How Did Hans Zimmer Come Up With Dune: Part Two's 'Otherworldly' Sound?

Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul Atreides alongside Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, and Javier Bardem in Dune Part Two.

Dune is an electrifyingly expansive sci-fi franchise that stood on the heap of its other failed adaptations. The failures were so catastrophic that the attempts to adapt Frank Herbert’s magnum opus were touted to be cursed. 

The director, Denis Villeneuve, broke the curse three years ago with Timothée Chalamet starring as the lead, Paul Atreides, bolstered by other cast members such as Rebecca Ferguson, who is essaying the role of Lady Jessica.

Villeneuve's 'Dune'

The film's crux is founded on Herbert’s dense and exhaustive plot. So, it wasn’t an easy task to begin with. The interpretations of the plot are so diverse that one can be truer than the other. Some have argued that the book is a white supremacist’s tale of leading a jihad and others suggest it to be a cautionary tale on the ecological devastation that awaits us. But the gist of it remains, the plot is famously difficult to adapt. 

Villeneuve's first film largely falls under the trappings of simplifying an otherwise complex tale that demands to be read through varied lenses. Mostly because it is not just the journey of a messianic hero in the desert world. And neither is it just a white man’s attempt to colonise for a hallucinogenic substance called spice. 

The World-building

The route Villeneuve takes is a cleaner, more sophisticated look into a complex plot. It focuses on the world-building. The first film sets the tone to give us a purview into the world. Dune: Part Two builds on its strong foundation – there are multiple villains as we witness the rise of our prophetic hero, a complex maternal figure and an equally indefatigable love interest, Chani (Zendaya). But that's just scratching the surface.

The storytelling is balancing on the firm shoulders of its cinematic visuals, with eel-like desert creatures that wreak havoc and dragonfly ornithopters that manage to do much the same. Every frame is a spectacle to behold. Adding to that, most of the desert shots were taken in Abu Dhabi amidst actual dunes, providing some of the best scenes in the film. Production designer Patrice Vermette said to Conde Nast Traveler:

“The movie is called Dune, so we need the sand dunes. In Abu Dhabi, that’s everything.”

While Italy, Jordan and Budapest trudged the way for the other shots.  

The Otherworldly Sound

The expansive production design, however, would seem incomplete without Hans Zimmer's reverberating music score. The booming experimental notes add to the narrative. Zimmer aimed to step away from the European orchestra and create unique sounds in the first film. Hybrid instruments were created, cellos were made to sound like war horns, and a made-up language was sung by female choirs.

He wanted to create something unorthodox and spiritual, so much so that he turned down an offer to score for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. And it was all worth it because he won the Oscar for it in 2021. 

Moreover, the Inception composer takes this sonic exploration very “seriously” as he has been working on the score since his teenage years. Being a fan of the books, he had already built the world up in his head. An enthusiasm he shares with Villeneuve. So much so, that Zimmer never read the script. The different departments in the film – costume and cinematography - kept in touch with each other to lend themselves to the storytelling in the most authentic way possible, as per a report by Wallpaper. 

Unorthodox Methods of Sound Production

Indian bamboo flute, Irish whistles, sound of scraping metal were used to create the futuristic intergalactic world. This is precisely why the film’s sound isn’t identifiable because the efforts to create it were “unorthodox”. In a recent interview with Variety, Zimmer adds, “I thought we were going to go to galaxies that we had never known before. It’s very important to build instruments and make a good sonic world and build a musical world that hadn’t been there before.”

For the war scenes in Dune: Part Two, Zimmer admits that his provocative tunes lend themselves to a very “northern European musical vocabulary.”

Lending Voice to The Characters Through Sound Production

Zimmer puts major emphasis on the female characters and female vocalists. The Bene Gesserit, an exclusive sisterhood that enjoys advanced abilities, has an accompanying background score that seems to be menacing when they slip into the frame. Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother, also has an equally powerful score.

“Even as the mother leaves the room, the sound of a female voice still lingers, so you’re constantly reminded where the power lies.”

Hans Zimmer

Another instrument that was reinvented was the duduk, a pre-Christian Armenian instrument which is played by Pedro Eustache in the films. Paul and Chani’s love theme, ‘A Time of Quite between the Storms” was primarily composed on the duduk with Loire Cotler (the female vocalist from Dune: Part One) singing very quietly, as per Zimmer's interview with Variety. However, the composition also holds the emotional core of the film. Amidst all the chaos – generational trauma, betrayal and family feuds – their love seems to run deep.

While Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen’s (Austin Butler) character, the primary villain in the film, has a “cold metallic sheen, an industrial brooding sound” (Variety). Scores like ‘Seduction’ also evoke a singular sonic sensation, unlike any of the soundtracks within the album. It's sinister, uncanny and strange, much like the House of Harkonnen. Zimmer himself admits that he creates dark sounds with much zeal.

Zimmer’s radical music score grasps the complexity of Herbert’s plot. He experiments with choral, rock, electronic and world music which builds an eerie, dramatic and downright weird atmosphere - making the film a sensory miracle. Reinventing instruments to the sound of scraping metal - the composer left no stone unturned to immerse us in the sheer scope of Villeneuve's cinematic world.