inspiring minor key dramatic builds and crescendos. An aversion to high strings. Race car sounds. Even the vocals: striking outbursts from his pre-Media Ventures days, operatic solos from the aughts, the ensembles of his Langdon scores, and various ethnic and tribal elements heard since The Power of One. But the defining element remained Loire Colter, who from her closet recorded a mix of Jewish song, vocal percussion, laments, throat singing, saxophone imitations, and other influences. “She’s making the sound that reaches across the desert. She sang one note, and it tore the enamel off my teeth.”

Hans and his team would then manipulate almost every sound, even going as far as to deconstruct a Tibetan horn in Cubase - “electronic chamber resonators” - and layer Tina Guo’s cello over it. Each percussion instrument was computerized to sound unlike drums “you could buy at a shop” and to generate “rhythms which were humanly impossible to play,” the latter quote showing how far Hans had moved from the days of using orchestrators like Bruce Fowler to make sure whatever he’d programmed could be played by real instruments. It was the ultimate expression of the pride he took on Pacific Heights over 30 years earlier about crafting music where the listener couldn’t easily discern what instruments they were hearing. “Being abstract in the instrumentation helped. You didn’t have the safety net of a violin. There are things in there that you’ve never heard before.”

Those aspects were perhaps the main reason this score didn’t work for many traditionalist score fans. And we haven’t even gotten to the bagpipes yet! Denis’ suggestion to use them in a fanfare for the protagonist’s family seemed crazy even to Hans, but he came around to it. “There hasn’t been a radical development in bagpipe technology. It will be the same 10,000 years from now. It’s ancient and timeless at the same time, [and they] aren’t just Scottish or Irish. The Middle East is full of [them]. Wherever you find a goat and some wood, you can build bagpipes.” The end result - a mix of 30 Scottish pipers, Guthrie Govan’s guitar, and Pedro Eustache blasting into a woodwind called a zurna - would be the ultimate love-it-or-hate-it aspect of the sketchbook release. You’ll either find House Atreides a headbanging prog rock joy or an unholy din summoning the “bagpipe PTSD” that Hans’ daughter experienced.

The demo album was a truly uncompromising collection of ideas. Many weren’t even designed to be enjoyable, including raspy gasps right at the start and the ear-splitting noise that dominates the Mind-killer track. Hans acknowledged “it’s pretty provocative. It barks at you, and then it bites you.” He’d frequently referred to many of his suggestions for earlier scores as revolutionary or dangerous or crazy or insane or bold, only for the end product to not be that far removed from the bounds of normality, but those proclamations were rather accurate at times with this work. Hans even did staggeringly complicated things with harmony, though not in easily discernible ways. Few really knew what to make of the demo album. I first listened to it while nursing a massive hangover the morning after a friend’s wedding, which may have been the best way to absorb this alternatingly soothing and abrasive creation. I found it both astonishing and confounding, though I knew even in the midst of my gradually diminishing headache that there was no sense in rendering an opinion about the work until I heard the actual music written to picture. It would turn out to deviate in several ways from the sketchbook album, and not always for the better.

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First, it devoted substantially more of its runtime to the undulating theme that was ostensibly for House Harkonnen but was also applied to other darker parts of the film. “It’s my deepest, blackest heart, and all it takes is a German and a fuzzbox to do that one.” It wasn’t a bad theme, but it also wasn’t that far removed from bad guy ideas from earlier Hans scores (think Commodus in Gladiator or the villain material in the Langdon films), which made its frequent use a minor disappointment in what was framed as a wildly different creative enterprise.

Second, the loose thematic attribution would carry over into other parts of the film, thus extending the ambient approach to music Denis had wanted on Blade Runner 2049. “It felt more interesting to, like an impressionist painter, come up with different colors as opposed to the normal, ‘here’s the love theme, here’s one for the car crash.' Lady Jessica might not be in the next scene, but her words might echo into [it].” (In a funny way, that last point makes this work somewhat of a sequel to Crimson Tide, where the near-omnipresent choir was used by Hans to suggest the distant but deadly Russian threat) The score was a perfect fit for the director’s aesthetic, but maybe too perfect; in having intentionally alien sounds float across the movie in an occasionally abstract fashion, Hans’ music seemed to reinforce the audience’s emotional distance from the characters.

