Forty-seven years after her death, Edith Piaf is soundtracking the biggest, darkest, most bombastic blockbuster of the summer. Composer Hans Zimmer has revealed that Inception's entire soundtrack, from the booming trombone theme to the strains of rising dread, originates from one of the chanteuse's most famous songs.
Anyone who has seen Christopher Nolan's movie will recall Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, the song used to signal a "kick" to another reality. But Piaf's famous ballad does not just permeate Inception as a sample – it's in the soundtrack's DNA.
"Just for the game of it," Zimmer told the New York Times this week, "all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Edith Piaf track." The clearest example is Inception's theme, which an enterprising YouTuber has already deciphered, speeding up the booming trombones to reveal Piaf's Gallic melancholy. "I was surprised how long it took them to figure it out," Zimmer said. "[It] wasn't supposed to be a secret."
The use of Piaf's song was encouraged by Nolan, who wrote and directed the movie. "[It was] always in the script," Zimmer explained. "It was like huge foghorns over a city, and afterward you would maybe figure out that they were related." But while the score is sublimated from Piaf's original, written by Charles Dumont and recorded in 1960, it does not rely on a direct excerpt. "I didn't use the song; I only used one note," Zimmer said, arguing that he should still be eligible for an Oscar for best original score. "[I got] the original master out of the French national archives. And then [found] some crazy scientist in France who would actually go and take that one cell out of the DNA."