Imaginary Worlds - The Team Behind Hans Zimmer

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Who really composed the scores of Dune, Interstellar, Blade Runner 2049, The Dark Knight, Man of Steel, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lion King? Were they all written by Hans Zimmer? Or were those scores put together by a team of musicians at Hans Zimmer’s studio Remote Control? The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz went behind-the-scenes and got a rare glimpse at the creative process of one of the most revered film composers in the world. Plus, I talk with Dallas Taylor, the host of 20K Hertz, about why visiting Hans Zimmer’s studio was almost like a religious experience for him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm a big fan of the podcast 20,000 Hertz. They explore stories behind the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. Long-time listeners might remember that many years ago, I played an episode of theirs about the sound in movie trailers. It was called The Bouge. We also co-produced an episode together about the golden age of radio dramas. A few months ago, they did an episode which blew my mind. It was about my favorite film composer, Hans Zimmer. Hans Zimmer composed music for the Dark Knight trilogy, along with Man of Steel, Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and many other

sci-fi fantasy films. I listened to his music while I was writing scripts for this podcast. His Batman theme is the ringtone on my phone. In fact, hearing this music now makes me feel like I'm supposed to be answering my phone. Now, as I mentioned, they did an episode about Hans Zimmer. They didn't talk to him, but what they did was fascinating. They went behind the scenes at his studio, which is called Remote Control, and they talked with a team which makes the sounds for him. I'm going to play that episode for you, but first I wanted to talk with their host, Dallas Taylor, about what it was like going there. He told me when he got the invitation,

it was like getting a golden ticket to Willy Wonka's music factory. In the industry, it's just such a magical place that no one seems to be able to go in unless you're an invited guest. And it's like the Abbey Road Studios for film composers, because remote control is more than just Hans Zimmer. Some of the composers that I look up to, and even composers I've worked with, when they reach a certain level, they may go get a studio at remote control. And so it's this place where so much of the most iconic modern music has come from. Okay, so describe to me physically what the studio looks like. So Hans has a really famous studio. It doesn't look like any studio that I've ever seen before.

It looks kind of like a big, maybe European royalty living area. It's very red-toned. All of the furniture is very comfy looking. It's like just a place that's supposed to feel homey. So in the center of this very comfortable living room, everything's facing this desk that has a ton of monitors, that has a big monitor right above it, has a bunch of speakers everywhere. If you look at the back of the studio, it is floor to ceiling roughly

of analog synths and samplers and blinking lights and everything you could imagine when you think of a big rack of synthesizers times 30. And everything felt like all of the neurons of this studio led to this one seat of creation. And so it was just this fascinating place to be in and just realize that the first sounds of Interstellar came out of these speakers or the first sounds that came out of these monumental movies all started to happen in this room for the first time. And something about that almost feels, in a weird musical way, religious, that this is the origin of so many iconic sounds that will be heard for decades and decades and into the future. So, I mean, I'm also a huge fan of Hans Zimmer,

but I don't have the language to understand the music. I just love it. What do you, as somebody who's an expert in sound, how would you describe Hans Zimmer in a way? How does he speak to you? Hans Zimmer does a beautiful job of filling the gray area between traditional post-audio sound design, foley environments, sound effects, and a musical score. Usually there's a big divide between what are environments,

birds chirping, people talking, you know, a sound effect, a hit, something that's trying to make you feel a little uneasy, or foleyley or, you know, a door shut. You know, there's a big divide between that and the classical orchestra that's playing underneath it or, you know, some music library or, you know, traditional composing. There's a big gap between those two sonic palettes. But the things that I gravitate towards so much is where you really can't, the lines between those two places are extremely blurred. And so when you get into something that Hans Zimmer's working on alongside some of the greatest sound designers, traditional sound designers out there, you get sound designers stretching deeply into score and even tonality. And then you have Hans Zimmer stretching deeply into sound design.