Third, the score felt grimmer and darker on average than the sketchbook did. That’s not to say it was a quieter score by any stretch of the imagination; it is arguably the most colossal contemplative score in cinema history. But the more operatic, serene, and shimmering aspects of Hans’ demo ideas seem to have been largely discarded in favor of doubling down on brutal, stark music that matched the barren landscape - drones n’ tones, if you will. The prog rock joys of the bagpipes are largely relegated to source music in an early scene and a brief quote in a midfilm battle. Not to mention that there’s an obnoxious thumping heartbeat effect in a few passages, which may have been appropriate for the film but spoils every album track it appears in.

Fourth, while nearly every theme idea from the sketchbook is carried over, few of them really evolve, which makes the back half of the long score album (and especially its largely drifting and hazy last 20 minutes) a challenge, as the music is basically sitting in the same place that it was at the beginning. As with Zack Snyder’s Justice League and a few other works covered in this rundown, it’s an open question if playing the 22 tracks on the album at random would really change one’s perception of the score’s narrative. For all the thought and weird new sounds, the end product was at times surprisingly predictable for Hans and occasionally quite dull. It suggested that the composer was operating with the same kind of logic he’d applied to assignments like Widows in this era where he thought the filmmaking was so high quality that he didn’t need to do as much melodically or narratively as he would on a more mid-tier film. Additional music compiled for an album meant to accompany a book about the filmmaking process would take that ambience to its absolute extreme.

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Dune was the natural endpoint - or for all we know just a midpoint - of the evolution of Hans’ approach in this era towards creating soundscapes instead of more traditional theme and variation scoring. It was no surprise how divisive the music was. It had its supporters, including those in the IFMCA who gave Hans a nomination for best film score for the second straight year, but also plenty of frustrated film score fans and websites like Filmtracks which lamented that (just like with Blade Runner 2049) the score seemed laser-focused on ambient sound design aligned to a visual aesthetic at the expense of hitting on other elements of the narrative or doing any of the other normal functions of film music. Yet unlike Man of Steel, where reactions to the music seemed to fall into one of two ardent camps, the score for Dune seemed to leave plenty of folks in the middle; both MMUK and Movie-Wave published reviews that suggested their authors were equal parts fascinated and perplexed.

The studio’s decision to simultaneously release its major 2021 films both in theaters and on its HBO Max streaming platform would rankle Hans, perhaps more than the same studio’s decision to dump Wonder Woman 1984 direct-to-streaming in 2020 did. “I don’t mind streaming. I love television. But when you look at a big screen, the eye takes a long time to wander. While if you’re cutting something for television, the eye takes everything in. I don’t know anyone who’s had an experience watching on their iPhone. The way Joe cuts, you stay on a shot for a longer time. Had you said, ‘We’re streaming this,’ I would’ve written quite a different score.”

There was much promotional work done to get Hans an Oscar for Dune, including a lengthy interview with Vanity Fair that went into detail on various instrumental and vocal forces the composer had used. Hilariously, despite all that effort Hans wasn’t actually at the ceremony when he won the award! With diminished COVID restrictions now enabling his tours to get back on the road, there was little incentive for him to fly back to Hollywood for a minute-long speech, and even less so once the Academy made the absurd decision to not televise several awards including the one for Best Original Score. Instead of the exquisite outfit he had on when he won his first Oscar for The Lion King, Hans would now be wearing pajamas and a hotel bathrobe when his daughter woke him up at 2am in Amsterdam to go celebrate in the hotel bar. There Hans would credit the members of his touring band, many of whom had played on Dune. “Had it not been for most of these people in this room, this would never have happened.”

You’d think three albums would be enough for one creative enterprise, but Hans would also record songs with actor Josh Brolin as his character sings in the book, though those elements didn’t make the final cut or any of the music releases. And by early 2022 Hans had already written an hour and a half of new music for the upcoming sequel. “Denis is writing Part Two. Rather than sending him bottles of alcohol, which probably would work, I keep sending him little tone poems that might inspire him.” Goodness knows how much music we’ll get if the director fulfills his ambition to adapt Herbert’s Dune Messiah as well.

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Next time: “It just wasn’t right.” “Massive change in direction.” “I wish we could have spent more time together.” “I’m not convinced any of my work will make it through to release.” “A yes used to be a yes.” “I'm not very amused.” The post I’ve been working on for four months; it’s the most deeply-researched and longest score write-up of this rundown, and also its most insane story.