Hans Zimmer tells juicy stories about the classic films he’s scored | Film

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An acclaimed musician who arranged 12 Years a Slave, Man of Steel, Rush, and The Lone Ranger in 2013, Hans Zimmer has enviable classics on his resume, and the 56-year-old raconteur is happy to share them with you. . Highlights … and telling the juicy behind-the-scenes stories that went into making them.

Thin red line

A year before Terrence Malick filmed this World War II masterpiece, he set up a pre-production suite in Zimmer’s office. “Before he left to shoot, I actually wrote him a full score, but I don’t think there was anything left of it by the time I finished the film. I do that with Chris. . [Nolan] As well, but with Chris,” he laughed, “it usually survives.”

Malick is known for completely reworking his films in the editing room, and this one was no different: As the director cut The Thin Red Line from Zimmer’s initial six-and-a-half-hour version, he virtually eliminated. Some of the film stars, including early protagonist Adrien Brody. “There was a time when it occurred to Terry that I should try. [edit] A scene with this other young editor because we would have a different perspective on it. I remember working on this thing for two weeks, going through all the dailies and coming up with something really mediocre, and then the original editor, Billy Weber, took a look at it and came back an hour later and said, turned into dirt. Something truly magical. I realized, ‘Oh, I’m not going to kid myself here! I’m going back to doing music now.”

The beginning

So how does Zimmer feel when he sees a new commercial that touts his bold opening score? “Oh, it’s terrible!” he cries. “This is a perfect example of where it all goes wrong. That music became the blueprint for all action movies, really. And if you get too much copy, I get confused too!” He even witnessed the incident himself: “When we got to The Dark Knight Rises, the studio sent out a trailer with this temporary track, and they actually apologized for it. They said, ‘ We put the Inception music on there because we didn’t know what else to do, so can you guys think of something else?’ So we came up with a trailer that was just a few lonely notes — it couldn’t have been more opposite.”

So where did all those BRAMMS actually come from? “I remember before we did the movie,” says Zimmer, “Chris and I were at the premiere of Sherlock Holmes in London, and of course it ended up with the two of us in a corner talking about the movie. That’s what we’re talking about. At the premiere, when everyone else is around us, we’re like, ‘I’ll tell you, let’s book a studio and get some brass.’ Player voice, indeed, it is That I put a piano in the middle of the church and I put a book on the pedals, and these brass players would basically play to the piano’s echo and then I added a little bit of electronic nonsense. But really, it’s just that It comes from saying, ‘Let’s experiment.’

Pirates of the Caribbean

Ironically, Zimmer was not supposed to work on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise at all, though he would eventually go on to score all four films. “Pirates is a little difficult, because the first movie was such a bastard child,” Zimmer says. “Alan Silvestri originally scored it, but I never heard it – people refused to play it for me.”

Director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer persuaded Zimmer to replace Silvestri, but it wasn’t an easy sell: for one thing, Zimmer was already in the middle of another composing job, and more importantly, Pirates of the Caribbean was coming out. Five short weeks. Instead, Zimmer recommended a partner for the gig, but “they all didn’t have a great first meeting,” Zimmer says. “I walked in and I saw the panic in Gore’s eyes. I don’t think he even said anything to me — I said, ‘Okay, okay, I’ll go home and I’ll see if I might come up with something.” Ask Zimmer how he feels about the result, and the composer is nothing if not candid: “I mean, I’ve had until the second film for Jack Sparrow. The theme wasn’t even written – it seemed That’s an oversight!” he laughs.

Fortunately, the first installment of Pirates was a beauty at the box office, giving Zimmer a second (and then a third, and a fourth) chance to improve on what he came up with. “For the second film, I wrote a very long, very intellectually precise Jack Sparrow theme,” he says. “But the second Pirates movie was really the first sequel I got to work on, and I thought it would be easy. It really wasn’t! I thought I’d just re-appropriate everything from the first movie, and It wasn’t. So again, musically, you’re the best, because I was a little embarrassed by how the second one ended, so I gave it a good try.”

The lion king

Another blockbuster that Zimmer reluctantly came up with was The Lion King, which won him an Oscar. “At first, I didn’t want to do The Lion King, because I don’t really like Broadway musicals,” he says. “I thought that was what Disney wanted from me, but they kept saying, ‘No, no, no, we really like that you don’t like Broadway musicals. We want it to be different.'” Ironic. That’s what The Lion King really did. Three years after the film’s bow, it became a Broadway musical, and that stage production is the highest-grossing Broadway show of all time.

