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3 weeks ago
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While legendary film composer Hans Zimmer has previously ventured musically into the realm of World War II with films like Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor, working on filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Blitz – set during the relentless, eight-month-long bombing of London by Nazi Germany – allowed him to look at the era, and a facet of his own family history, in a way he never had before.
“My mother was a refugee in England during the Second World War, and Steve McQueen gave me one direction. He said ‘After you watch this film, you will understand your mother better,’” Zimmer revealed during Deadline’s Sound & Screen event on Friday. “That’s all he said. And I knew all the stories, and as I was working on the film. I started to feel her stories. So he was absolutely correct.”
Indeed, the story moved Zimmer to create a musical score to reflect the unrelenting chaos and brutality of the blitz, so disturbing that it was difficult for him to assemble a sonically palatable collection of passages to present with a live orchestra to the Sound & Screen audience.
“This score is unmitigatedly horrendous,” he conceded. “It is an absolute horrible score, it’s so dissonant, it’s so committed to this atonality that it was very difficult to put pieces together where you weren’t going to go and run screaming out this room, because I didn’t think I could do that to you. But these literally are the nice bits. That was it.”
Perhaps only half-jokingly, Zimmer described the key instrument that inspired his musical take on psychological torture. “One of the most tortuous instruments in the world, which is the treble recorder,” he said. “And I don’t know who’s ever been to an English public school where we learn how to play this little recorder and everybody’s out of tune and everybody’s blowing really hard into them – and it’s the sound of hell!”
Still, there was a method to Zimmer’s musical madness, which was entirely in alignment for McQueen’s unflinching vision for Blitz. “The idea behind the whole thing is the story of a child who is trying to get through war-torn London, which has been bombed all the time, and trying to find his mother again,” the composer explained. “What I wanted to do is, I wanted the grownups – you, me, the grownups – to feel the same sort of disassociation, being completely lost in the world, being illogical, not knowing how to get there, not knowing how to get home, not knowing how to find home, and having that horror, that fear that you’ll never find it again; the horror of these massive bombs coming down. So the only way I could think of doing it was to write music which was so brutal and so absolutely violent.”
How did Zimmer know he’d accomplished his mission? “When I got a text from my producer that says, ‘That takes balls.’”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
