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Zimmer: “Dark Knight” Score Was Too Loud
Along with the now infamous “BWAAAMMMMMM” sound, the film scores that Hans Zimmer composes for his long-term collaborator Christopher Nolan are often described by terms such as ‘loud’, ‘bombastic’ and ‘bold’.
Nolan’s films always have a strong visual aesthetic and celebrated soundtracks, but the sound mixing on these films is a little less universally praised – the score so often emphasised over the character dialogue it can make some of it unintelligible.
Many have put the blame on Zimmer, but the composer this week tells Vanity Fair that it’s all on Nolan and in fact with “The Dark Knight” he himself had complaints about the same thing:
“I told Chris the music was too loud – you couldn’t hear the lines. He said, ‘I wrote them. I can do what I want.’ He was right; people do remember the lines. He could have done 200 different cop-out endings, but he put that ending on. It’s hard to pull off a satisfying ending, if you’re that ambiguous. One second longer, or one sentence or note different, and it would have been a different movie.”
Nolan’s decisions ultimately reign supreme on one of his sets with even venerated composers like Zimmer deferring to the filmmaker. The pair are likely to collaborate on Nolan’s next and still yet to be officially announced film which was recently set for a July 2020 release.
Zimmer’s score work will be heard later this year in both “The Lion King” and “Dark Phoenix” and in next year’s “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and the third “Spongebob Squarepants” movie.
Along with the now infamous “BWAAAMMMMMM” sound, the film scores that Hans Zimmer composes for his long-term collaborator Christopher Nolan are often described by terms such as ‘loud’, ‘bombastic’ and ‘bold’.
Nolan’s films always have a strong visual aesthetic and celebrated soundtracks, but the sound mixing on these films is a little less universally praised – the score so often emphasised over the character dialogue it can make some of it unintelligible.
Many have put the blame on Zimmer, but the composer this week tells Vanity Fair that it’s all on Nolan and in fact with “The Dark Knight” he himself had complaints about the same thing:
“I told Chris the music was too loud – you couldn’t hear the lines. He said, ‘I wrote them. I can do what I want.’ He was right; people do remember the lines. He could have done 200 different cop-out endings, but he put that ending on. It’s hard to pull off a satisfying ending, if you’re that ambiguous. One second longer, or one sentence or note different, and it would have been a different movie.”
Nolan’s decisions ultimately reign supreme on one of his sets with even venerated composers like Zimmer deferring to the filmmaker. The pair are likely to collaborate on Nolan’s next and still yet to be officially announced film which was recently set for a July 2020 release.
Zimmer’s score work will be heard later this year in both “The Lion King” and “Dark Phoenix” and in next year’s “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Top Gun: Maverick” and the third “Spongebob Squarepants” movie.