and even tonality. And then you have Hans Zimmer stretching deeply into sound design. And so you have so much color to play with between those two that it all just starts to immerse and feel vibey. And it all starts to feel like one cohesive thing from top to bottom throughout this entire soundtrack. Yeah. Well, hearing that story also reminded me of the fact that like, there's a long history in the arts from from the renaissance all the way up until now where an artist will have a team and you know there are paintings where like art historians are trying to figure out did this artist actually paint everything on this canvas or did he just supervise it and then like sign off of it at the end and i mean obviously that's not the case with Hans Zimmer. But does it make you wonder if these people are doing so much work beforehand, whose score is this? Like, is this really a Hans Zimmer score or is this the score of Hans Zimmer, the composer, which isn't necessarily Hans Zimmer, the human. Now, if it was only those two, then you can start to get into the weeds of like, well,

is it really Hans or is it really these people doing it for Hans? But what I learned when I was there is that third aspect that I took with me to my own studio was Hans Zimmer, the leader, which is closer, more closely aligned to the person. Because the thing that everyone kept telling me is how collaborative he is, how he will always be going the extra mile, how he'll be, you know, he's the one working, working, working, thinking, thinking, thinking. And so he's very active. It's not like he just disappears and waits for someone to put the sounds under his fingers. He's guiding every single step of that project. So just the exploration process of Hans Zimmer, the leader, is what's still at the end of this,

even with help, it's still the heart and soul of Hans Zimmer, but with the help and genius of so many other people supporting the weight of that. So what do you think surprised you the most in the end? As a business owner, especially a business owner in a creative field, I've been told by business gurus often to expect that you'll be out of the creative chair eventually. Eventually, you're just going to be a manager. Eventually, you're just going to be a manager eventually you're just going to be a leader but what i realized in this situation is that the most creative brain in the room was the one still sitting in the chair and hans every single thing he needed to put him in the most valuable brain space possible because we only have so much time. You can have a billion dollars in your bank

account, but you only have so much time in a day and you only have so much time on earth. And the time is something you can't get back. So what I learned from Hans is that he's, in a way, buying back time in multiple ways with the best possible people to be able to put him in a situation where he can just be full creative. Let's hear their episode, which is called Hans Zimmer's Remote Control. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. I'm Dallas Taylor. Off the top of your head, how many film composers can you name? Unless you're a big movie buff or you work in the film industry, I'm guessing it's around three or four.

And chances are, one of them is Hans Zimmer. Hans has scored some of the most iconic movies of the last few decades, from The Lion King to Gladiator to Pirates of the Caribbean. But for me, some of his most interesting work has come from his collaborations with Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, whether it's Inception, Interstellar, or Blade Runner 2049. These scores are jam-packed with sounds that have never been heard before. So how does one person create so much amazing music? Well, it turns out, he doesn't do it alone.

Hans actually runs an entire film score company called Remote Control Productions. Their studio is inside of a huge seven-building complex in Santa Monica, California. Now, Remote Control has about 85 people on staff, but on that same property, there are at least 15 other composers with their own

independent studios, along with musicians and staff from all over the world. When I visited, I was blown away by the sheer magnitude of it. At Remote Control, each person provides something unique and crucial to the final sound of these movies. Everything that we do, it's about collaboration. That's Raul Vega. I am a sample developer or a digital instrument designer. Explaining Raul's exact role can be a bit tricky, even for him. I feel like my job title has changed with every project we work on, so your guess is as good as mine as to what to call me. To understand what Raoul does, you need to understand the unique way that Hans composes music. Traditionally, the director of a movie will meet with the composer and talk about the styles and moods that they have in mind for

the score. Then, the composer reads the script and starts writing. Later, when the edit of the movie is farther along, they'll often bring in a live orchestra to bring that music to life. But for Hans, much of this is in reverse. He adds a whole other stage at the beginning. It all starts with choosing the kinds of sounds and sonic textures he wants to highlight in the score. For example, Hans scored the 2013 Superman movie Man of Steel. When you think of Man of Steel, you think of Superman, you think of brass, trumpets, percussion, all these big cinematic swells of beef and sound.

