• 7 months ago
Dune 2 Movie - Deeper into the Desert -The Sounds of the Dune
Transcript
00:00 I never left the world of Dune.
00:03 In fact, I think Denis thought I was quite mad
00:06 because I kept writing after we finished the movie.
00:09 Six months after Dune released,
00:12 Hans was still composing, was still scoring the movie.
00:15 I was like sometimes receiving music and say,
00:17 "Hans, the movie's in theater right now
00:19 and you're still sending me music."
00:21 He said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's not--
00:23 you understand, I want you to be inspired for part two."
00:26 I don't think Hans really stopped.
00:28 I knew the story, I knew the book,
00:30 I knew it was coming our way,
00:32 and it felt important to carry on writing
00:35 when we were still in the same frame of mind.
00:38 Had we not stood outside Warner
00:43 and had he not said to me,
00:46 "You're the father of a book called Dune,"
00:49 everything would be different.
00:52 [music]
00:54 We did pretty well on the last one.
01:02 It's kind of a simoscape, you know?
01:04 Pretty good.
01:05 And we were weird.
01:07 So now I want to go and take everything that we're doing
01:09 and just, you know, go wider, go weirder.
01:13 Hans Zimmer brought to the first one different colors,
01:16 different tunes that will take you immediately
01:19 to an emotional state or to a frantic state.
01:22 It's a hell of a movie.
01:24 When I first read the script,
01:25 I put on a soundtrack from the first film
01:28 because it just immerses you in it.
01:30 He had to go deeper into the world of the Arcanons.
01:34 I wanted him to compose music for Fede Rota,
01:38 for the Arcanon world,
01:40 for the Emperor as well.
01:42 He had those two new bubbles of music to create the universe.
01:46 I wanted to do different sonic landscapes.
01:49 The Arcanon world is industrial.
01:52 You're having dinner in a steel foundry.
01:55 The Fremen world, I want to have the song sung
01:59 by the wind across the desert.
02:01 Beauty and simplicity and natural sounds.
02:04 A lot of wood.
02:06 A lot of sand, actually, is in there, scorned in a way.
02:11 But more importantly, I wanted him to write
02:15 something unforgettable for Shani.
02:19 A love theme, the love of Paul for Shani.
02:23 I wanted something that would be heartbreaking
02:26 and the most beautiful love theme ever written.
02:30 And honestly, I think he did it.
02:33 Ta-da!
02:34 By hitting those a little harder, some of those,
02:38 it's like she's telling a story.
02:40 It's like she's...
02:42 I'm being too gentle?
02:46 Yeah, tell me more of the story.
02:48 Okay.
02:49 For me, the romance is atypical,
02:57 but it was always going to be the heart of the story,
03:01 of this movie.
03:03 Look, right there, Spice.
03:06 Arrakis is so beautiful when the sun is low.
03:10 Shani shows him how to love this barren planet.
03:14 I originally wrote the theme for her
03:17 and then let it spread, like, bleed across into Paul
03:21 and then let that bleed across into the planet.
03:24 When I listened to it, I was in tears.
03:33 I said, "Hans, I think it's maybe one of the best things you've written."
03:37 He said, "You think so?" I said, "Yes, I think so."
03:40 He said, "Me too."
03:42 [MUSIC PLAYING]
03:45 If we were to do it with an orchestra,
04:08 it would actually destroy the intimacy.
04:11 It's a really good group.
04:13 I never understood why a film set on some strange planet
04:17 in the future should use a normal, romantic,
04:21 Middle European orchestra.
04:23 You know, why am I suddenly hearing violins?
04:26 So we started building instruments
04:29 and we started designing instruments.
04:32 Guillaume, Christophe, and Ed Egan,
04:36 Canadian genius designer,
04:39 spent 10 years building these beautiful instruments out of wood
04:43 with a lot of electronics inside.
04:45 We have all these resonators.
04:47 So there are two wooden ones, the big pyramid.
04:51 And we basically have the ability to take any one of our setups,
04:55 from either my setup or Guillaume's setup or Christophe's,
04:58 whatever we're playing, we can print these things separately,
05:02 but we can also feed it selectively into the resonators.
05:05 Just great flexibility, and we can react to this acoustic sound
05:09 that's coming back from the resonators.
05:12 It gives new kind of sounds that you never heard before, and subscribe.
05:17 When you hear it, you don't know if it's going from the future,
05:20 that you don't know exactly what kind of instrument it is.
05:23 So the pitch is continuum, the volume is continuous.
05:28 You have the osmosis, you have two of them.
05:30 And the osmosis is that whenever you start pressing a note,
05:35 you get the first sound, and you can vibrate the sound
05:38 and have the pressure being under control all the time.
05:42 When you play a note on a piano, basically it goes plonk, right?
05:46 Plonk, and it dies out.
05:48 What they've done is, when you touch the keyboard,
05:51 it knows you're already touching the keyboard.
05:54 Like, within that travel of that key, the sound can change completely.
05:59 And then, of course, the one thing every keyboard player wants to do,
06:03 what a violinist can do, or a guitarist can do, is have vibrato.
