The “influential” song Christopher Nolan calls “a magical piece of film score”
While the visual, narrative, and performative aspects of Christopher Nolan‘s movies are undoubtedly responsible for giving them their overall quality, it’s also fair to say that the likes of Interstellar, The Dark Knight and Dunkirk wouldn’t have such excellence were it not for their glorious scores.
Nolan has worked with some of the best film score composers in the industry throughout his career, including Ludwig Göransson, who offered his talents to Tenet and the recent Oppenheimer, and the legendary Hans Zimmer, widely considered one of the greatest composers of all time, who provided the score for Interstellar and Inception, among others.
The director is a big admirer of Hans Zimmers’ work in general and once spoke of his magnificent efforts in Terrence Malick’s 1998 war movie, The Thin Red Line. When Nolan visited the JM Video store in Paris with Cillian Murphy, he spoke glowingly of Malick’s films and Zimmer’s score.
“Thin Red Line. Fantastic war movie,” Nolan began. “Absolutely poetic. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that one on the big screen, it’s very beautiful. It’s remarkable”. The film is the second screen adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 novel of the same name, which tells a fictionalised version of the Battle of Mount Austen during World War II.
When Murphy asked Nolan whether he had a film print of Malick’s film, the director responded: “I’ve borrowed one, but there’s a very good Blu-Ray, a Criterion Blu-Ray, but it’s just a phenomenal movie.” Nolan then went on to discuss Hans Zimmer’s “influential” score for the film.
“Hans did the score,” he began. “There’s a queue in there called ‘Journey to the Line’ that he refers to as ‘the forbidden queue’ because whenever he’s working on a film, and somebody temps with it, it’s impossible to replace because it’s so powerful in and of itself, and so beautifully modulated with its time and how it builds.”
“It’s a pretty magical piece of film score,” Nolan added. “Very influential. You hear it ripped off all the time. But it works at its best in that movie. It’s really incredible. Really beautiful”. ‘Journey to the Line’ is typical of Zimmer’s works, constantly elevating to a crescendo that seemingly never ends, and the effect is just devastating.
It’s an instance that Nolan is clearly in great admiration of and is likely one of the reasons that the director has sought out Zimmer on several occasions to provide film scores for his own movies. Check out the track below to get a feel for Nolan’s passion for the score.