This is the classic Superman theme from the 1978 film, which was scored by the legendary John Williams. But Hans had another idea. He thought, what is the sound of America? What's the sound of a true Americana? What are some of those instruments that could clearly represent Superman? And so his thought was a pedal steel guitar. Of course, typically, we hear that in country music. And if you play it just right, it's played pretty well in Hawaiian music. But that's not what we were going for for this particular score. Instead, before he wrote a single note, Hans assembled eight pedal steel guitarists and brought them into a recording studio. And he had them play notes, different dynamics, different slides, but most importantly, different intervals.

Very specific intervals that he already knew what he was going to be doing with them. Some of the things that Hans had them record sound nothing like traditional, rootsy steel guitar. Here's a clip of those recording sessions from Warner Brothers. First, you'll hear the musicians. More vibrato. I don't know if I've got more vibrato. Then, Hans talks to the camera. I'm self-creating my own little string section. There are strings, there are section.

It just so happens there are pedal steel guitars. These musicians aren't playing written-out score music. They're basically recording as many different sounds as possible for Hans to use later on. I'm building a library of single notes. I'm gathering ammunition for my writing process. This process of gathering sonic ammunition is known as sampling. Each note or bend or slide that gets recorded is a sample, and recording all of the samples they want from a particular instrument

can take days or even weeks. Think about a piano, for example. To capture all of the nuance of a real piano, you need to play every key softly, a little harder, and a little harder. You'll record long notes and short notes and really short notes. If that sounds tiring, imagine a violin. Now for every note you've got slow vibrato and fast vibrato and different types of slides and trills and plucks. For a musician, these recording sessions are like a marathon of stamina and precision.

Every musician we work with is insanely talented and hardworking, and they will push themselves, but sometimes we have to tell them, hey, we have to take a break. Once these recordings are finished, Raul and his team have to edit them. They'll chop the recordings up and make each sound start and end exactly where it should. They'll make sure there's no unwanted noise and add different types of effects. And all of that material has to be organized and programmed in a very specific way.

After a while, it does get pretty exhausting. Some of these things can be massive. I mean, we've built stuff which have over 10,000 little puzzle pieces that have to be assembled. That's Taris Habib, who works with Raoul on the sampling process. At one point, Taris mapped his computer keys to an Xbox controller

so he could edit 10,000-plus samples more comfortably. And I just remember thinking, like, man, if, like, me from elementary school got a glimpse into my future but saw it from the other side where they're not seeing what's on the screen, they'd think, wow, I'm getting paid to like play video games and it's like i was but it's maybe the worst video game ever made but the result of all that work is a unique fully crafted digital instrument that hans can play on his keyboard So whenever he presses a key, it triggers a specific sample from their recordings. And if he presses it harder or softer or turns a knob, it'll trigger a

different sample. The result is a digital instrument that feels intuitive and expressive to play. That's the way that we always approach it. It's not like we're making a computer program. It's like we're making a digital Stradivarius or like something that, even though it lives entirely in zeros and ones, should feel organic and alive when you put your hands on the thing that's going to control it. For Man of Steel,

the digital instrument they made from those steel guitars allowed Hans to play sounds like this. Hans then sprinkled these slide sounds all over the soundtrack. For instance, here's a track called Sent Here for a reason. And here's another clip from the original recording sessions, where one of the guitarists asks Hans what interval he wants. What would you want, a C to a G?

C to a G. Quite lazy. Like a... And here's a track from the film. Now, taking a traditional instrument like the steel guitar and transforming it to fit within a sweeping superhero score is pretty mind-boggling. But creative decisions like these are part of what makes Hans such a singular composer.

You could say that he paints with unique colors, and it's the team at Remote Control that allows him to do that. If you look at the composer as a painter, well, the painter needs paint. So it's then my job to go out and fetch the paint from a very specific sound source. We spend a lot of time creating the paint for the master painter, in this case Hans, to paint his masterpieces with.

And crafting that sonic paint takes an incredible amount of work. For every movie they work on, they'll make dozens or even hundreds of these digital instruments. I think our record is about 300 instruments for a film. This process costs a ton of money and requires months of work.

