It’s only a few days now until Tenet hits UK cinemas – and Empire Online is celebrating with Nolan Week, looking back at the films of a modern-day filmmaking icon. From his numerous Hans Zimmer collaborations, to his twisting of popular music, to the tonal-shifts that deliver rising waves of anxiety, Christopher Nolan knows how to deploy movie music to maximum effect. Take a trip through his scores and personal music tastes in our A-Z round-up.
A is for Acrostic
An acrostic is a puzzle in which certain letters in a line form a word or phrase. In typical Nolan fashion, the first letter of track titles 4 through 9 on the Batman Begins soundtrack form an acrostic: Barbastella, Artibeus, Tadarida, Macrotus, Antrozous, and Nycterus. See what they did there?
B Is for BRAAAM
For the uninitiated, BRAAM is a music motif associated with Hollywood action movies and trailers – a big, bold brassy note that sounds like a souped-up foghorn to signify something cataclysmic is about to happen. If the noise had been present in trailers for Transformers (2007) and District 9 (2009), it was Nolan’s 2010 Inception that took BRAAAM from bit-part player to having its name above the title. Hans Zimmer claims to be the Boss of BRAAAMs, taking his cue from a description in Nolan’s screenplay of "massive, low-end musical tones, sounding like distant horns.” He created the sound by placing a piano in a church, weighing down the pedal with a book and asking brass players to play into “the resonance of the piano.” While others (Mike Zarin, Zack Hemsley) also claim to have invented the trope, it was Zimmer and Inception who popularised it, the composer later lamenting he had created a “horrible” blueprint for Hollywood action scoring.
C is for Collaborators
If Hans Zimmer is the poster boy for Christopher Nolan’s music, the scores are often brought to life with a cadre of composer collaborators, often members of his Remote Control Productions banner. On Batman Begins, Zimmer was joined by James Newton Howard, Ramin Djawadi (Game Of Thrones), Lorne Balfe (Mission: Impossible: Fallout) and Mel Wesson (Black Hawk Down); The Dark Knight saw Zimmer reunite with Howard; on Dunkirk, Zimmer was joined by Balfe, Andrew Kawczynski (Top Gun: Maverick), Steve Mazzaro (No Time To Die) and Benjamin Walfisch (Blade Runner 2049).
D Is for Desert Island Discs
In February 2018, Nolan appeared on landmark Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs to pick the eight records he would take if castaway on a secluded isle. Ever the film lover, half his list come from movies.
His choices were; 1) ‘Journey To The Line’ from The Thin Red Line by Hans Zimmer; 2) ‘Paranoid Android’ by Radiohead (he wanted it for the end of Memento but couldn’t get the rights); 3) ‘Fantasia For Four Hands in F Minor’ by Franz Schubert; 4) ‘Five Circles’ from Chariots Of Fire by Vangelis 5); ‘Loving The Alien’ by David Bowie (whose ‘Something In The Air’ played over the ‘Memento’ end credits and later went on to appear in The Prestige as Tesla); 6) ‘Marwood Walks’ from Withnail And I by David Dundas; 7) ‘Ski Chase’ from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by John Barry; 8) ‘Prophecies’ from Koyaanisqatsi by Phillip Glass.
His book was The Selected Fictions Of Jorge Luis Borges (very Inception) and his luxury was a projector and a vault of classic films.
E is for Extreme Method
To get into the zone to compose the score for Dunkirk, Zimmer not only visited the beach set on the greyest day imaginable but also picked up a handful of sand, put it in a jar and took back to his studio. “Generally when I start on a movie, the agonizing deadline, the unsolvable things, I’m tense most of the time,” he told The New York Times. “There was something good about having that [sand] next to me.”
