Here’s an anecdote about Hans Zimmer for you. When I was in grad school, through several months of trial and error, I learned that I could write to one soundtrack and one soundtrack only: Zimmer’s score for Interstellar. I would listen to the entire album on repeat - minus the final track with the Dylan Thomas poem, of course - and crank out hour after hour of academic writing. I’ve often joked that Zimmer is the reason I finished my degree, but if we’re being honest with each other, it may be closer to the truth than I’m comfortable admitting.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I am here for the Hans Zimmer renaissance that seems to be going on right now. You know who might agree with me? Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve, who recently asked Zimmer to help out on the score for his upcoming movie. According to a new article in French publication Studio Ciné Live (via Heroic Hollywood), Villeneuve felt that he needed a little help bringing Blade Runner 2049‘s music in line with the Vangelis score from the original film. Here’s what Villeneuve had to say:

Johann Johannsson of Iceland composes the main theme as planned. However, given the scale of the task, Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer joined the team to help Johann. It’s hard to get to Vangelis’ angle. We have Johann’s breathtaking atmospheric sounds, but I needed other things, and Hans helped us.

Zimmer needs no introduction, of course, but Wallfisch is another veteran composer, having worked on a slew of features (and previously collaborating with Zimmer on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). It sounds like this is less an issue of creative differences between Johannsson and Villeneuve and more an opportunity to get the soundtrack just right; not every film composer is an expert at every style of music, and if the director just needed someone to land harder on the ‘80s synth music, it sounds like a good collaboration for everyone involved. And hey, with movies like Han Solo and Justice League steeped in controversy, this little bit of composer shuffling seems delightfully tame by comparison.

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