So why doesn't Hans just use the thousands of digital instruments that are already available? If you're pulling samples from library packs that are kind of available to everybody and everybody can use them, at some point, everything's going to start sounding the same. But this beginning stage of it, capturing very specific sounds, it makes it that much easier for Hans to craft a score that's going to be entirely unique and specific to whatever the project is.

unique and specific to whatever the project is. Sometimes Hans will have them sample things that aren't even instruments, or as Raoul puts it, anything can be an instrument. You know, if you're looking at a pocket watch, you're listening to it. By itself, it doesn't really sound incredibly interesting, but you throw in another one of a different size, a different weight, playing at a different speed,

a different rate, it's getting a little bit more interesting. You got three, four, five of them on top of each other. Now you've got some really cool colors. Now by itself, that sounds pretty cool. There's a lot of chaos and stuff that's happening around that. But what's really more interesting is when you can actually take those sounds and chop up every single little tick by the smallest increment.

Taking that control and being able to make them short and small, you can really build out whatever kind of groove you want. Hans used these pocket watch ticks as a key component for the score of Dunkirk. The movie is a tense World War II epic and whenever these ticking sounds play in the film, it really ratchets up the anxiety. For instance, there's one scene where a group of soldiers are floating in water that's filled with oil from a sinking ship. When a plane crashes into the water, the oil catches fire, so the soldiers have to dive underwater to avoid the flames. Sounds like these pocket watch ticks

really start to blur the line between music and sound design. I think we tend to kind of think of music as, well, I have these 12 notes, what can I do with them? But when you start to think in the broader term of just sound and how it elicits an emotional response there isn't really a line it truly is building out the sonic landscape in times where you don't know is this score or is this sound design and the answer is it's a little bit of both And the answer is, it's a little bit of both.

Ultimately, sound designers and composers have the same goal, to elicit emotion from a viewer and propel the story forward. Sure, like you can get certain emotional responses from like a C major chord versus like a B diminished chord. But you could also get an emotional response from like the sound of a chainsaw and then adding some processing to make it even more jarring. I mean, it might not be easy listening music, but that's not always what you're trying to do when you're telling a story. easy listening music, but that's not always what you're trying to do

when you're telling a story. Sometimes the story itself will explicitly call for a certain sound. For example, the Inception soundtrack is known for its low, blah sounds. They happen throughout the movie and most famously appeared in the first trailer.

It's called Inception. I'm ready. appeared in the first trailer. For a few years after that, the Inception Bois was copied in countless movie trailers. There was Transformers 3, Battleship, Smiley, The Avengers, and a bunch more. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gold Derby, Hans explained how his original bwa sound came directly from Christopher Nolan's script. There's a story point written in the script about these low brams, the bra sounds.

It's a story point. Suddenly it turns up in everybody's trailer. The screenplay to Inception includes descriptions like... In the distant background, strange, massive, low-end musical start sounding like distant horns. Arthur stops hearing something. Massive, low-end musical tones.

Eames races back in. In the relative quiet, he notices massive, low-end musical tones. Eames races back in. In the relative quiet, he notices massive, low-e musical tones. To create these low-end tones, Hans brought ten brass players to Air Studios in London. The studio is inside of a beautiful Victorian church with high vaulted ceilings. Hans had these brass players stand around a piano and used a heavy book to hold down the sustain pedal. Then the musicians would play loud cacophonous notes into the piano so that all of the strings would vibrate. Once he had that recorded, he added a bit of, quote, electronic nonsense.

