In a year of big, bold movie scores ("The Social Network," "How to Train Your Dragon," "Tron: Legacy"), Hans Zimmer's work on Christopher Nolan's blockbuster brain-teaser "Inception" has to count as one of the biggest and boldest. Dark and portentous but with an undercurrent of loss and longing, Zimmer's music plays a crucial role in defining the feel and mood of the film; he also uses shifts in tempo to help orient viewers in Nolan's multi-level dreamscapes.
The German-born Zimmer is a nine-time Oscar nominee whose only win came for 1994's "The Lion King." He was consistently nominated throughout the '90s, and then went almost a decade without Academy recognition until last year's nod for "Sherlock Holmes."
Among his scores that were overlooked was his acclaimed collaboration with James Newton Howard on Nolan's "The Dark Knight." As part of Nolan's trusted circle of collaborators, he'll soon venture back into the Batcave for "The Dark Knight Rises."
When you started talking to Chris Nolan about "Inception," did he tell you what he was looking for in the music?
He let me read the script very early on, before he started shooting. And we would always talk about story. We would talk about the ambition of the storytelling, and occasionally I'd hear things in my head. But the actual talk about specifics of the music was very minimal.
I was trying to figure out what my journey through this script was, in a way. Just sort of parsing it out. Okay, dialogue takes care of this, Wally Pfister's cinematography is going to take care of this. So what is left for me? What is the thing that only I can say that is impossible for him to say elegantly with words or pictures?
So what can you say that the others can't?
There's a great sense of foreboding, and a great sense of tragedy, I think, in the score. Chris and I talked a lot about English movies of the '70s, the movies Nic Roeg did and the way he used music. And we were talking a lot about John Barry and what he did in the James Bond movies. They had a very distinct voice, and they found a modern way to deal with age-old emotion. And I was just trying to find out, what is the current voice to tell a tragic love story?
Did you reach a conclusion?
For me, the Marion Cotillard character was absolutely the cornerstone for all my writing. Everything, in a funny way, is about her. The scene where she's sitting on the ledge was absolutely the center for me.
I approached it as just a big love story, really – a doomed love story. And how often do you get to write a great tragic love story? I think people actually forget, because the movie is so dazzling, they forget how personal the story is.
