Newsletter #53 - Hans Zimmer on Interstellar

Hans Zimmer on Interstellar

Before filming Interstellar, Christopher Nolan handed Hans Zimmer an envelope.

Inside was a single page: a father’s letter to his daughter.

No mention of space travel. No epic stakes.

Nolan told him: “Write for one day, then play me what you have.”

Zimmer returned with a fragile piano-organ piece.“This is the heart of the movie,” said Nolan. It became “S.T.A.Y.,” the score’s anchor.

From that moment, they reinvented how they worked:

• No old habits. They threw out trademark drums and string swells to force something new.
• No rigid workflow. Normally, a composer works from a “spotting session” — a map of where every cue will land against the cut. But here, Zimmer wrote to the story itself. The music wasn’t chained to editing marks.
• Emotion before spectacle. That father’s letter stayed at the center. Even when the film expanded into wormholes and collapsing galaxies, the score kept circling back to intimacy, not scale.

They met more than 40 times, triple their norm, to experiment and refine until the sound felt as original as the story. When it was finished, Nolan gave Zimmer a watch inscribed:

“This is not the time for caution.”

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down System

We make hundreds of decisions each day. Most of them drain energy that belongs elsewhere.

The Thumbs System speeds up decision-making and trains your assistant to think at a higher level.

Here's how it works:

Train your assistant to frame questions so you can answer with a single emoji:

👍 = Yes

👎 = No

❓ = Need more information

For anything else, they offer numbered choices and you reply with a single digit.

What This Actually Looks Like

Instead of: "FYI, vendor dispute update" followed by a 22-message email thread.

Try: "Vendor pushing back on pricing. We can either hold firm or offer a 5% discount (total impact: $8K/year). You've denied similar requests before due to this vendor's pattern of last-minute renegotiation. Recommend we hold firm. 👍 or 👎?"

Response: 👍

Decision made in five seconds.

Why This Works

The system forces your assistant to do the heavy lifting before the question reaches you. They:

→ Synthesize information

→ Understand context

→ Review your past decisions

→ Propose solutions

You become the editor, not the writer starting from scratch.

The Thumbs System handles 80% of daily decisions in seconds, saving cognitive energy for decisions that actually matter.

Your assistant gets better at thinking like you. You get hours back each week.