Hans Zimmer Was Still Composing Dune Music Months After The Film Released

It's official: "Dune" is not a book or a movie, it's a really great album for which the other stuff serve as companion pieces. This was made clear in a feature about "Dune: Part Two" in the latest issue of Total Film, where director Denis Villeneuve spoke about his composer, Hans Zimmer, and his intense love for the project. According to Villeneuve, Zimmer loved creating music for "Dune" so much that he just couldn't stop.

"I remember at one point, he called me, and said, 'Denis, listen to this. You're going to love this.' I said, 'Hans, it's absolutely fantastic music. I deeply love it. But we released the film six months ago!' He was still scoring non-stop. And he's doing the same right now, by the way. It's by far the best score I've had in my life."

Although a lot of the score didn't end up in either movie, Zimmer's "90 minutes of brand new music" still helped get Villeneuve in the right mood while writing the "Dune: Part Two" screenplay. Even the dozens of fans who prefer the 1984 "Dune" adaptation can probably still agree that Zimmer knocked it out of the park — and there's more where that came from.

"In 'Part Two' the score is even stronger than 'Part One.' I can say that with confidence,'" Villeneuve promised. If he's right, then the "Dune" score will likely end up filed alongside the music for "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "The Dark Knight" and "Interstellar," all of which are movies that wouldn't work nearly as well without their orchestral backdrop.

One of the big musical moments we're really looking forward to is the opportunity for Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) to finally show off his musical chops. In the book, Halleck plays a 9-string baliset, a futuristic instrument that's basically the result of lutes and lyres evolving over tens of thousands of years. Halleck was supposed to play from his baliset in the first "Dune" movie, but the scene was cut to make room for more crucial book material that the movie needed to cover. 

"Tonally, [Villeneuve] was right [to cut] the first one," Brolin acknowledged to Total Film. "This one ['Part Two'], the placement is right. I wrote the lyrics, and Hans wrote the music. I didn't think the scene would turn out as well as it did, but I'm really happy with it."

So far, Halleck's music has only been played in the 2000 miniseries. Patrick Stewart's version of the character in the '84 film did technically get to jam out on the baliset for a minute there, but that scene was tragically cut from the theatrical release for time as well. It'll be interesting to see what "Dune: Part Two" does with it, especially since we know from the "Hunger Games" series that you can never quite tell how catchy a song could be just from the lyrics written in the book. Back in 2010 when "Mockingjay" released in bookstores, did any readers predict that the depressing "Hanging Tree" song would soon become the catchiest banger of 2014? 

The sheer amount of effort Hans Zimmer's putting into "Dune" is encouraging, because not all Zimmer soundtracks are created equal. Perhaps as a result of Zimmer's team getting hired for such a large number of movies over the years, many of their soundtracks over the past decade have been somewhat forgettable. Even some of the soundtracks with a clear emotional resonance, like "Twelve Years a Slave" in 2014, still feel a little too familiar. It's hard not to listen to "Solomon" from that movie and not be reminded of "Time" from "Inception," for instance. It's hard to get too upset over the similar chord progression in those tracks — "Time" is a masterpiece, after all — but it was still a little worrying in 2021 to realize that outside of "Interstellar," Zimmer hadn't made a truly iconic, fully fresh movie score in over a decade. 

Luckily, the "Dune" movies are an exception to that trend, with Zimmer giving us one of his most inspired scores of his career. Maybe it's the books' bold psychedelic qualities, or maybe it's Villeneuve's fresh new direction, but the two-part story seems to have wakened Zimmer out of what some would call a late-career slump. Considering that "Dune" is one of the most ambitious and beloved sci-fi novels of all time, it makes sense that it'd inspire Zimmer to rise so much to the challenge. "Dune" fever really is that strong.