Hans Zimmer Breaks Down His Career, from 'Gladiator' to 'Interstellar' | Vanity Fair

everything I've done is always a little bit of something I would just like to tweak a little bit so I so it's really I'm still hunting down the great tube that I've never read you know some round and that's what makes me get up in the morning I just know I can do better it was the 80s in London I was very fortunate to have this friend who were some a well-known film composer in England I'm standing - he'd written a music full of Deer Hunter and he was constantly barking and I got the job to be his assistant run the espresso machine and he won't teach me about the orchestra the friends of ours had started a little movie company called working title film and so we worked on a movie called my beautiful laundrette starring Daniel day-lewis and so that was really my first introduction into film scoring it sort of took off it was it was this really unusual piece of filmmaking and that was a good start [Music] Rain Man came about in a very strange way I had Donna again from working title film I done a film called a world apart which is still one of my favorite movies and Barry Levinson's wife Diana I've seen the film and loved the soundtrack and went out bought the CD for him and gave him the CD I remember it was 11 o'clock at night and my little studio down a back alley and of shadier neighborhoods of London and there was like a knock on the door I open the door there's a man standing there going hello my name is Barry Levinson I am a director and I'm going yeah I you and my mom both he started to tell me about this movie that he was making with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise and he asked me very politely if I would even consider going to Hollywood and working on it you know well I was just occurring yes please so I did it the way I did any independent little movie had done in England before except now we weren't Hollywood it made me very very nervous literally Barry had just to tell me this is okay move on go to the next bit because I would have just spent forever on a single note [Music] The Lion King at first I didn't want to do it but you know sometimes all the right things happen for all the wrong reasons I didn't know how to do animation and I thought you know oh it's a Disney animated film so it'll be like fairytale princess and I kept saying I don't know how to write fairy tale princess music and they kept saying that's why we want you my daughter at the time was six years old and I never been able to take her to a premiere of any of my movies and I thought dad wants to show off so that's why I took the job and there was being flippant you know oh I'm doing this movie about fuzzy animals and suddenly I realized that that the heart of the story is a child losing their father and and my father died when I was very young suddenly I was confronted with something and you know the the fuzzy animal movie became actually very serious and very profound for me and so yeah I wrote a requiem for my dad [Music] Ridley knows that I am useless in the mornings and I'm vulnerable because I keep me six hours you know it's like I have a nine-to-five job I started 9:00 in the evening and finish at five in the morning so we're in ridley fermi at nine o'clock in the morning and said hey do you want to do a gladiator movie all I could think about was men in skirts and sandals and and he's even no hands it's not that sort of a gladiator movie it used to be in the screenplay titles gladiator pretty much straight into the bath and I realized one of the things that was missing and it was missing for Ridley as well was was a female soul that was you know and we talked about this idea that that we needed a female voice in this and these are the great things that happen during movies [Music] pirates pop pirates was a complete accident I mean I was working with go on something I said I'm so what you're doing next nice going well I'm thinking of doing this pilots movie trying pirates movie really seriously this is the worst idea I got a phone call from God on a Sunday going come over have a look at this thing he showed me a movie that I couldn't possibly have imagined you know when he was talking about it and I loved how wrong I was and how right he was there was very little time left by the time I got on to this I was going okay I better go home and write a theme and I started 7:30 in the evening I'm just exploding with ideas except I'm signing to be so tired so playing gets worse and worse and worse and it's just like my fingers are moving properly anymore now it's five o'clock in the morning or so so that's sort of how that movie came about what seems to be a major preoccupation of Chris's and mine is the idea of time and how time affects everything if you think about the three Batman movie Swedish Batman Begins Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises it's three movies to you but it was 12 years of our life I think we managed to figure out a new way of telling the sort of stories after an over hundred movies has always been the same I never know if it's working I never know how it's working sometimes I have the instinct that I might be onto something and sometimes you feel sometimes you get that feeling of ooh it's all falling into place the images and the sound are becoming one I think sonically you know that the sound of thirst movies became different in the sound of personalities very much I think influence other movies around us inception was you know we had Chris had written into his screenplay this idea of these big heroes forms so it was a story point and suddenly everybody absconded with that idea and put it into every trailer that there was [Music] by the time we got to interstellar we literally sat down and went okay let's make a list of everything we have done and see what we are left with you know we've done the big brass we've done the big drums we've done the synthesizer stuff and Chris said what about church on and at first I went our lasar like Frankenstein horror movies will beat all gothic it was actually appropriate in a funny way because if you think about the church organ by the 17th century it was the most complex machine bit of Technology ever built by man and if you think that the most complex piece of technology was actually built to be in the service of the creation of music that's not so bad I just thought yes okay I'm going to give this a go how to write something which is not gothic but let us try to write a new vocabulary for this amazing piece of technology and we ended up in London in this May I mean it was a truly extraordinary place Temple Church recording this beast of an instrument with this amazing or unless Roger sayers I had written all these unplayable parts and for Roger I was just like I mean I was really worried on are almost on the flight or over our safety Chris what are you prepared with which is the least amount that we can actually get through before this guy is going to quit on us you know walking into a temple charging this Roger humble man is gonna let me just try a few things and he just blazed through these unplayable parts I mean superhuman [Music] blue planet to that little did I know because I'm ignorant this this earth this little blue planet of ours that we cohabitate 70% of it is covered in water and we're so used to Terra Firma so I thought wouldn't it be interesting to figure out how to happen we call it the tidal orchestra an orchestra that you know has sort of ebb and flow and waves and and so we just sort of figure out how to make the orchestra into a more impressionistic tool and basically explain to the players that everything they learned about their instruments was now going to go by the wayside and we were going to figure out a new way of playing the instruments we are so dependent on the ocean we have so dependent on this planet and we know so little about it and I just thought if the music can become some sort of a bridge between what is under the surface to us you know and and just just to bring us closer to this world so that maybe just for a moment we realize that if we don't look after then it won't look after us while other kids were playing with LEGOs I was torturing the piano and you know you know itself became an obsessive thing so I'm basically unemployable I can't do anything else I have to stick with this music thing because it's the only thing I ever learned and it's the only thing I that gets me out of bed in the morning it's the only thing I want to do you know I'm still learning

