Hearing a bigger picture

He has written the music for 125 films, including the latest, 'Angels & Demons', but Hans Zimmer baulks at the idea of being seen as a 'grand composer'. And the terror before each new project still drives him crazy, he tells JOCELYN CLARKE

ALTHOUGH MOST people have never actually heard of film composer Hans Zimmer, nearly everybody has heard his music on the big screen. Over the last three decades, he has scored some of Hollywood's highest-grossing movies ( The Lion King, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Dark Knight), as well as some of its smaller independent films ( Thelma & Louise, The Pledge, The Thin Red Line), and has been nominated for six Oscars and six Grammys, winning one of each.

His scores have redefined the style and sound of contemporary American film music and they have also sold millions of copies around the world – The Lion Kingalone has sold more than 15 million. Yet despite his extraordinary artistic and commercial success, each time Zimmer begins working on a new film, an exhilarating terror always overwhelms him.

“When somebody asks, ‘Do you want to do this movie?’, I always say, ‘I would love to do this movie’. But as soon as I start working on it, I am terrified because I have no idea how to do it.

“Each movie is sort of a singular experience. It’s a thing I can do only once in my lifetime. So, for me, it’s always this thing of ‘we are going to tell this story, we are going to tell it once, and we are going to do our very best in doing it’. And I drive myself crazy. I go through a very dark period somewhere in the middle of it where all seems to be lost. I have no idea how to do it. I have no idea how to turn the next corner, to find the next note, to solve the next problem. I have taken on some huge thing where I know $200 million of somebody’s money is invested in it and some people’s livelihoods are dependent on it.

“You are the last person in line to sort of add something or to complete a film, and to partly fix the vision of the director. All the way through the making of the movie, the director has had to give up a little of the ambition of the original great dream that you have when you start out on the journey. Things will go missing by the lack of budget, by the lack of time, by whatever, so I think part of the composer’s job is to start putting some of that back in. So the only thing I can then go and do . . . in a funny way, my reaction is to come up with the daftest, most ludicrous, crazy idea.”

Zimmer's entry into the word of film music is typical of the gregarious 51-year-old German-born composer. After a short career in pop music as one of the founding members of seminal 1980s electro-pop phenomenon Buggles – the video of whose worldwide hit single, Video Killed the Radio Star, was the first to be aired on MTV – he began a long formative collaboration with the idiosyncratic British film and television composer, Stanley Myers ( The Deer Hunter, My Beautiful Laundrette). Working in Myers's London studio, he was exposed to an unusually collaborative approach to writing film music, which was both experimental and practical, the perfect environment for an emerging scorer with no formal music education except for "two rotten weeks of piano lessons, the worst example of German bullying" at the age of six. "Literally on my first day as the lowly apprentice, I was in a meeting with the director, Nicolas Roeg . He was a great teacher. I think I kept my mouth shut on that first day. I was there as Stanley and Nicolas were trying to solve a problem in a scene with music. I think that's very different from when you are at university and somebody stands in front of you and lectures about a problem that they had solved.

“The great thing was that I had these amazing directors who realised I knew nothing and that was okay. And they took it upon themselves to tell me a thing or two. They would answer questions. I would ask the most stupid, insane questions and they would take the time and answer them.”

COLLABORATING WITH Myers and on his own scores, Zimmer developed his signature approach to film music, combining electronic music with traditional orchestration, evolving a sound and style that was at once dramatic and contemporary in its fusion of music idioms and technologies.

With the success of his score to Barry Levinson's Rain Man(for which he received his first Oscar nomination), he moved to Los Angeles and quickly followed up with two very different scores, for Bruce Beresford's Driving Miss Daisyand Ridley Scott's Black Rain,which established him in Hollywood as a go-to composer who was both singular and multi-talented.

With The Lion Kingand several high-octane action movies (notably Tony Scott's Days of Thunderand Crimson Tide, and Michael Bay's The Rockand Pearl Harbour) cementing his reputation, Zimmer set up Remote Control Productions, part recording studio and part atelier modelled on his experience of being mentored by Myers.

