13 Minutes to the Moon: Bonus - The making of the music

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Here I am, a German, talking to you in a language that I'm not entirely comfortable with, when really the language I'm most comfortable with is a wordless language which is which is music.

Hello, I'm Kevin Fong and I'm back with a little treat for all of you who enjoyed listening to 13 Minutes to the Moon.

Making the podcast was for us its own journey into the unknown and we've loved how much you've loved it.

We were extremely lucky to be joined along the way by a very special team member, the Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer, whose music was central to the series and which I know you found every bit as inspirational as we did.

Hans is well known for writing soundtracks to blockbuster Hollywood movies, but he'd never before composed for a podcast.

So I wanted to take a little time to find out why he'd made this leap into the unknown and what drew him to our project.

With this aim, I sent podcast editor John Minnell to Hanzima's London studio.

From the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon, Hanzima, the making of the music.

Hans, first of all, it's absolutely amazing meeting you and thank you so much.

Well, let's see how this goes.

You might want to change your mind about that.

No, thank you.

Can you describe where we are?

Because this room itself is a piece of art.

Well, I don't know if it's a piece of art, but we're in my writing room and we're surrounded by actually

very appropriate pieces of technology.

Knobs and dials.

Knobs and dials, and it's very Stanley Cooper,

and it's very NASA, and it's very,

yeah, you know, I mean, I grew up with that stuff.

For me, the most important inventor is not the people who built the rockets for NASA, but one Bob Moog, who, of course, built the greater synthesizers.

Just like the old Saturn rockets that they used for the Apollo mission, this stuff,

it just goes, it just has power, it has something that

is still not matched.

If you think about any piece of music and any instrument, it is a piece of technology of its time.

And here we are surrounded by the musical instruments, which are the technology of this time, of our time, and sort of from 1967 to whatever the computer is behind me.

And I suppose the way I got into music was that I was too ignorant to figure out that there's supposed to be a division between technology and music, or that computers should be used for accounting as opposed to could be perverted into becoming great musical instruments.

So, you know, that's just my generation.

You must get so many requests to write for all these huge movies.

And so when I told my colleagues that I wanted to contact you to see whether you would write for this podcast, I think some of them thought I was crazy.

They were saying, why would Hans Zimmer want to write for a podcast?

So that's the first question I need to ask you.

Why?

Well, because the subject was important, because it was challenging, it was interesting, and it was based on an idea.

I think our world is in such

trouble these days.

And, you know,

nothing that held true and had value in the past means anything anymore.

I mean, you know, like in the old days, you know, your parents would tell you, you should become a lawyer or a doctor or something like this.

Get a real job.

You know, I became a musician and look at you, you know.

Because I think at one point or the other, we realized that the only valid job there was and the only valid job that will hold true in the future is the storytellers.

And the podcast is the ultimate medium to, you know, chronicle the history of who we were and who we are and what our dreams and ambitions are.

We've always had podcasts.

It was mum telling us a story late at night.

You know, now suddenly we found a way of

legitimizing it and you know

taking it one stage further and

it's great to be able to share stories.

Just talk us through the process in that

you start composing, but then you have this team of young composers who work with you.

I think to become a really good composer for film or anything like this, it starts off with you have to know how to make a really good cup of coffee for another composer.

And I started out

working for Stanley Myers, who wrote The Deer Hunter and

a thousand beautiful, amazing pieces of music.

And I used to know how to work his espresso machine, and he taught me how the orchestra works.

So that seemed like a very fair exchange at the time.

I think I got the better end of it.

But the idea that music is a collaborative process and music sounds its most beautiful when

people are playing together

is important to me.

I think one thing which people forget about musicians is

it's not how well we play, it's how well we listen to each other that makes music actually really good.

Okay,

I'll give you a perfect example.

Ramin Javadi, who writes Game of Thrones,

I'd written this theme for

the original Pirates movies, and

we were just working on one of the

first scene.

I knew the theme was sort of good, but I just couldn't make it work to the movie.

And everybody else was sort of unfortunately agreeing with me that it wasn't quite working.

And I remember Ramin saying very quietly, you know, and he was all he was, he was an intern, and he was making coffees, and I didn't even know he could play an instrument.

He said, do you mind if I have a go after you go home?

I'm going, yeah, okay, whatever.

We came in the next day, and

I remember going, oh, yeah, all right, Ramin, did you do anything?

He goes, yeah, I had a go.

And him playing us what he had done with my notes that I couldn't make fit to this movie.

And I remember Gorbobinski and Jerry Brookhaven, and everybody going,

This is amazing.

It's like the movie was shot to it.

And

I remember saying to him, You'll never make me another cup of coffee.

But it did have to start that way.

You have to have to

start in some humble way, and at the same time, it means it's different from college because you get to be in the room with the filmmakers, you get to be in the room with the directors, you get to be part of the process.

You get to see

a composer who's got a

pretty good track record and a lifelong career, sit there and go, I have no idea what to do in the morning.

And by the evening, you know, there are a couple of notes there that show the possibility that we might actually finish this and actually come up with a tune.

The fear never goes away, you know.

The white page just gets whiter.

And how different was it writing this as compared to what you normally do writing for movies?

I think we sent you some audio and

some detailed notes about what we were hoping to do, but we were still making it at that point.

But I'm used to that.

You see, like

Chris Noll and I,

we hit upon this sort of way, I don't know why

we ended up where we ended up, but it was a good way of working, whereby I would start writing sort of around the time he would start shooting.

So I wouldn't see anything other than storyboards, and I would have

complete freedom.

I wasn't restricted by anything other than

the lack of my imagination in a funny way.

