While the legendary film composer Hans Zimmer has previously ventured musically into the realm of World War II with films such as Dunkerque and Pearl Harbor, working on director Steve McQueen flash – set during Nazi Germany’s relentless eight-month bombing of London – allowed him to look at the era and a facet of his own family history in a way he never had before.

“My mother was a refugee in England during the Second World War and Steve McQueen gave me direction. He said “After you see this movie, you’ll understand your mother better,” Zimmer revealed during Deadline’s Sound & Screen event on Friday. “That’s all he said. And I knew all the stories and while I was working on the film. I began to feel her stories. So he was absolutely right.”

Indeed, the story led Zimmer to create a musical score that reflected the relentless chaos and brutality of the blitz, so disturbing that he found it difficult to assemble a collection of sonically pleasing passages to present with a live orchestra to the Sound & Screen audience. .

“This score is absolutely horrible,” he admitted. “It’s an absolutely horrible score, it’s so dissonant, it’s so involved in this atonality that it was really hard to put together where you weren’t going to go and run screaming into this room because I didn’t think i can do this to yourself. But those are literally the beautiful parts. That was it.”

Perhaps only half jokingly, Zimmer described the key instrument that inspired his musical interpretation of psychological torture. “One of the most twisted instruments in the world, which is the treble recorder,” he said. “And I don’t know who’s ever been to an English public school where we learn how to play this little recorder and everybody’s in tune and everybody’s blowing really loud into them – and it’s the sound of hell!”

Still, there was a method to Zimmer’s musical madness that was entirely in keeping with McQueen’s unwavering vision for Flash. “The idea behind the whole thing is the story of a child trying to get through war-torn London, which has been bombed all the time, and trying to find his mother again,” the composer explained. “What I wanted to do is I wanted adults – you, me, adults – to feel the same kind of dissociation, to be completely lost in the world, to be illogical, not knowing how to get there, not knowing how to reach at home, not knowing how to find home and having that dread, that fear that you’ll never find it again; the horror of these massive bombs falling. So the only way I could think of to do it was to write music that was so brutal and so violent.”

How did Zimmer know he had accomplished his mission? “When I got a text from my producer saying, ‘This takes balls.’

Check back on Monday for the panel video.