Composer Hans Zimmer reveals what he likes about writing music for film

Hans Zimmer. Photo / Getty Images

By Matt Suddain

'Let me explain glamorous Hollywood life to you," says Hans Zimmer. "I get up, I get in the car, I go to my studio, I spend all day in the studio until I drop. I go home, go to sleep, that's it." He works weekends. "The weekends are really good because nobody phones you and nobody disturbs you. That's my life. It may be boring to some, but to me, I love doing music."

He makes it clear he's not a workaholic. In fact, he doesn't think what he does is work at all. "I don't work. I'm a musician. It's called play."

Legendary composer Hans Zimmer is friendly guy with a laid back attitude to life, and work. "I really can't remember when I started playing music. It's just a fantastic thing. And part of it I suppose is that you never really have to grow up like other people. You just carry on playing."

He's been working on music for Planet Earth II, the natural history series starring the immortal Sir David Attenborough. "Every job starts the same way, which is that a director phones you up and goes, 'I want to tell you a story.' We love being told stories. So suddenly you're in this great big thing with everybody else. Each movie becomes a sort of weird, interesting and sometimes dysfunctional family."

Natural history programming might seem a world away from Pearl Harbour, or Pirates of the Caribbean, but Earth II is an epic series in its own right, with Attenborough striking that perfect balance between authority and empathy. "I grew up with his programmes, and his voice in my head. I just think he's a remarkable man."

Attenborough's voice is the ultimate soundtrack to more than six decades of incredible images from the natural world. It feels like he's talking only to you. With music, you hope for that kind of connection?

"Hope! I hope! Struggle! Try! You know. And it's infuriating how easily he achieves it."

With such cinematic source material as that offered by PEII, I wonder if Zimmer's approach had to change that much. There were sequences that played like an action movie. Like the racer snakes and iguanas. "Totally! I mean that thing with the snakes. It's 100 per cent an action sequence. Fact can be more emotional than fiction, that's how I keep looking at this."

For Zimmer, the central struggle for any creative individual is to get through life while maintaining some sort of sense of relevance. And Attenborough is more relevant now than he's ever been. "There he was on this lifelong mission, to show us the world, to show us Planet Earth, and we're only just getting it. We're only just getting what he's been saying for - what is it, 60 years?"

Does he ever feel like people don't take film music as seriously as other forms of music?

"The great thing about film music is, since other people don't take it quite as seriously, it also doesn't have the same burdens as concert music. You can do whatever you want, you know? So if Interstellar has a large orchestra, and organs, and all that stuff, then there's no reason why I can't do banjo-psychedelic-country/western-heavy metal. Just because I want to. It keeps me a moving target."

The music of Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer has 180 composer credits across film, TV and games: from Rain Man in 1988, to the recently released Dunkirk. Here are a few highlights.

LION KING (1994)

Zimmer was hired off his work on two films set in Africa: The Power of One, and A World Apart. He flavoured his score with a traditional African choir conducted by legendary South African composer Lebohang "Lebo M." Morake. It's the only soundtrack for an animated film to be certified diamond platinum (which means it sold over 10,000,000 copies). It also earned Zimmer an Oscar for Best Original Score.

GLADIATOR (2000)

Zimmer drew inspiration from fellow German composer Richard Wagner for his soundtrack to this movie about an Australian man who travels back in time to join the circus (or whatever that movie was about). He might also have drawn some inspiration from Gustav Holst's Mars: The Bringer of War, because in 2006, the Holst Foundation sued him for alleged copyright infringement.

HANNIBAL (2001)

Zimmer regards his score for this film about a cannibal serial killer attempting to reconnect with the FBI agent he once tormented to be one of the best love themes he's ever written. "I keep telling everyone this is a romantic comedy," he once told a journalist, "but nobody believes me."

Heath Ledger as The Joker.

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

During filming, Zimmer sent director Christopher Nolan an iPod with 10 hours of recordings on it. Zimmer's nine-minute suite for the Joker, Why So Serious?, was inspired by the iconic German band Kraftwerk, and was produced by using razor blades on stringed instruments. As you do. When Heath Ledger died, Zimmer considered writing a new theme, but in the end he decided to put sentimentality aside and keep it.

INCEPTION (2010)

This mind-bending film about a group of people who use technology to infiltrate people's dreams needed a suitably mind-bending score. Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr features on the soundtrack, which also delicately weaves in Edith Piaf's recording of Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

INTERSTELLAR (2014)

Nolan gave him no script or story outline, just a single page of notes. Nolan has described exactly what he said to Zimmer: "I am going to give you an envelope with a letter in it. One page. It's going to tell you the fable at the centre of the story. You work for one day, then play me what you have written." He nailed it, apparently.