Hans Zimmer‘s music captures images that words cannot describe.
Actor and director Sean Penn once described Zimmer‘s work as a musical adaptability that “rekindles a timeless sense of the human journey.”
“To have a career that is based on isolation and to have people respond to it feels fantastic,” Zimmer said during a recent interview.
The Oscar-nominated composer has written the scores to such diverse films as Gladiator, The Lion King, Rain Man and Thelma & Louise. He recently released a new album, The Wings of a Film, which features selections from, many others, the aforementioned hit movies.
Born Sept. 12, 1957 in Frankfurt, Germany, Zimmer relocated to London during his teens and submersed himself in music. He eventually collaborated with the synth pop group The Buggles on their 1980 album The Age of Plastic and the video for the hit single, “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
Zimmer later turned his attention to melding electronic and classical music. This lead to writing film scores.
After garnering significant acclaim for his score to 1988’s A World Apart, Zimmer was asked to write the music for Rain Man. The offers then started to pour in, and Zimmer soon became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated composers.
He received Oscar nominations for Rain Man, Crimson Tide, The Preacher’s Wife, As Good as It Gets, The Thin Red Line and The Prince of Egypt. He received an Oscar, a Golden Globe and two Grammys for The Lion King.
In recent years, he has composed the scores to Mission Impossible 2, Gladiator and Pearl Harbor. He ranks his scores to The Thin Red Line and Hannibal as his personal favorites.
The role of a music composer begins well before production starts. Sometimes a simple phone call can be the beginning of a future masterpiece.
“One day I got a call from [Gladiator] director Ridley Scott, and he asked me, ‘Do you want to do a gladiator movie?’ and we both laughed,” Zimmer said.
At the time, neither knew how they could do a score for a movie about gladiators, but both decided to give it a shot.
In the months that followed, Zimmer flew to Florence, Italy, where he saw some of the movie being filmed.
“Ah, it’s a dreadful life!” he said, laughingly, of such work-related trips. “It was horrible, and the food was bad!”
Zimmer returned home to compose the score to what would later became this year’s Oscar winner for Best Film. His score would earn him another Oscar nomination.
He mostly receives his inspiration “from images in the movie,” and working with some of the world’s most talented directors.
“Ridley Scott is a fabulous painter and I am a composer,” he said. “We are both impressed with each other’s work and see things in different ways, yet try to complement each other with our work.”
The scene in As Good As It Gets, during which Jack Nicholson tries to feed the dog while playing the piano, provided Zimmer with the inspiration he required to write the score.
“[Director Jim] Brooks is a very articulate writer, and I try to keep up with him in my language,” Zimmer said. “Yet I always fear that I am not doing a good job.”
Zimmer could not name his favorite director to work with.
“I hate them all,” he says with a contagious laughter. “They are all incompetent.”
Composing, Zimmer explains, can be a very scary yet intellectual process.
“You sit in a room with no windows and just create music,” he said. “The director has a big idea that he can’t say with pictures or words and you have to try to put it into music. You have to sit there and try to write a decent tune.”
There are times when a film and a score will not magically intertwine into a perfect package.
“A lot of it has to do with the reactions viewers have to the film,” Zimmer explains.
With Gladiator, “Scott would not have been able to use the first shot of the film, where a hand touches a field of wheat, if it wasn’t for the music,” he said. “The music gave Ridley a way to be poetic.”
When at the movies, Zimmer says he never gives much thought to how he would score a film that he did not work on.
“I’m like a kid when I go to a movie,” he says. “It never occurs to me because I’m just a person in the audience. I just watch the movie and it’s like magic happens.”
What constitutes a good soundtrack?
“A good soundtrack is when the director doesn’t sentimentalize things and treats the audience like idiots,” he said.
He rates the music to The Cell, composed by Howard Shore, as “completely original and breath-taking.”
“You know you got a good soundtrack when the music can stand on its own two feet,” he says.
So what makes a soundtrack bad?
“When rock ‘n’ roll is used in the wrong way, like when they have all this guitar noise in a car chase,” Zimmer said. “And all that stuff that just make people cry.”
Zimmer admires classical composer Mozart “because he never made a piece that wasn’t perfect.”
He also expresses joy for the music of Macy Gray and Massive Attack, whom he currently has in his CD player.
“That [Massive Attack] song ‘Unfinished Symphony’ is amazing,” he said.
As for Zimmer‘s advice to aspiring composers: “Get a real job,” he said, laughing.
“Try to get a voice of your own,” he said. “Don’t try to be John Williams. Just be who you are, and I hope you are good.”