The result was the OG Bois. By that point, Hans had scored dozens of amazing movies. He had won an Oscar and been nominated for 10 others. But throughout his life, there was one project that he had always dreamed of doing. It was a story that he had fallen in love with as a boy and had never stopped thinking about. Then, a few years ago, that dream came true. And for that score, Hans and the team at Remote Control would have to bring an entire alien world to life through sound. It was a distant,

desert planet called Arrakis. That's coming up after the break. almost well you can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered but you can get a chicken parmesan delivered a cabana that's a no but a banana that's a yes a nice tan sorry nope but a box fan happily yes a day of sunshine no a box of fine wines yes uber eats can definitely get you that get almost almost anything delivered with uber eats order now alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. When Hans Zimmer was a teenager, he came across a sci-fi book called Dune. The story captivated him. In his head, Dune had a certain exotic sound to it, and it sounded very different from the sci-fi movies that were popular at the time. Here's Hans in an interview with Vanity Fair. I remember as a 13-year-old going and seeing science fiction movies and going,

why do all these science fiction movies have European orchestra, orchestral sounds, romantic period tonalities? For instance, the soundtrack to 2001 A Space Odyssey featured lots of famous classical pieces. And this trend of orchestral sci-fi music continued for a long time. There was Star Wars. There was Alien. And there were the Star Trek movies.

Even back then, Hans didn't want to taint his vision of how dunes should sound, so he never saw the version by David Lynch that came out in the mid-80s. That soundtrack was mainly done by the rock band Toto, though one track was written by ambient composer Brian Eno. In the year 2000, there was a Dune miniseries that aired on the SyFy channel. Here's a piece from its soundtrack called Dreamscape. But Hans made a point not to see that version either. So when director Denis Villeneuve asked him to score his adaptation of Dune, Hans could finally bring the sounds that he'd been hearing in his head for over 40 years to life. Dune is set roughly 20,000 years in the future in a different part of the galaxy.

Because of this, Hans wanted to use sounds that felt totally unfamiliar, with one exception. He figured that no matter how far into the future you went, the one thing that would remain at the center of our culture and our music would be the human voice. This idea tied in well with one of the main concepts in Dune. In Dune, you have these female characters who use this technique called the voice to kind of control people, sort of instantaneously hypnotize people and get them to do certain things. In one scene early on, a character called the Reverend Mother uses the voice on the main character, Paul.

Come here. Kneel. How dare you use the voice on me? Hans wanted Dune's soundtrack to be based around female voices that sounded enchanting and mysterious. So he brought in three singers who were regular collaborators with remote control. Suzanne Waters, Loar Cutler, and Edie Lehman Boddicker, three of some of the most versatile and interesting vocalists

I've had the honor and pleasure to work with for years. Suzanne Waters first worked with Hans on the soundtrack for the X-Men film Dark Phoenix. The movie didn't do so well, but Hans' music for it is incredible. That's Suzanne. For Dark Phoenix, Hans wanted a digital instrument made entirely out of her voice. To create this, Suzanne recorded over 21,000 bits of audio

in about three weeks. And I sang basically every note in my range. It was like different vowels, different volumes, different pitch bending. Like sometimes it would be like, well, I want you to rise a quarter tone and sink a quarter tone. And they would have me start softly crescendo and decrescendo and hold out each of these notes. And then Raoul and team had to digitize all of these things and put them into the instrument itself, so that at the end of the day, Hans could have it all on a keyboard. Hans called this instrument the Susie Synthesizer,

and Suzanne still remembers the day she came in and heard him playing it. It was what an incredible, humbling experience to walk into Hans' lair and him presenting this instrument, and it was like a massive orchestra of Suzanne. That was a whole new level of wow. Here's a bit of the Susie synthesizer on its own. On Dark Phoenix, Suzanne's ethereal voice was often paired with a very different style of singing, recorded by vocalist Luar Cutler. She was all of the percussion, and she's a master at it. Like, Hans was like, can you whisper all of it? And so literally, she just does this, like, all whispered, and it's fantastic.

all whispered, and it's fantastic. When it came time to score Dune, Hans wanted to use this same combination of vocal sounds. When Dune came around, he called and was like, we want to bring the band back together and get you and Luar and make these sounds together. Yeah, I love that Hans really wanted to go female with both of these films. For Dune, Suzanne recorded a huge range of new vocal performances. Some of these recordings were added into the Suzy synth,

so Hans could create more dreamy vocal soundscapes. Then, later on, Suzanne came back to record live takes on top of these vocal pads. At Remote Control, this is how it usually works, because no matter how well you sample something, it's never quite the same as an organic, human performance. And in all the years that I've been doing this, every single musician that we've sampled and that we've recorded, they have then come back in and become a massive part of the actual live orchestral sessions as well. On Dune, Suzanne wasn't sure what kind of tone her singing should have.