06:07 So you can go and wobble your keys left to right,
06:10 and you literally can transform a sound completely.
06:15 You're certainly hearing the textures that were in Dune 1, very inspirational.
06:20 And it's like that movie just resonated for us,
06:23 and it was like saying, "Man, this is like the environment that we love living in."
06:27 It's just a beautiful, beautiful score,
06:30 and it's amazing to be able to start contributing our kind of vision to this acoustic world.
06:36 I'm tuning now.
06:38 With the pencil.
06:40 [Violin playing]
06:44 I can sound something.
06:46 That I made. No, this is from an Oryx.
06:50 An Oryx horn.
06:53 [Violin playing]
07:00 Hans is restless instrumentally.
07:03 You know, Pedro, who plays the duduk,
07:06 he's also very keen on going to Home Depot and buying a load of plastic tubing,
07:13 and somehow putting a reed on it and making a sound.
07:16 I call it the PVC-based K-Bandstrip.
07:20 [Violin playing]
07:31 Now I can sleep tonight.
07:33 Oh, Pedro. We got Pedro from Venezuela.
07:35 You know, with all this technology going on,
07:38 you need somebody who can play with this enormous heart that he has.
07:42 So just music flows from him.
07:44 [Laughs]
07:47 [Violin playing]
07:57 I wrote the notes, but the notes are only, for me, a tiny part of the journey.
08:02 The notes need to be dressed up, so they need to have sound.
08:07 Well, you have this good, and if you can go and humanize them.
08:12 That's what I'm thinking, yeah.
08:14 It's so low, it needs a little pitch.
08:17 You know, I can throw an idea out there,
08:19 and then somebody else puts another idea on top.
08:22 Let's do another round, so that one we can just say was a little bit louder.
08:26 The mezzo piano, and this one, let's go for a Viennese elegy.
08:29 [Violin playing]
08:32 This is my friend, Trina.
08:34 She's my muse. We have done a lot of things together.
08:38 The team that surrounds me, we speak the same language.
08:41 Denis and Joe are part of the band.
08:44 The thing I love about Joe is that he works as much on sound
08:47 that he works on the images,
08:49 and there's an old structure that we work together on the structure of sound.
08:54 How much do you have to adjust things when I send it?
08:59 I mean, how much do I get you to shuffle?
09:03 You tell me.
09:04 Because I have a feeling you and I are very...
09:08 I think we'd sync rhythmically.
09:10 Yeah, exactly.
09:12 We could easily be in the same band playing the drums,
09:16 because our sense of storytelling.
09:20 You have to, in this film, not only convey very convincing battle scenes,
09:24 but also weird interior life that the Bene Gesserit have developed
09:30 and that Spice brings along in the characters.
09:33 So, you know, there's such an opportunity to experience the sound.
09:36 That map is used at this time by a new artist that I'm working on for the first time.
09:42 Richard King came on board and had Doug Emple and Ron Bartlett bring the sound to life.
09:48 Denis wants the world of Dune to be very visceral and tactile and recognizable as real.
09:55 Documentary was the word that he used.
09:57 He wanted really for the audience to have the feeling that all of this sound
10:01 was recorded the day that the shots were taken.
10:04 The phrase I use is like a camera person will rack focus
10:08 to show you what they want you to be looking at, and we do the same with sound.
10:11 It's the same principle.
10:13 You don't want an audience to choose between 10,000 sounds.
10:16 You want to focus in on what you'd like them to hear for story and emotion.
10:20 The worm is much more of a feature, and it's featured a lot more in this film.
10:32 And so we needed to create the sound of the worm riding along the surface
10:37 and the velocity of the worm and the friction of the worm on the ground.
10:42 Well, when Paul rides the worm the first time, he gets the grandfather of all worms,
10:48 and we had to make it sound like that.
10:50 There's 50 tons of meat traveling along the ground at 50 miles an hour.
10:55 So there were so many challenges.
10:57 We did a lot of recording in the desert, dragging large objects across sand and gravel
11:03 and then utilizing pitch shifters and simple kind of analog tools like that to alter the sounds.
11:10 It's a real handoff moment where it's this massive worm.
11:14 And Paul's voice is so tiny because if you make him large or loud,
11:21 it makes the worm sound smaller, so you go the other way.
11:26 The worm's huge. You can barely hear Paul yelling or doing any efforts.
11:31 But when you get to the music, that's when it's like, "Ta-da!"
11:35 He's going to really take off and ride this giant worm.
11:39 And it's just very heroic and gives you goosebumps.
11:44 Richard's sound is spectacular and phenomenal.
11:49 So I quietly have to find a...
11:53 It's not quite fighting a battle. It's outwitting him.
11:57 It's like figuring out, "Okay, hang on.
12:01 I know that Richard will just have appropriated the whole top end of the audio spectrum,
12:09 so I better find something in the middle to sneak in."
12:12 This is the score done by the band.
12:16 Well, it's by you.
12:19 Played by the band.
12:22 This is the score done by the band.
12:24 Don't argue with me.
12:27 Okay.
12:29 [Music]
12:54 [Music]