F is for “The Final Piece”
You probably wouldn’t associate Christopher Nolan with the world of lo-fi ambient US rap but Tenet’s end credits are accompanied by a song by US rapper Travis Scott. It’s unknown whether Nolan has got Scott’s ‘Sicko Mode’ on repeat or digs the rapper’s collabs with Kendrick and Drake but he has called the ditty ‘The Plan’ “the final piece in a year-long puzzle.” So it may be worth staying in your seat to have a listen over the end credits as it accompanies an army of VFX artists names going up in black and white.
G is for Göransson, Ludwig
Tenet sees a new composer enter the Nolanverse. With Hans Zimmer already committed to Dune, Black Panther and The Mandalorian composer Ludwig Göransson has picked up the baton, working with the director four months before shooting started. “He talks about music like he is a composer himself,” says Göransson about Nolan. “It’s very deep.”
H is for Howard, James Newton
It was Hans Zimmer who invited James Newton Howard to work on Batman Begins. The idea was simple: two composers to reflect the split personality of Bruce Wayne/Batman. Zimmer composed the film’s action cues while Howard concentrated on the more dramatic elements of the story. Howard returned for The Dark Knight, composing the motif for Harvey Dent/Two Face, but declined to return for series closer The Dark Knight Rises — he felt he had gone artistically as far as he could go with the series and, after Nolan’s collaboration with Zimmer on Inception, thought the pair enjoyed a special relationship and didn’t want to intrude.
I is for Isolation
Believing the key idea informing Insterstellar was isolation, Hans Zimmer barricaded himself in his London apartment living life like a hermit for a month. Bet his Deliveroo bill was off the chain.
J is for Julyan, David
David Julyan is a composer who scored the early works of Nolan. Starting with short film Larceny, Julyan went on to compose the director’s debut Following (legend has it the music budget was around $8 for a blank tape), Memento, Insomnia and, following a break for Batman Begins, The Prestige. For the Memento score, inspired by the likes of Vangelis’ Blade Runner and — hey! — Hans Zimmer’s The Thin Red Line — Julyan composed a synthesised score that created distinct sound worlds for the colour (“brooding and classical”) and black and white (“oppressive and rumbly”) strands of the film. If working on a smaller canvas, Julyan’s work is no less intricate and dense that Nolan’s latter scores and is well worth seeking out.
K is for Klaxon
See: BRAAAM!
L is for Letter, The
Before starting work on Interstellar Nolan sent Zimmer a typewritten one-page letter detailing the fable that stood at the heart of the film’s story. He then instructed the composer to work for a day and then present back what he had written. Zimmer, who was working with students in Los Angeles at the time, wrote a four-minute piece for piano and organ, "I really just wrote about what it meant to be a father," recalled Zimmer to The Hollywood Reporter. "And [Nolan] came down and sat on my couch and I played it for him. He goes, 'Well, I better make the movie now.'”
M is for Marr, Johnny
Former guitarist with The Smiths. Johnny Marr made an important contribution to Inception’s score, supplying a Morricone-esque guitar lick for Mal (Marion Cotillard) and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) – ‘Old Souls’ on the original soundtrack. “I don’t think anyone else could have done it,” said Zimmer of Marr. “I was willing to throw out the tune if he said no.” The pair most recently collaborated on No Time To Die.
N is for Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
Staying with Inception, Nolan wrote Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’ into the screenplay but had second thoughts when he cast Marion Cotillard as Mal because she had recently played Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Zimmer convinced the filmmaker to keep it in, the song becoming a lynchpin for the entire score with moments taken from the Piaf song providing links from one dream level to the next.
“Just for the game of it, all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track,” recalled Zimmer. “So I could slip into half time, I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time.”
O is for Organ
Forget Matthew McConaughey – the real star of Interstellar is the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ housed at Temple Church in London. Played by the Church’s music director Roger Sayer, it was an apt choice: for Zimmer, the organ visually resembled a spaceship and the air coming from the pipes mirrored the breathing in astronaut’s suits. It booms out when Michael Caine’s Professor Brand hands over the keys to the spaceship to McConaughey’s Cooper, during the first handshake scene or perhaps most gloriously in the docking set-piece. No time for caution, indeed.