But then Hans gave her some direction. He says, Susie, I want you to get really, really sad. Like, so, so sad. I need sorrow and tears and the lament. Just dig, dig deep into those places. So Dune, all I was thinking was sorrow when I made these sounds, and it changed everything. For this next track, Suzanne recorded five different vocal lines. We'll start with one and slowly stack them together. Satsang with Mooji And here's what the final version sounds like in the soundtrack. In addition to these sorrowful vocal tones, Hans also wanted chanting. But to chant, you need words to say.

So in the preliminary stages, we literally just pulled text from the book, from the glossary from Dune. Dune is full of exotic-sounding words that were invented by author Frank Herbert. Words like Comjaba. Poison needle. Listen, Al-Kaib. It's their name for Messiah. Shai-Halud.

The Great Sandworm. Using these words as inspiration, vocalist Edie Lehman-Bodeker recorded this. Still to this day, I have no idea what she was saying, but it sounded so cool. We had to make an instrument out of it. By making this chant into an instrument, Hans could speed it up to unnatural levels. From there, the vocalists created a kind of improvised language, which Raoul and his team turned into more digital instruments. Every single note in their range, I think it was three or four different dynamics of this made-up language that they had constructed.

Hans used these chanted, fictional words throughout the score. Here's a track that almost sounds like it comes from a demonic horror movie. But there was one final piece to this vocal puzzle. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Hans explained that one of the reasons he called Luar Cutler back for Dune was her experience with rhythmic singing. Here she is demonstrating it alongside him. We were talking about that Dune has its own rhythm. So it's obvious that I would find a woman who should know everything about rhythm and then give you the cry of a banshee.

Ha-de-nyo-ki-ba! Ha-de-nyo-ki-ba! Luar Cutler is the lead female vocalist in Dune, and she does all of the warrior cries. That vocal performance might be the most iconic moment on the entire soundtrack, but there's another really gripping melody that happens in a track called Leaving Caledon. So the main riff, there's electric guitar, electric cello mushed together. That's cellist Tina Guo, who recorded over 90 hours of material for Dune. There was no

acoustic cello because he was saying since it's in space, we don't want any normal instruments. We want everything to sound a little strange, a little off. And that's one of the things that I love about playing the electric cello because you can actually change the tone and the quality of the sound. Hans and Tina first met back in 2009. Hans, the way that he's found a lot of musicians that we work with is through YouTube. At the time, Tina was a struggling musician living in LA. She'd been playing classical cello since she was seven years old, but her dream was to make a career out of the electric cello. So I thought, okay, as my last hurrah, I'm going to take all the money that I've left in my savings account, which was a little over $2,000, and I'm going to put it into a music video. I thought, okay, if I put this on YouTube, maybe someone from Metallica or Rammstein, my favorite

band, or System of a Down, or somebody's going to see it and whisk me away on tour, and then I'll be saved, and then I can play the electric cello. The song Tina recorded was a metal version of a classical piece called The Flight of the Bumblebee. In the video, a group of edgy-looking musicians rock out in a warehouse. Tina is front and center, absolutely shredding the electric cello. At one point, the song has a breakdown where she switches on a wah pedal. After she posted the video, Tina didn't hear from her favorite bands. But instead, she started hearing from film composers. One of them was Hans Zimmer, who fell in love with these heavy, exotic cello tones.

And when Hans called, I didn't even know who he was because my focus was not on soundtrack music. Hans asked Tina to play on the soundtrack for Sherlock Holmes, and they've been working together ever since. I think he appreciates artists with a particular sound or their own personality. So I really appreciate that Hans always gives me so much freedom in what I play. He welcomes the aggression, the stuff that I do on the electric cello. And of course, I also still play classical cello, which I've also done for a lot of the soundtracks. Here's some of that aggressive cello on Hans Zimmer's Wonder Woman theme. For Dune, Hans had a specific idea in mind for the tone of her electric cello. Here's Hans with Vanity Fair.

