MUSIC OF HIS SPHERES

ART & CRAFTS

SCORES, Dunkirk, Blade Runner 2049

H ans Zimmer has proof the millennials wept: a photo of grown men crying at this year's Coachella music festival, their tears peaking when he and his band played his score to The Lion King. The result was not a given when Zimmer earned billing at the event below Kendrick Lamar, Radiohead, and Lady Gaga. But the gamble paid off.

"I'm slightly irked that one gets put into pigeonholes," Zimmer said a few months later. "I wanted to see if we could play in front of a non-dedicated film audience and just turn it from film music into music_I was spending 40 years in this room, and nothing was in real time and I was hiding behind a screen. I had a suspicion I was having a conversation with people, even though we had never met. That picture sort of confirmed that."

Zimmer—who has two scores in contention this year, Warner Bros.' Dunkirk and Blade Runner 2049—was sitting in that room in his Santa Monica-based Remote Control Productions, a complex that's like a WeWork for composers. He said he never wants a score to tell an audience how to feel, and credits collaborations with such directors as Ridley Scott and Christopher Nolan for challenging him.

In the case of Dunkirk, that meant taking Nolan's suggestion for using British composer Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" piece from his Enigma Variations for a pivotal scene, but going one further. "Chris was nervous about even mentioning ["Nimrod"] because he wants me to come up with my own ideas," Zimmer said. "But the first thing I said was 'Well, hang on, Elgar's piece is about 14 variations. Why can't we go and write Variation 15?'" The composer turned it into a score he described as one continuous song, which took him seven months to complete.

For Blade Runner 2049, Zimmer almost balked at coming onboard. Director Denis Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker called, wanting to visit his studio with a dilemma and a proposition. "I said, 'Absolutely no way. I'm going on tour,' " Zimmer recalled telling them. The pair showed up anyway and unspooled an early cut of the film for him and composer Benjamin Wallfisch, a frequent collaborator. "I was sitting at my keyboard, and I had just a fraction of an idea, but it got the conversation going." Zimmer owned the same Yamaha CS-80 that Vangelis used to compose for the original 1982 movie, and played a melody that became the "Mesa" track on the score. Wallfisch carried out the remainder of the duties, with Zimmer helping to finish during a 10day break from the road.

"There was a sense of hope to the melody," Wallfisch said. "We're different kinds of musicians, but we both have a similar way of thinking.... This is a score where you hear both of our voices influencing each other."

That ability to riff and re-invent is something Zimmer relies on more and more. "All I've got in front of me is a blank page," he said of his process. "The more movies I've done, and the more I try not to repeat myself or become irrelevant, the blanker that page seems to become."

ANNA LISA RAYA