Film Music: Interstellar

Everyone knows that the score can make or break the movie. That’s why top film composers are high in demand, and it’s also why many movie-watchers and music-listeners love listening to film scores outside of the movie itself. And the Interstellar score fits in this category.

This 2014 science fiction movie tells the story of a dystopian future. Humanity is struggling to survive, so a group of astronauts travel through a wormhole to find a new habitable planet.

An Interstellar Score

The Composing Process

Picture this: you are a film score composer and have been hired to work on a new project. However, the director does not give you a copy of the script to study as you begin composing. In fact, the director does not even tell you the plot for the movie. He only gives you a one-page story of a father leaving his child to go to work.

This is what happened to Hans Zimmer at the start of Interstellar.

“I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It’s going to tell you the fable at the center of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written,” Interstellar director Christopher Nolan said to Zimmer. 

And this is how Zimmer wrote the main theme for the movie. After spending an evening composing music based on the short story, he came up with a four-minute piece for piano and organ showcasing “what it meant to be a father” (read that interview here). After Nolan heard the theme, he was sold. Zimmer continued to develop it, taking the next two years to complete the Interstellar score.

*Fun fact: while writing the score, Zimmer spent a month living as a hermit in order to fully understand the isolation felt by the characters in the movie. This helped him capture those feelings in his music.

Analysis of the Score

The Interstellar score combines Romanticism and minimalism in unique ways.  One of the most distinctive features about the music is the intensely loud organ (for more on that, read here), which can represent spirituality and the vast unknown. And if you listen closely, you can hear air and breath move through the music in various forms (fitting, because the story is about astronauts in spacesuits). Zimmer experimented with a 60 person choir to achieve this idea:

I wanted to hear the exhalation of 60 people, imagining the wind over the dunes in the Sahara. I got them to face away from the microphones, and used them as reverb for the pianos. The further we get away from Earth in the movie, the more the sound is generated by humans – but an alienation of human sounds. Like the video messages in the movie, they’re a little more corroded, a little more abstract.

Hans Zimmer on FMS

In the track Mountains, Zimmer makes great use of the “rushing air” effect. And at 3:11 in the track above, the choir joins the orchestra with an unearthly chant-like sound, adding drama to the music.

Another technique Zimmer uses in the Interstellar score is a lack of harmonic progression. Repetitive cellular ideas (minimalism) combined with no harmonic changes – or unexpected harmonic changes – add to the mystery and emotion in the music.

What do you think? Was Zimmer successful in writing the Interstellar score? Did he capture the feelings and the story of the movie?

For more interviews with Zimmer and discussions on this score, click here and here.