So what does Zimmer remember about that night at the Academy Awards? “At first, I was sure I wasn’t going to win it,” he says. “I thought it was going to be Forrest Gump. So when they called my name, I just sat there, didn’t hear it. And then my wife was going, ‘Get up.’ And then I get on that stage and I’m being handed this golden thing, looking at people, and I just remember all the teeth, everybody smiling and clapping and this little voice in my head, ‘Oh, it feels great, so if I keep writing good music like this, maybe I can do it again.’ And I remember the next part exactly, because this second voice came and said, ‘There is ruin.’

“The Oscars are incredibly glamorous,” he says. “You see people you admire and who you think have incredible artistic integrity make complete fools of themselves on that stage. are

12 years a slave

Zimmer is expected to return to the awards race this year for his work on 12 Years a Slave. He’s such a fan of director Steve McQueen that he didn’t need much persuasion to come on board. “We had a mysterious conversation a few years ago where he told me he was working on something and asked me if I was even remotely interested in working with him,” Zimmer says. ” says Zamar. “And I just love her, so of course I was more than remotely interested!”

Much of the film is scored with the same four-note theme, which Zimmer plays depending on the mood of the scene. “Music can actually make you cry. I don’t mean that as a scary, manipulative thing, but music can reach parts of your psyche that other things can’t get to… Try that which resonates very quickly and takes if you are brave enough to look [12 Years a Slave] Twice, in a way, your emotional dominoes already start falling when you hear those first few notes.”

The Dark Knight Rises

“I get a lot of flak from people who say, ‘All his scores sound like Inception,’ or ‘All his scores sound like Batman,'” Zimmer laughs. “Well, I’m sorry, guys! I didn’t know when we did Batman Begins that it was going to change in nine years of being in this style and this style. Within each movie, we’ve done something new. added, but the sequel thing really threw me.”

When it came to The Dark Knight Rises, the culmination of those nine years of work, Zimmer had a brand new brainstorm: To announce the villain, he wanted a huge song sung by 100,000 different voices. Will be resurrected. Logically, though, such a track wouldn’t be easy to arrange, and if Zimmer put even a relatively modest 100 people on his slog, chances were high that something leaked from one of those top-secret productions. can do “At the same time, it was important to Chris that the Bunny character wasn’t revealed first by someone taking a dodgy picture with their iPhone on set,” Zimmer says. So they pulled a neat trick: Nolan and Zimmer launched a website featuring the song and filled it with cryptic messages that, when played through a spectograph and typed into Twitter, would be pixelated. will reveal the first official image by Pixel.

“Now that the slogan was out there in the world, I said, ‘I want my 100,000 people,'” Zimmer recalls. So I thought, why not break the fourth wall and reach out to the fans? So we did it over the internet where they can put on their headphones and chant at home on their computer and send it in. And I would literally line up 100,000 tracks of all my fans chanting … I never knew we were going to spend nine years of our lives in Batman, so it was important to me that the last one It was comprehensive, that the doors were open. The people who loved it and supported us can actually be a part of it.”

The Man of Steel

Zimmer has been honing his craft for decades, but it wasn’t until he worked on comic book projects like The Dark Knight and Man of Steel that he noticed his exceptional has attracted enthusiastic fans. “You go on Amazon.com and you see what people are writing about the soundtrack, and you can make a decision without actually knowing the person, just by seeing how they react to your music. having rather deep conversations,” he says.

The tricky thing with comic book movies like Man of Steel, says Zimmer, is that while audiences may think they want a very faithful adaptation, the filmmaker has a responsibility to take chances — and sometimes, These occasions don’t go well with angry fans. . “I get a lot of it,” Zimmer admits. “Look at poor Ben Affleck! And honestly, when Chris cast Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight, there was some really nasty stuff going on, because everyone was saying Jack Nicholson was the only one who could do it.” Can. But here’s the reality of what my job is: Our job as filmmakers is never to ask the audience, ‘What do you want to see?’ Because then they go, ‘I don’t know … Indiana Jones 5 or Star Wars 27?’ Because it’s not their job to come up with a new way of thinking about it, or our job to surprise them.”

–.Vulture