Channel: Vanity Fair

Views: 4,273,129

Rating: 4.9799786 out of 5

Keywords: hans zimmer, hans zimmer composer, hans zimmer 2018, hans zimmer music, hans zimmer interview, hans zimmer soundtrack, soundtrack hans zimmer, inception hans zimmer, interstellar hans zimmer, hans zimmer career, hans zimmer breaks down, hans zimmer career timeline, hans zimmer timeline, hans zimmer soundtracks, hans zimmer imbd, zimmer, zimmer composer, hans zimmer vanity fair, career timelines vanity fair, zimmer career, hans zimmer dune, vanity fair

Id: GGs_NT4iL2c

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SurlyMike]

This man, what a treat. So humble and grateful.

[u/mtbatey]

His scores are so powerful. They are some of the few that I can listen to outside of the movie itself and still get the same powerful feeling from listening to them. "Time" from Inception is a god damn emotional experience for me when I listen to it. Much of his stuff from Pearl Harbor was great.

[u/Cyril0987]

Although i love every composition from Hans Zimmer. These two are something else.

Time Inception

Interstellar Main Theme

Best way i found of enjoying them is to clear your thoughts, put up the best headphones, lie-down and close your eyes.

[u/Maverick721]

LOL, I love how Hans Zimmer acknowledge that the Inception horn theme is now used in every trailer

[u/lacourseauxetoiles]

I personally think his best score is easily his score for The Prince of Egypt. People tend to forget he did that, but tracks like The Burning Bush and Deliver Us are the best work he's ever composed.

[u/TheDudeWithNoName_]

One of his less talked about scores is Thin Red Line, the entire soundtrack, especially the track 'Journey to the Line' is one of the best comppositions ever.

[u/Cossack1812]

https://youtu.be/c-W3MYGftbQ

His magnum opus.....in my eyes at least

[u/[deleted]]

Would've loved if he talked about The Thin Red Line. One of his best compositions.

[u/integrateus]

He never gives credit to the enormous number of people that actually do the work under him