Hans Zimmer is so influential as a film composer that, after 125 movies, it becomes more and more difficult not to repeat himself. But director Christopher Nolan set him an original challenge in this summer’s most aniticipated film
IMAGINE YOU are one of Hollywood’s most successful and influential film composers, with million-selling albums and your own recording studio. Imagine you are working with one of Hollywood’s most successful writer-directors, with several hundred-million-dollar award-winning films. Imagine you both spend months talking together, sitting on the beach in Malibu watching your children play, or on a film set in London, planning how your music will work with this summer’s most anticipated film. And imagine when the movie has finished shooting and you are about to begin scoring it, the director turns to you and tells you that you cannot see the finished film until you have written the whole score . . .
Imagine what you would do.
If you are Hans Zimmer, then you burst out laughing.
Because Zimmer understood that director Christopher Nolan ( Memento, The Dark Knight) had just given him a remarkable gift, one that film composers are never given, particularly on a $200 million sci-fi blockbuster with Leonardo DiCaprio. On Inception, Nolan gave him the freedom to play.
“He wanted to free up my imagination,” Zimmer says, “partly because I think he felt very safe with our shared vision of the whole thing, and partly because he thought it would be interesting to just let me loose and see what happens if I give him the music and he fits it to the picture. And sometimes I would just send him things and talk to him on the phone or else he would phone me up and say ‘I need something that feels a bit like . . .’ and we would go off on a conversation. It really was weirdly liberating and at the same time weirdly strange not having the images in front of me all the time.
“The nice thing for me was that when I finally saw Inception, the whole framework was in place. By not knowing how long the movie is, you are just free to write music, which is, after all, what I love more than anything. It took away the responsibility of deadlines and time, and just the sheer terror of ‘oh my God I’ve got another hour of music to write, how am I going to do that?’”
Although Zimmer's relationship with the "tricky" Nolan ("Chris really has a way of shaking things up") is unusual in Hollywood because a film composer is rarely granted such freedom, it is nevertheless typical for the award-winning maverick Zimmer. In a career spanning three decades and 125 scores, beginning with films by Nicolas Roeg ( Eureka) and Stephen Frears ( My Beautiful Laundrette), he has worked with an array of directors who have more often than not let him loose on their films, ranging from independents such as Terrence Malick and James Brooks to blockbuster specialists Ridley Scott ( Black Rain, Gladiator)and Gore Verbinski ( Pirates of the Caribbean).
"From Nic I learned never to try to make something perfect, because it will take the life right out of it," he says. "Every piece of music I write has one purpose only, which is to ask questions. That's really what I picked up from Terry Malick. And he kept saying about Thin Red Linethat 'it should only ask questions, it should never answer questions'.
“I keep thinking how music very often tries to answer questions, like you get that last note, it’s a nice resolution and it’s all over. Isn’t it much more interesting that music behaves like doors opening that invite you and ask questions of you, and sort of has a dialogue with the audience as opposed to a dictatorship imposing its answers on to you, imposing what you are supposed to feel.”
In the early 1990s Zimmer invented the "heroic" scoring style of action movies, notably on Ron Howard's Backdraft, Tony Scott's Crimson Tideand Michael Bay's The Rock.His distinctive sound of anthemic synth-rock, with driving rhythms and soaring strings, quickly became the genre style of most action movies, particularly producer Jerry Bruckheimer's ( The Rock, Pirates of the Caribbean, Prince of Persia). Two decades on, it is still the predominant style because it works so well in getting the heart pounding and the adrenalin pumping.
Many of the composers who continue to develop his action style (notably Prince of Persia's composer, Harry Gregson-Williams) still collaborate with Zimmer at Remote Control Productions, the recording studio he founded in 1989 because he was "fed up with being a lonely composer and it's nice to surround yourself with people who go through the same shit you go through". But if the action style both defines and confines Zimmer, it also drives him to take risks.
"What doesn't interest me any more is the big, pompous, hero music in the style of some of my earlier scores – The Rock, King Arthur, Crimson Tide. But what does interest me is to find a different way of saying it. As much different stuff that I do, I think you can always tell it's mine. I can't leave my own style behind. I really write from the inside out, so I am always visible for better or for worse.
“A weird thing happens at the beginning of each project. I sit there and the only thing I know is that I have a blank page in front of me and I feel helpless because I have no idea how to do it. In a way, having done a hundred movies is against it. Everything I try out I realise I have done before. I am still only left with those 12 notes. I am supposed to make them exciting and express all these different emotions, and I am supposed to not do things I have done before. You have to keep pushing yourself forward.”
His recent Grammy-winning The Dark Knight(scored with James Newton Howard) and Oscar-nominated Sherlock Holmesscores are two different but unmistakably Zimmer pieces of work. As action scores they teem with energy and drama, but they are also boldly experimental, from the former's nerve-shredding two-note Joker theme to the latter's exuberant fusion of jig, polka and klezmer with 19th-century romanticism. His dynamic score for Inceptionfinds Zimmer on a similarly innovative trajectory, combining electric guitar (played by Johnny Marr) and orchestral strings with propulsive electronica.
Despite having “a thousand excuses why I shouldn’t put guitars with an orchestra . . . a horrible, dated, 1980s sort of thing”, Zimmer’s re-imagining of his earlier signature led him to a surprising discovery. “One of the things with Chris that was really helpful was when I was working on one piece and I said, ‘look, I think I have used this form before’. And he said: ‘So what? It’s your form. Everybody else is stealing it, why can’t you? You have a legitimate claim to it.’ Oh, I didn’t know that.
"None of the pieces of music that I have written I consider as perfect pieces. I see them as a stepping stones. There is a good idea somewhere but I haven't quite figured out how to express it and I would love to get better at expressing exactly that. I think the amazing luxury that I have is that I am always reaching for the unattainable and it gets me up in the morning. The funny thing is that for the last month or so, as Inceptioncomes to an end, Chris and I have been talking about what to reach for in the next one already."
The Inception score is on Warner Bros
Hans Zimmer's top scores
The Thin Red Line
With beautiful themes, minimalist pulses and spare orchestration, this is a score of remarkable expressive intensity and elegiac power.
Gladiator
Zimmer's greatest score in his distinctive "heroic" style, counterpointing Lisa Gerrard's exquisite voice and Heitor Pereira's Spanish guitar with Wagnerian melodies, s turm und drangorchestration and pounding rhythms.
Sherlock Holmes
Zimmer at his most exuberant and playful, boldly mixing late 19th-century romanticism and propulsive rhythms with European folk traditions (jig, waltz, polka, klezmer). Particularly notable for its 18-minute-long Psychological Recovery, Six Months.
And Zimmer’s own favourites
The Thin Red Line(director Terence Malick) – "I am still not totally sick of it."
Hannibal(director Ridley Scott) – "Just as an emotional response."
Thelma and Louise(director Ridley Scott) – "I love Pete Haycock's guitar playing on it."