I remember saying to Tina, go out on my cellist. I want your cello to sound like a Tibetan war horn. I don't even know if there's a Tibetan war haunt, but she got the image. But of course, the score for Dune includes much more than just vocals and cello. Creating this alien soundscape required all kinds of surprising things, including bagpipes, giant woodwinds made from PVC pipe, and even... The ultimate sound of destruction. That's all coming up after the break. and save the new feature in the PC Optimum app, you'll get PC Optimum's best price for your grocery items. Simply add products to your shopping list in the app,

and it'll show you similar items at a lower cost. Add coffee to your list, then swap it for one that's cheaper. Craving chips? The app will suggest some on sale. To get started, just open the app. It's as easy as that. See the PC Optimum app for details. For Hans Zimmer's team at Remote Control, scoring a film is all about finding the right sonic textures.

We're forever trying to not only write music to the film, but create a world, create a sonic palette for the film. That's Steve Mazzaro, a composer at Remote Control. A film like Dune, you want to work as hard as you can to draw them in without having the viewer go, oh, I know that instrument, or I know that sound.

You want it to be completely alien. At Remote Control, even the writing process is a team effort. Because when Hans scores a film, he usually has several composers working under him. I think Dune had,

I want to say it was four or five of us. The exact division of labor varies from film to film. It's always different. Sometimes I'll just grab a cue that I want to do, or sometimes Hans will ask me to do a specific cue.

What we'll generally do is we'll take bits here and there, score it, and then we'll all come into a room and play it together and go over notes, thoughts, ideas with Hans and Denis. On Dune, the process went something like this. First, musicians like Tina and Suzanne recorded all kinds of samples. Then, Raoul and Tareis built those samples into digital instruments. Next, Hans used these instruments to write themes that Steve and the other composers could expand on.

So the theme is like the melody, you know, the notes that you would hear when Superman shows up and you hear Superman's theme. In Man of Steel, the main Superman theme goes like this. Throughout a film, the themes get adapted to fit the mood of the individual scenes. So when Superman meets the bad guy for the first time, they might play an ominous, minor key version of the theme. If it's a heroic moment, you're going to hear the heroic action version of the Superman theme. In the writing stage, these variations on a theme are called suites. A suite is basically like a piece of music

that isn't set to picture. So a lot of our writing the suites is experimentation. You know, I can take like a little motif that Hans did and then go, oh, well, what if I change this note and then make this longer? And then what if I double it or make this a whole theme in itself? We are just seeing what these themes are capable of,

what moods they can evoke and, you know, write all this material that then could possibly be used for the film itself. If the themes are strong enough, you really only need a few of them to score the entire film. If you look at something like Dune, for instance, there's three themes, maybe four themes in the whole movie. But unlike many of Hans' other scores,

the themes in Dune are intentionally subtle. A lot of them are very subliminal. You might not necessarily notice them. That's because Dune isn't about a heroic gladiator or a superhero or a swashbuckling pirate. It's about a distant, mysterious world. A world with its own lore and customs and wildlife and language. Here's Raul Vega. So when you listen to the score, you may not be getting something that is so motif heavy in a vein of, here's our theme and this is exactly what it is, this is the orchestra.

You're getting so many different layers of texture that are representing all these different elements and grains of sand. This whole thing is comprised of that as well. The samples are the sand. And how they move apart and move up and down in every which way you can think of in the score, there's something really beautiful about that. beautiful about that. From the beginning, Hans wanted the score to evoke the literal sound of that sand. But rather than sampling a desert storm, he decided to use flutes. As Hans explained to Vanity Fair, I kept saying to Pedro, you start my flutist, don't play it like a flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes. To achieve this, Pedro would blow air through various woodwind instruments, making vowel shapes with his mouth to alter the sound.

