Christopher Nolan Wrote Hans Zimmer a ‘Fable’ to Inspire His ‘Interstellar’ Score

Hans Zimmer and frequent collaborator Christopher Nolan have quite the bond — so much so that Nolan even courted Zimmer for his 2014 epic “Interstellar” by sharing a very personal story.

Zimmer told Vulture that his favorite Nolan collaboration remains “Interstellar” due to how the project began.

“Chris sent me a letter and said to write whatever came to me. He wouldn’t tell me what the movie was, but he wrote me this fable,” Zimmer said. “It arrived on thick paper, and I know it was typed with his father’s typewriter. It was really about what it means to become a father, how you always look at yourself from then on through your children’s eyes.”

Zimmer continued, “He knows my son Jake very well, so I thought that’s what he was writing about. So I basically wrote a love theme to my son. I finished around ten at night. I phoned Chris’s house, and his wife and producing partner, Emma, answered. She said, ‘Chris is pacing around. He’s really antsy. Do you mind if he comes down to hear it?’ He came down and sat on my couch. I never look at somebody when I play him something for the first time. It’s too scary. I played him this small, fragile piece, and I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ He said, ‘I suppose I better make the movie now,’ and I’m going, ‘What is the movie?’ And he started to talk about space and ginormous journeys and the end of the world and all that stuff. I said, ‘Hey, hang on. Stop, stop. I wrote you this incredibly intimate, private, tiny piece.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but I now know where the heart of the story is.'”

Did Zimmer’s score really impact and redirect the story of “Interstellar” that much? Apparently so. And Nolan even changed Zimmer’s approach to which instruments he selects for scores.

“We just sat down and made a list of things we had done: ‘We’d done the big drums, so what have we got left in the repertoire of instruments?’ And Chris actually said, ‘Have you ever tried using a pipe organ?’ Nobody had added any new vocabulary or material to this amazing instrument,” Zimmer said. “The piece I played for Chris is called ‘Day One,’ and it appears all the time in the film. […] Nobody other than a horror film has used a pipe organ.”

Another piece that has become synonymous with both Zimmer and Nolan’s respective careers is the “BRAAAM” theme from “Inception,” which Zimmer says is his most technically innovative score to date.

“I managed to go and fuck with the very fabric of time,” Zimmer said of the score. “There’s a point where three things are going on. It’s like trains crossing, all at different tempos, but then they all meet and they’re all harmonizing with one another and then float away into their own little worlds again.”