With “Hans Zimmer Live 2022”, Hans Zimmer will release an album with his scores in rock and world music arrangements next March. From April he will be on tour through eight German cities. The 65-year-old is considered the most important living film composer after John Williams: his albums have sold around 25 million copies, and he received the soundtrack Oscar for “The Lion King” and “Dune”. The Hesse, who first emigrated to London in the late 1970s and now lives in Hollywood, started his career as a new wave musician, most recently collaborating with Pharrell Williams, Johnny Marr and Vampire Weekend. He prefers to give interviews in English.
Mr Zimmer, how…
Stop! How many 65-year-old composers who aren’t rock stars make ROLLING STONE? Although: Most rock stars are even older than me, right? I am honored!
Maybe you can be called a punk? They upset things. They changed the world of soundtracks, away from classical music and leitmotifs towards sound design.
My four heroes are Ennio Morricone, John Barry, John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith. So I don’t want to do what they do – which doesn’t mean that I can’t compose traditional orchestral music anymore, like for “Gladiator”. But I prefer to devote myself to another idea now: the (says this word in German) timbre music. “Dune” isn’t about sci-fi battles, it’s about the power of women. I could have given characters like Lady Jessica a leitmotif, but instead I gave her a sound that resonates and stays when she leaves the room. Like a perfume.
I hadn’t noticed.
You shouldn’t either. You should feel it unconsciously. Otherwise I would have done something wrong. They should experience the music, not see pictures and think of the noisy, oh so clever composer.
But there’s been a “loudness” debate about soundtracks for years. Especially in the Christopher Nolan works, the film sound seems to compete with your pieces in terms of volume.
no On the Batman movies, I said to Chris, the music is too loud, I don’t understand the dialogue! He said: This is my dialogue, I wrote it – I can do what I want with it. His films are smart, but Chris is smart too. He doesn’t give you every important piece of information, every clou, not once in the film, but at least twice. Once on the emotional level, once on the intellectual level. Well, “Interstellar” was loud: we proved that we used it to blow up an IMAX system in a Seattle movie theater. At the same time, we wanted to make not only the loudest film of all time, but also the quietest. “Interstellar” takes place in silent space, in the deepest blackness. When flying past Saturn, you only hear a single piano note.
Sometimes they just play the sound of ticking clocks for minutes. Can you understand why some people don’t think this is music?
But that’s music! It is also about perceptual psychology. A rhythm has a defined start and end point. But the ticking? Leaves everything open. As long as it’s running, you’ll never know when the monster will attack or the woman will kiss you. This is the secret of time. You will never know when you will die, never when you will fall in love.
A number of tutorials deal with the unnerving “Joker” motif from “The Dark Knight”: an ever higher rising tone that never ends.
The “Shepard” tone, from C to D, the two musically closest tones on the piano. To the ear, however, they are the furthest apart. I create the illusion of an infinitely rising musical scale, yet one that never exceeds the limits of your hearing. I’ve spent hours of sonic research trying to figure out who the joker is, what the joker is. When Nolan went to Hong Kong to finish the film, I gave him an iPod with all the experiments on it. Eight hours of music for eight hours of flight. Afterwards he said: “Hans, that didn’t exactly make me a better person.” Nobody will ever hear these recordings.
You said you wanted to compose music that people absolutely hate. But shouldn’t even bad music be attractive?
Naturally. The “Joker” motif begins quietly. They should be able to adjust to it, learn something about themselves in it. Are they able to endure this tension? They are tones that ask questions. Writing hateful music is a privilege reserved exclusively for film composers. Who else would want to do that? I wrote the score for Frost/Nixon and said to myself, damn me if anyone ends up feeling the slightest sympathy for Richard Nixon just because they like my theme. That’s the problem with music: It automatically creates empathy, expands character traits. Do you know the band Garbage?
Clear.
They composed a James Bond song, The World Is Not Enough. When I was showing my own Bond suite recently, they said to me: “We love you – because you produced The Damned back then”. I have a punk background, probably one of the few Hollywood composers. And I use that punk ethos, whether for the anarchy in The Joker or Frost/Nixon, a lot of which sounds like you could be knifed out of the dark.
When you won the Oscar in 1995 for your African-inspired sounds of “The Lion King”, the term “cultural appropriation” was almost unknown, later your Japanese music for “The Last Samurai” followed. What do you think of the debate?