“It’s the exchange of ideas,” he says. “It’s other people helping to make your ideas better. Or if there is a momentary pause when you can’t think of something, or you don’t have the answer and you know that somebody can come and help you out. You have to be careful that you don’t dilute the specificity of your original idea, and everybody who comes on board serves that idea. And if the idea is good enough, everybody will be heading in the same direction.”

Remote Control has been responsible for launching the careers of a new generation of film composers, notably John Powell (Jason Bourne trilogy), Harry Gregson-Williams (Shrek trilogy) and Klaus Badelt ( Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl). They have all contributed music and production to Zimmer's own scores (for which he generously credits them) and he continues to produce and advise on their projects.

The surging, heroic scoring idiom which Zimmer pioneered in the 1990s and which has since become the dominant music convention of most Hollywood blockbusters, continues to be developed by his protégés, as well as emulated by other composers. Tony Scott's upcoming The Taking of Pelham 123and Michael Bay's summer blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, will be scored by former protégés Gregson-Williams and Steve Jablonsky respectively.

“You have to realise that my definition of a composer isn’t quite as clear-cut as other people’s definition of a composer,” Zimmer says. “I always get a little bit worried when people think of me as a ‘grand composer’, because I just see myself more as a musician who likes writing music, working away on whatever, and working with other people who, through their interpretation of the notes, very often change the feeling of my notes. I see them as just as valuable as people who are a ‘grand composer’. I just find it a little dangerous territory sometimes. It gets a little pretentious, the word ‘composer’.”

IRONICALLY, THE Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences initially ruled that The Dark Knight, Zimmer's superb second collaboration with scorer James Newton Howard for Christopher Nolan's brooding Batman franchise, was ineligible to compete in last year's Oscars because it credited contributions by a music editor, a sound designer, and an arranger; in other words, there were too many "composers" listed on the music cue sheet. If Zimmer's demotic, rather than academic, approach to film scoring has proved controversial because it challenges the conventional authorship of film composers, it has also enabled him to achieve an enviable freedom and influence. Over the last five years, his work with Hollywood A-list directors Christopher Nolan, Gore Verbinski ( Pirates of The Caribbeantrilogy) and Ron Howard ( The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon) has transformed the traditionally fraught relationship between director and film composer into an unusually rewarding collaboration between equals.

"I was playing Ron some pretty crazy stuff at the beginning of Angels & Demons," Zimmer says. "There was one moment where I knew I had really overstepped all the boundaries of whatever, and as this piece of music was playing, I turned around and I saw this huge smile on Ron's face. It was great. And I got to the end of it, and he said: 'Please don't shut the laboratory doors, let's keep the laboratory doors open.' That was a great thing to say. You know what I mean?

“What interests me is telling a story, combining the story with the music, being part of – literally – a bigger picture, and collaborating and working with directors and cinematographers. I get excited about that stuff.”

Last year the prolific Zimmer scored six films (including the little-known indie feature, The Burning Plain, and the documentary, Running the Sahara) and he has kicked off 2009 with the Vatican-unfriendly thriller, Angels & Demons. He is about to embark on a "very, very, very secret" new project with Christopher Nolan. Although, at the beginning of the project he will experience his familiar terror, when "the blank page seems to get longer in a peculiar way", he is also still excited by the fundamental drive that has shaped all his work as a composer.

“You know what excites me? Writing a good tune,” he says. “I am just trying to write a good tune. I have been trying all my life to write a good tune. And that is an exciting part of the journey still.”

** Angels & Demonsis on general release

Aimmer on film: top 10 scores

1 The Thin Red Line

2 Gladiator

3 The Dark Knight

4 Pirates of the Caribbean: At the World's End

5 The Da Vinci Code

6 The Ring

7 The Lion King

8 Thelma & Louise

9 The Pledge

10 Driving Miss Daisy