P is for Pocket Watch
When Nolan sent the Dunkirk script to Zimmer, he also sent the sound of his antique pocket watch. Zimmer synthesised the sound and it used the insistent ticking as the pulse for the score. Other strange inspirations for Dunkirk instrumentation include the boat The Moonstone which Zimmer took the sound of and turned into a musical texture.
Q is for Quotation
The Dunkirk score also makes a striking use of Edward Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’, the ninth variation from the composer’s 1898-1899 Enigma Variations. Zimmer called it an “emotional anthem for a nation” but, to shred it of any hint of sentimentality, the composer slowed it down to 6 beats per minute, amplifying its quiet heroism. The Elgar piece is particularly poignant for Nolan: it played at his father’s funeral. “I just find it unbearably moving.” he said.
R is for Rise Up
No, not Hamilton. According to Zimmer, ‘Rise Up’ is a translation of the chant deshi basara (from an unspecified language) used in The Dark Knight Rises. Zimmer wanted hundreds of thousands of voices so crowdsourced a choir from social media to build up the chant’s richness and volume. It accompanies Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale)’s final escape from the Pit and would make an excellent wake up call.
S is for The Shepard Tone
The Shepard Tone is an auditory trick Nolan first used with composer David Julyan on The Prestige but unleashed to full effect in Dunkirk. Named after cognitive scientist David Shepard, the illusion is built around several tones separated by an octave layered on top of each other. While the lowest bass note starts to fade in, the higher treble starts to fade out. Once the bass is completely in and the treble completely out, the sequence loops again. Because you can always hear at least two tones rising in pitch at the same time, your brain gets tricked into thinking that the sound is constantly ascending in pitch. The result is an always shifting creeping anxiety that informed the creation of the screenplay.
“It's a corkscrew effect,” Nolan told Business Insider. “It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle. I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there's a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So, I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principles.”
T is for Time
For a director so concerned with temporal shenanigans, it is apt that perhaps the most beloved piece of music for a Christopher Nolan film is called ‘Time’. Written by Hans Zimmer for the end of Inception, the track plays over the scene when Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Saito (Ken Watanabe) wake up on the plane and Cobb finally sees his children. Multi-textured but simple with a beautiful rise-and-fall structure, it’s seemingly simple stirring
U is for Underappreciated
Zimmer has been nominated for the Academy Award, Golden Globes and Baftas for his scores for Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk, but never won. None of his Dark Knight Trilogy scores were nominated for Oscars or Globes, though The Dark Knight picked up a Bafta.
V is for Vespertillo
The titles for the cues on the Batman Begins soundtrack are named for the scientific names of different genera of bat starting with Vespertillo and ending with Lasiurus.
W is for Why So Serious?
‘Why So Serious?’, Zimmer’s nine-minute suite for Heath Ledger’s Joker, was partly inspired by German electro-legends Kraftwerk and built around two notes played by electric cello, solo violin, guitars and strings. Zimmer utilised the latter in an unusual way, running razor blades down the instruments to get that scratchy, edgy, fingers-on-blackboards sound. So much the same as listening to Toploader then.
X is for Xylophone
There’s bound to be one in of these scores somewhere
##Y is for Yorke, Thom
A huge Radiohead fan (see Desert Island Discs), Nolan featured ‘Treefingers’ from Kid A on the Memento soundtrack and singer Thom Yorke’s song ‘Analyse’ from his 2006 album The Eraser plays over the end credits of The Prestige.
Z is for Zimmer, Hans
Nolan’s six film partnership with Hans Zimmer is one of the most exciting director composer partnerships in modern movies, both men bringing creativity, an analytical mind and love of mathematics to the party. But don’t be fooled into thinking it is completely harmonious. “We fight like cats and dogs but in the best, most productive way,” Nolan told Classic FM. ‘We love each, with everything that comes with that. We fight like brothers and we love like brothers.”