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INCEPTION: THE MUSIC

August 15th 2010 07:28
INCEPTION: THE MUSIC

Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan

Article from stuff.co.nz

Having systematically picked apart the critical arguments for and against Christopher Nolan's Inception and the many possible meanings of that dream-within-a-dream-within-a -dream caper, the film's fans on the web have gone deeper by focusing on its music.

A video by a pseudonymous author, camiam321, comparing the Edith Piaf song Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien to Hans Zimmer's score for the movie has circulated widely on the internet. It plays a key musical cue from the Inception score - two ominous blares from a brass section - followed by a slowed version of the Piaf song (which the Inception characters play at regular speed as a warning to wake up from a dream state). They sound nearly identical.


Zimmer, who won an Academy Award for his music for The Lion King, said the sonic similarity was not only intentional but it was an element of an enigmatic film ''that wasn't supposed to be a secret''.

The musical cue, Zimmer said, ''was our big signpost'' to show the film's characters moving from one level of dreaming (or reality) into another. ''It was like a drawing of a huge finger saying, 'OK, different time'.''

Zimmer said the idea for this musical game began with Nolan, the film's director and writer. ''He had the Edith Piaf always written in the script, the da-da, da-da,'' Zimmer said, imitating the cadence of that song. ''It was like huge foghorns over a city, and afterward you would maybe figure out that they were related.''

Technically, Zimmer said, that part of his score was not a slowing of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, but was constructed from a single manipulated beat from the version recorded by Piaf in 1960. ''I had to go and extract these two notes out of a recording,'' he said. ''I love technology, so it was a lot of fun for me to go and get the original master out of the French national archives. And then find some crazy scientist in France who would actually go and take that one cell out of the DNA.''


The manipulated beat comprises about five minutes of Zimmer's 132-minute score, but all its tempos, he said, are ''subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track''.

In this sense the score is Zimmer's personal interpretation of Inception, which many viewers see as a commentary on the nebulous boundary between dreaming and reality.

''Everybody thinks the dream is the important part,'' Zimmer said. ''For me the time was the important part: the idea that, in a peculiar way, Chris had made a time-travel movie that actually worked.''

Watch camiam321's video here


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