DUNE (2020): How Hans Zimmer’s Pink Floyd Cover Brings Arrakis to Life

How Hans Zimmer’s Pink Floyd Cover Brings Arrakis to Life

The trailer for Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (2020), the new adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s classic space opera novel (1965) features a sample of what’s to come in the soundtrack by award winning film score composer Hans Zimmer.

The piece is an excerpt from Zimmer’s cover of Eclipse, a track from the forty seven year old Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon (1973), introducing the song to perhaps thousands of new young viewers. The fact that at Zimmer’s behest, director Denis Villeneuve chose this track to introduce audiences to his interpretation of Dune came as somewhat of a surprise considering that most movie trailers are rarely scored by the film’s composer. Even more surprising was the fact that he chose to lend such gravitas to the trailer by composing an original cover of the classic rock song. Zimmer confirmed that the cover was his idea and tweeted the film’s signature tag line, “Beyond fear, destiny awaits” referencing the litany against fear, a popular religious chant from the book series. He added “This is a childhood dream come true for me!” on September ninth, the day the trailer debuted.

Zimmer gathered a thirty two voice who’s-who ensemble of Los Angeles session singers to perform a choral rendition of Eclipse. Twelve singers performed the lyric lines from the song and joined the remaining twenty for the choral segment. Although the choir sang the entire song, only a few of the lines are used in the latter half of the trailer, beginning with “all that you touch and all that you see…” and ending with “everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.” Edie Lehmann Boddicker, the choral director noted, “He wanted to pay homage to the original, very back-phrased sound, a little spaced-out, so the vocals would not sound urgent. … There’s a kind of joy happening in the track, a lot of hopefulness. It’s not despondent, just very peaceful and sounding not of this planet.”

The track choice suggests that Villeneuve and Zimmer may be giving a nod to psychedelic film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who in the mid-1970s attempted the first film adaptation of Dune (chronicled in the 2013 Jodorowsy’s Dune), only for the production to collapse spectacularly. Jodorowsky had requested that Pink Floyd score the film.

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