I took the “Samurai” and the stylistic challenge very seriously, it was a difficult learning process for me. The more I learned, the less I understood. And then I hired Japanese musicians. In the back the deadline to have to finish the soundtrack. In short, I presented my pieces to Japanese audiences. The people there asked: How do you know our music so well? I’m still a punk at heart, so I like to provoke. But what I don’t like doing: hurting people. Culture is something you carry in your heart. It is not far to exploitation, to cultural imperialism. Inventions or fictions, on the other hand, are legitimate for me. The Last Samurai is a Hollywood film, not a documentary.
You don’t feel offended by your fictionalizations?
One of my first jobs was as a “tea boy” in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” from 1987. The director? An Italian. The composer? Ryūichi Sakamoto, a Japanese. The film? Revolved around Chinese. Ryūichi worked with Chinese musicians and they hated him because he is Japanese. For the first – and fortunately only – time I felt racism. And racism is something that is very unusual for musicians. Racism is very rare in music itself. Either you play well or you don’t play well. That is the only trait by which one is judged. Skin colour, gender, cultural background – I don’t care, it doesn’t matter for joining my band.
There’s a multicultural-sounding Vampire Weekend track, Hold You Now, based on a sample of your The Thin Red Line score. They are Jewish, Vampire Weekend singer Ezra Koenig is Jewish, the choir sounds African but is Pacific.
Exactly. Colorful like my band. A Chinese woman, a Venezuelan, a refugee from the African continent. A Ukrainian. Three years ago I booked an orchestra from Odessa for my tour. Then came the Ukraine war. We got ten of them out. While they were playing on our stage, their families’ houses were bombed. This is hard to take.
Many of your pieces are used as ‘temp music’, temporary tracks that serve as a guide to atmosphere while the film is still in production, and which increasingly prompt impatient producers to simply commission imitations for the right soundtrack. That’s why today’s film music often sounds the same. How do you find…
I fucking hate temp music! My piece “Journey To The Line” from “The Thin Red Line” has been used everywhere since 1998. I just call it: “The forbidden cue”.
Not flattered?
I’ll kill you if you use this cue (laughs). Things got even worse after 2005’s Batman Begins. Even before the film was released, the production company simply used a piece of it for the trailer of another of their films. What was that? Didn’t they understand that they were harming themselves by doing this? This music was now used up. Didn’t they see that we might want to do more Batman movies? Look, maybe the audience doesn’t care who invented what sound, what style. But I don’t like being seen as a copycat of my own style – just because not everyone knows that this style was created by me.
They are credited with inventing the “braaam” sound, the mega-powerful horn boom, like AC/DC alphorns being played. Did you come up with the name too?
No! And there is a misunderstanding here. Chris Nolan invented the braaam, not me. The “braaam” is a story point in 2010’s “Inception”. “Braam” means that everything is slowed down – the protagonists sink deeper and deeper into their trance state, reaching deeper and deeper levels of time and dream. Hence my massive, slow-motion entry with the orchestra. I’m haunted by the “braaam” abuse because on “Inception” there’s a reason I wrapped it in sound. But because the sound is so powerful, it was copied by those who didn’t even get the point. And then “Braaam” landed in climax-to-climax trailers structured as non-linear storytelling. Director Ron Howard told me, “Trailers are like dreams. Neither are mysterious. You jump from one thing to the next. And ‘Inception’ is about nothing but dreams”. So, funnily enough, while “Braaam” has been misused for a number of trailers, the trailers themselves, with their jumps from climax to climax, capture the “Braaam” concept quite well.
In your company “Remote Control Productions” several employees work on the Hans Zimmer sound. Is the image of the composer poring over etudes alone in his little room an old-fashioned one?
Of course, everyone always has Mozart and Bach in the back of their minds, who created everything on their own. How amazing her work was! If you had a lifetime just to copy everything from these masters, you wouldn’t have enough time. I know why I have this company and why I accurately list the profiles of my employees and what jobs they have on my homepage. I started my career as an assistant composer to a big colleague, and I was supposed to compose car chase scenes the whole time because he hated that job. But he gave me credit for the car chase scenes. That was unusual. In Hollywood, many composers work in the shadows, they are “ghost composers”. Many never level up. If I now see that a talent can lead an orchestra, then I want to help him. I gave careers to John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams. It was more difficult then than it is now – and do you know why?
Why then?
Because you literally shot on film, not digitally. Producers kept coming up to me: “Do you actually know how expensive it is when we add this and that name in the film credits, use up even more material? Just think about the economy!”. One of my scores for Disney said the end credits couldn’t be longer than 2:40 minutes. And by not naming this or that soundtrack contributor, it would reportedly have saved millions of dollars a year. I just had to break this pattern. And that’s why there’s an accusation against me that just doesn’t make any sense. If people say I don’t write my music myself, why are they the same people who say my music always sounds the same?