Christopher Nolan Says ‘Dunkirk’ Score Started With A Recording Of His Watch, Shares His Love Of ‘MacGruber’

The first reactions to “Dunkirk“ rolled in yesterday, and the consensus is that Christopher Nolan‘s WWII film is another fine achievement from the filmmaker, one that will genuinely make your heart race. One of the key factors in serving up the tension that builds around the drama is Hans Zimmer‘s score, which is already being touted as a standout, but it was some canny inspiration from Nolan that got the ball rolling.

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In an interview with Business Insider, the director reveals that the Zimmer’s score was built around a very simple idea and an interesting musical theory.

“The screenplay had been written according to musical principals. There’s an audio illusion, if you will, in music called a ‘Shepard tone‘ and with my composer David Julyan on ‘The Prestige‘ we explored that and based a lot of the score around that. And it’s an illusion where there’s a continuing ascension of tone. It’s a corkscrew effect. It’s always going up and up and up but it never goes outside of its range. And I wrote the script according to that principle,” he explained. “I interwove the three timelines in such a way that there’s a continual feeling of intensity. Increasing intensity. So I wanted to build the music on similar mathematical principals. Very early on I sent Hans a recording that I made of a watch that I own with a particularly insistent ticking and we started to build the track out of that sound and then working from that sound we built the music as we built the picture cut. So there’s a fusion of music and sound effects and picture that we’ve never been able to achieve before.”

That’s pretty fascinating, and it’s not a big surprise that working with Zimmer so early in the process of developing “Dunkirk” resulted in something special.

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Meanwhile, with Edgar Wright outing Nolan as “secret comedy nerd,” everyone wants to know what makes the suit-wearing, tea-drinking director laugh. Well….

“I’ve been outed in the past as a ‘MacGruber‘ fan and I have to say there are a couple of moments in that film that had [me] howling uncontrollably,” Nolan said.

Which scenes in particular?

“[Laughs] I’m not going to go any further!”

We’ll just have to speculate on that one. “Dunkirk” opens on July 21st.