So so the last few movies I've done, I've done very much

as if they were radio plays without images.

And the images are in my head.

And I think

part of

what

we all try to do is we are we're trying to

give our audience an experience and we're trying to give them an autonomous experience as well.

So all we're doing with the music is we're opening the door a little crack and say, okay, now let your imagination run free and create images in your own head as opposed to dictating the images to them.

It's a private conversation, it's somebody whispering to you from far, far away, from space.

And that it has a singular experience for one person.

So when you play it over speakers, it's like it's the opposite

to

what films are all about.

And you know, it's funny because I remember always going,

I love film because they have big speakers and the screen is big.

And, you know, now suddenly

here I am

40 years later of doing films.

I'm going, no, no, no, no.

I want something which is intimate and personal and

tells a story to

one person at a time.

So I know how you start writing a story with words when it comes to creating a podcast.

For you, where did you start with this?

Well, you've got to come up with a concept of some sort for yourself, some sort of intellectual framework.

And sort of my intellectual framework for this was, you know, the fragility of,

you know, the more I found out about

how these

brave men and women

managed to

make these rockets fly and then put some reckless, brave, and I think

I have no idea if they're foolish or just incredibly courageous visionaries into these capsules and make them land on the moon.

The idea of how do we describe this adventure that was all held together, I think, with rubber bands and bit of chewing gum and

the tires needed kicking and

however big the budget was, it was never big enough, but it was the dream that got them there ultimately.

So I thought

a piece which, number one, included a lot of the sounds that, you know because the the recordings of that time and the recordings from

you know there's a quality about it that is so

mysterious you know sound being sent back across space you know and recorded

badly with with you know with the what was the best technology at the time but still you know it's it's you know there's a grittiness to it and there's a you know

there's a danger in every sound you can you can feel it could just go terribly wrong.

So I thought that was a good place to start

and to actually make it a quiet piece and make it a piece that starts off.

You have to lean in, you know, that far, far away from, you know, it comes to you through the decades

like a memory of a black and white image we saw on television.

And through the haze, you know, this tune is slowly starting to establish itself.

By now, it's sort of hard to even point out which bit comes from a NASA recording, which bit comes from a Russian Sputnik recording, etc.

You know, things which we didn't have sort of access to, and which things are completely electronically created, and then suddenly you get the cello coming in and establishing some sort of humanity.

You know, and the piano, you know, the piano is.

The problem is when you write about space,

since we all know there is no sound in space, so everything is an invention, you know.

But it isn't entirely an invention because we do have those bleeps and these little signals that came from those satellites and we have the sound of the rockets, etc.

And modern technology allows us to turn those into musical instruments.

And at the same time,

by having the piano in there, you know, that piece of, what is it, 600-year-old technology

that is so simple and we all recognize it, it frames

the strangeness and the serialistic quality of the sounds from space beautifully, I think.

And then towards the very end,

just when you're being taken down from this amazing journey and you think it's over, then you hear

one more space-type bleep.

Absolutely.

Sputnik.

Right, no, I mean, you know, and the loneliness, the loneliness.

I mean,

I was always taken by

the vast, you know, the bigger the space is and the further away we are and the more epic the journey is.

Somehow, I always think it all comes down to that loneliness of that one little little leap, you know, and sort of reminds us of how fragile and

when we look back on, you know, onto our little blue dot of a planet.

You mentioned there about the silence of space, and I remember when we first spoke, you talked about your job being to fill that void.

One of the things is if you want to create silence, you have to actually put a noise into it.

You have to describe silence.

You have to sort of be, you know, you have have to be a poet, or you have to be painterly, or you have to be a musician.

Because

nobody realizes, you know, nothing is nothing.

So you have to actually

cheat and you have to actually go and find a poetic way of describing silence or to describe the vastness of

this

space with no gravity, with no nothing.

One of the versions of the music has a heartbeat, and I know just reading some of the comments about that that people just say it gives them goosebumps every time.

I don't want to say it's a trick, but it's just

to remind you constantly that within all this idea of technology,

there is that thing about

it was these humans that went on this journey and it must have been so scary.

My dad was a scientist, so I suppose, you know, my mom was a musician, my dad was a scientist, so I suppose I keep living in both worlds.

The scientists take somebody's dream and make it real, but it takes somebody dreaming, it takes a storyteller to set things up and get things going.

The emotion comes because it's telling you a true story.

You know, it's telling you a story about humanity at its

sort of at its finest.

and I think I you know and that was part of the idea of getting that into into the music and and

I can't comment on is it is it moving or is it not moving you know that's that you know that's the whole point I'm trying to give the audience autonomy to feel what they want to feel but to say here's a possibility just

just for a moment you know forget about everything else forget about your day You can just, you know, and all the problems that life presents you, just for a moment, you know, you get to have

solitude and experience something.

And whatever it is you want to experience, I'm opening the door for you to just feel something.

A huge thanks to Hun Zimmer and his team at Bleeding Fingers Music.

This episode was produced by Mark Ward.

The series editor was Rami Zabar.

The World Service podcast editor was John Minnell.

Thirteen Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

I'm Kevin Fong.

Thanks for listening.

A world of wonder.

That's just crazy to try and do something as dangerous as that around the moon.

Moments of joy.

What you should see now is a cloud.

No way.

A world of drama.

We don't have to be afraid now.

Look at us.

And real life, too.

This is maybe the first leaf of evidence we have in almost 48 years.

Amazing stories.

They hugged me and they started crying, they squeezed me,

from all over our sphere.

There's nothing that you can't do in this world if you set your mind to it.

Shall we do it all again?

Next year,

podcasts from the BBC World Service.

Search for BBC World Service wherever you get your podcasts.

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