Technically, Mr. Zimmer said, his score is not a slowing-down of the French song, which was composed by Charles Dumont and recorded by Piaf in 1960, but is constructed from a single manipulated beat from it.
“I had to go and extract these two notes out of a recording,” Mr. Zimmer said, using a little bit of “Inception” lingo. “I love technology, so it was a lot of fun for me to go and get the original master out of the French national archives. And then find some crazy scientist in France who would actually go and take that one cell out of the DNA.”
You will like this:
“Just for the game of it,” Mr. Zimmer said, “all the music in the score is subdivisions and multiplications of the tempo of the Édith Piaf track. So I could slip into half-time; I could slip into a third of a time. Anything could go anywhere. At any moment I could drop into a different level of time.”
“I didn’t use the song; I only used one note,” Mr. Zimmer said. “But look, I so couldn’t care less about awards. I know I’m not supposed to say this. But when you work with Chris Nolan, when you work on a movie like ‘Inception,’ it’s for the adventure.”
Musical genious goes here: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/hans-zimmer-extracts-the-secrets-of-the-inception-score/
I love that guy