Interstellar: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the album composed by Hans Zimmer for the 2014 film by Christopher Nolan. Hans Zimmer had previously worked with director Christopher Nolan several times, scoring Nolan’s The Dark Knight film trilogy and Inception. Without revealing the plot of Interstellar, Nolan wrote a short story for Zimmer about a father leaving a child to complete an important job. The story contained two sentences of dialogue: “I’ll come back,” and “When?” Nolan then asked Zimmer to spend one day composing some musical interpretations of the story. “I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It’s going to tell you the fable at the centre of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written.” ( Christopher Nolan, on the Interstellar score composition process with Hans Zimmer.)
In one night, Zimmer wrote a four-minute piano and organ piece that represented his idea of fatherhood. When he played it for Nolan, Nolan was pleased and explained the full plot and concept of the film, though it had not yet been written. Zimmer was originally sceptical, noting that he had written a “tiny, tiny little fragile” piece while Nolan had described an intense, epic space film. However, Nolan reassured Zimmer that the piano piece provided “the heart” of the film. The piece can be heard at the conclusion of the film.
For the film’s signature organ, Zimmer specifically requested that organist Roger Sayer, the music director of Temple Church in London, play the church’s 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ. The physical appearance of the organ reminded Zimmer of spaceship afterburners, while the airiness of its sound evoked the reminder that every breath is precious for an astronaut. The rest of the ensemble consisted of 34 strings, 24 woodwinds, four pianos, and a mixed choir of 60 voices. The soundtrack was recorded at both Temple Church and AIR Lyndhurst Hall in late spring 2014. In 2022, Zimmer cited the Interstellar soundtrack as the best work of his career.
Zimmer himself delayed the soundtrack album’s release until two weeks after the film premiere because he wanted audiences to hear the score in theatres first. We wanted people to really hear it for the first time with the movie on really big speakers in a theatre… I just didn’t want people to go and hear everything on tiny little speakers on their Mac or something like this. I wanted them to go and have the visceral experience of being pinned in their seats. (Hans Zimmer, on his decision to release the Interstellar soundtrack album after the film’s release date.) The soundtrack was released in November 2014, via the WaterTower label.
The score received critical acclaim. Reviewing for BBC News, Nicholas Barber felt, “Hans Zimmer’s music makes the film seem even more colossal than it would otherwise: Zimmer invokes the original meaning of ‘pulls out all the stops’, rattling our teeth with reverberating pipe-organ chords.” Scott Foundas, a chief film critic at Variety, stated, “Hans Zimmer contributes one of his most richly imagined and inventive scores, which ranges from a gentle electronic keyboard melody to brassy, Strauss-ian crescendos. The soundtrack garnered critical acclaim and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