Here he is demonstrating the technique in that same interview. Pedro recorded this on everything from a tiny piccolo to a giant contrabass flute. He even attached a small reed instrument called the duduk to a long piece of PVC pipe in order to make it bassy and resonant. Hans then layered these breathy wind sounds throughout the soundtrack. Here's the piece that plays when the evil Harkonnens break into Paul's bedroom. For another track, Hans found a use for a group of sounds that Raoul and Thariz recorded years ago. I think it was a few years into working at Remote. Hans wanted to beef up his percussive library.

So he called us in and he said, hey, I want you to build me a drum kit. So we said, okay, do you have a preferred drummer or set of toms you want us to use? He said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let me rephrase this. I want you to build a drum kit out of found sound. Take anything that's in the yard. Take anything that's in the yard. Take anything that's in the alley. Go to Home Depot and just play.

So we went to Home Depot. We bought some two by fours and some bricks and some chains and a sledgehammer. And we set a bunch of microphones in the live room and just took turns breaking stuff. We just beat it to death. Just smashing things to bits. Capturing just the ultimate sound of destruction.

Once they had those recordings cleaned up, organized and processed, it sounded like this. Those were sounds of axes on two by fours, broken piano lids, chains, clay bricks. Now for the longest time, we had no idea what this was for. And I don't even think he knew what it was for. And so we kept it in our library of sounds for a very, very long time. But years later, as they were working on Dune, he called us and said, hey, do we still have that? I said, I think so. Great, send it over.

So we built it. He mixed it. And then it became a very, very popular march for a theme for Dune. Hans used these sounds in a version of the track that plays when Paul and his family arrive on Arrakis. As you can hear, these percussive sounds are paired with bagpipes, which might seem like an odd choice for a sci-fi movie, but director Denis Villeneuve said that he always saw House Atreides as a kind of Celtic people, so he decided to add a group of bagpipers to the scene. To record this, Hans Zimmer brought 30 bagpipers into a church in England to make what he called a fabulous noise. Now, if you added up all the layers in the soundtrack of Dune, the number would be in the tens of thousands.

And that's just one out of the 50-plus scores this team has created. Each one takes many months or even years of work and involves dozens of people. But the result is some of the most gripping and immersive music ever created. As a musician and a huge Hans Zimmer fan, I've often wondered what it would take to do this kind of work at this level. And after getting to know some of the key people from remote control, I've narrowed it down to three things. The first is an obsessive attention to detail. At the end of the day, you're trying to tell a computer how to pick between 10,000 different audio events, and you have to have cataloged those in a way that

makes sense. And if you're not consistent with that, it becomes quite cumbersome to build something. The second thing it takes is a willingness to experiment. It's not just about creating a cool sonic landscape, but how do you create something the world has never heard before? The only way you can do it is if you use your imagination and start playing. When we're creating a sound, it's not about like,

oh, should we use this or use that or the EQ levels? It has nothing to do with that. It's like what visceral feeling or what scene or what emotion. And then you just kind of like experiment. Like there's no rhyme or reason to it. You experiment until you can capture that feeling. Above all, the one thing that everyone kept hammering home was collaboration. It's all a very collaborative spirit. It's about this collaborative effort and this excitement and wanting to inspire and encourage each other. I enjoy the creative freedom, the collaboration, and the people.

It's really, really nice that there is a sense of family and community there. And according to everyone I spoke to, Hans leads by example. I don't think I've ever met somebody so collaborative and so curious about everything. You don't feel like you're with somebody who's like superhuman and that you're not worthy. You feel like you are part of a team and you're every bit as important to the process.

And I think you get the best results artistically. And that curious, collaborative spirit comes through loud and clear in the music they make. important to the process and I think you get the best results artistically. And that curious collaborative spirit comes through loud and clear in the music they make. It really is about connecting. That's why we like movies. We want to connect. We want to feel seen. We want to empathize. And a great place for us to start doing that is in sound. You can learn more about 20,000 Hertz at 20k.org and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back with new episodes in two weeks.