From actors to cinematographers, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has a knack for having frequent collaborators, and one of his favorite until a few years back was composer Hans Zimmer.
While Nolan is one of the most acclaimed Hollywood filmmakers in modern cinema who is well known for creating visually stunning movies, Zimmer’s composition of powerful and memorable scores is well known for elevating the best of the best movies creating a unique immersive experience. Then, what could be the reason behind the fallout of such an incredible collaboration?
Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer’s collaboration created masterpieces once upon a time
Nolan and Zimmer’s collaboration traces back to 2005 when they first collaborated on the DC film Batman Begins. The background score for the film served as what Zimmer referred to as “only the beginning of a theme” for the upcoming collaborations. The score only went on to become more experimental and aggressive in the sequels The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Following this, their collaboration was extended to the 2014 Oscar-winning film Interstellar. Zimmer earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score and left a lasting impression on viewers with its distinctive "BRAAAM" cue which had a long-lasting influence on the musical aspect of blockbuster marketing. Regarding making the score for the movie, Zimmer spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how Nolan wrote the screenplay throughout in company of his composition. “I really just wrote about what it meant to be a father. And he (Nolan) starts describing this huge journey, this vast canvas of space and philosophy and science and all these things. So he was writing with this piece of music sort of keeping him company all the way through the writing process, all the way through the shoot,” he said.
For the next collaboration, Zimmer composed music for the 2017 epic historical war thriller film Dunkirk. With the use of the Shepard tone, it is touted to be his most creative and ambitious effort to date. Zimmer told Deadline, “Nobody had done what we ultimately did, and I kept thinking, halfway through the movie, ‘I know why nobody has done it before — because it’s sort of impossible.’”