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Ladies and gentlemen, Hans Zimmer!
There's a word I don't use very often, which is genius.
Hans Zimmer is one of them.
He has the incredible capacity to reinvent himself
without losing his identity.
He's a storyteller.
He tells stories with music.
It's not a job. It's like a calling.
It's like a crazy thing.
I can't imagine not writing music.
Hans Zimmer is the world's most sought after
and prolific movie composer.
He's written music for blockbusters, romcoms,
animations and even iconic nature documentaries.
This is a dangerous place.
He's fascinated just by sound itself.
He has all kinds of technical ideas
and tricks going on at any one time.
Throughout his career, he's broken all the rules
about how you compose music for films.
I don't think anybody's ever won an Oscar for a score
that blatantly is bagpipes, heavy-metal guitars
and a woman screaming at you.
This is great!
He doesn't want to read a script.
He wants me to tell him,
"What is the movie you think you're making?"
It's like being psychoanalysed.
Even if you're not hearing what you want to hear always,
the project gets better every time
it gets under Hans's microscope.
He remains a child, in a way.
And I think you have to have that quality in order
to sort of be a successful musician for all that time.
I've been doing this for, what, 40 years?
Somebody the other day said, "When are you gonna slow down?"
"What do you mean 'slow down'? I'm just getting going!
I'm just getting started."
Hans is experimenting with some ideas
for the soundtrack of a new BBC Natural History documentary.
Just try to get to something that sounds remotely frozen.
I'm using a bit of noise,
make it a bit more tundra-like.
You know, I mean, it's just...
I like the idea that there's, like, a wind
rattling across everything.
I'm literally making it as we're talking about things.
Er... Let's say...
Let's go and use this, too.
It's relatively chilly, but we can make it chillier.
Bit of frozenness.
The problem is that wind across a tundra
and bacon frying are very similar.
This is a stronghold
for one of Antarctica's most remarkable inhabitants.
The seriousness and the depth that we bring to this project
comes a lot from me being a kid.
One of my main memories is just shortly
before my father's death, where he took me to the Rhine,
which was completely covered in foam.
And he was explaining to me,
"You know, look, we're destroying the world.
We now need to go and do something about that."
And I think it hugely influenced me in our work
with Sir David Attenborough.
Hans was born in Frankfurt, Germany,
in 1957 into a Jewish family.
I knew what the Nazis had done to the Jews.
It would be brought up quite a lot.
The fear was that, "You know what?
If you tell the neighbours,
your best friend can turn on you within one moment."
While still a child, Hans's family was torn apart
by a bolt from the blue.
The week before my 6th birthday --
my birthday was on a Sunday --
my dad died on either the Friday or the Saturday.
And on Monday, my mother, who was totally overwhelmed,
basically dropped me off for my first day at school.
It was like, you know, all these kids,
terrible teachers of an older generation.
Then came the moment where she said,
"You know, I think you should have piano lessons.
Do you want piano lessons?"
And as a 6-year-old, 7-year-old,
you think that stuff you hear in your head,
a magical man is going to come
and tell you how to put it under your fingers.
And, of course, that's not at all what happens.
Some horrible German comes who raps you across the knuckles
if you don't play your scales right.
You know, "Read, read, read, read, read!"
And to this day, if you put music in front of me,
it just starts getting wobbly and swimmy and...
and defocuses.
Despite having only two weeks of formal lessons,
Hans found his home in music.
I play the piano because it put a smile on my mum's face.
It's the only reason.
It's not the only reason -- it put a smile on my face, too.
Hans kicked against the rules, not just in learning music
but in everything.
He was thrown out of eight schools in Germany
for not conforming to the strict discipline demanded.
The music teacher threw a chair at me.
I remember that.
He always told stories of his childhood,
all the shenanigans he got into --
crazy thing in boarding school that got you kicked out.
He got kicked out of boarding school quite a few times.
I know my mum was really worried about me.
I think everybody was really worried about me.
Hans's rebellious streak
led to his mother moving them to England.
There they found a progressive school
where he could concentrate on his music.
On graduating, he followed his dream
and joined a band called Krakatoa,
mainly playing working men's clubs.
♪ Don't apologise, it's not your style ♪
We were the entertainment nobody listened to.
We were so bad, up north,
we would be the support act to the strippers.
♪ Treat your mama good ♪
And it was interesting because it was the '80s
and it was Margaret Thatcher and it was...
coal miners' strike.
Whoa, it was rough up north.
People were so frustrated.
You know, you left London and you entered another world,
you entered another country.
And this country was a country that was desperate
and it was poor and it was everything
that you could only imagine of the left behind
and left for forgotten.
And to this day...
I have this person I write my music for.
And she's fictitious.
She's called Doris and she lives in Bradford.
She has a grey coat and, you know...
is of uncertain age.
She's got two terrible boys.
I mean, they're so ill-behaved.
And her hair-dye job isn't very good, you know?
And she works really hard throughout the week.
And come the weekend, she has a choice.
She has a choice of going to the pub, having a drink,
or she has a choice of coming and seeing one of our movies.
And she's a hero to me because she works hard.
And so when she comes and sees one of my -- our -- movies,
I want to make sure that she gets her money's worth and...
I promise you. I mean, every movie,
I sit there and I go, "What would Doris think?"
It's so easy to think about the past in a nostalgic way.
Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.
My friend Warren Cann, drummer from Ultravox,
we decided to do an album together,
which, absolutely, we couldn't give away.
To this day, we couldn't give it away.
Oh, and then we had this crazy idea.
We did a concert at the London Planetarium,
you know, basically, people looking up at the stars
and us playing weird, cosmic music to them
and scaring the children in the process of it.
The 1980s saw a revolution in music,
video and film production.
Computers and synthesisers were changing how music
was made and recorded.
Hans saw the potential in all this new technology
and made himself the master of it.
I was seriously into synthesisers
and I was a lot skinnier then as well.
But I still have this, of course,
and I still make music with it.
And, you know that sound that basically pins you
into your seat when you watch "Dark Knight"?
That's that beast.
It was a time where
you suddenly could have access to computers,
so the whole idea about doing things on stage
was far less exciting than the idea
of "How far could I push this technology?"
Using his know-how of studio technology?"
It was in this unassuming yard
that Hans began to hone his writing and production skills.
Together with his friend and mentor,
composer Stanley Myers,
he set up his first recording studio.
I mean, you can tell from the glamorous nature of this door
that this is the door that leads directly to Hollywood,
fame and Oscars.
This used to be my studio. Actually, it wasn't my studio.
It was Stanley Myers' and my studio.
Absolutely extraordinary composer.
I mean, everybody owes a lot of things to everybody in life.
My film language, for instance,
I very much learned from Stanley.
It's really simple.
If you don't have a tune,
you've got nothing to hang on to.
So, this sort of somewhat decrepit building
actually turned out to be a haven for us.
I don't think many people had the sort of idea
that you could go and do film scores with a little keyboard
and not an orchestra, but you could.
I want to be manager of this place.
I think I can do it. Please let me.
Of course, "My Beautiful Laundrette,"
I think, was pretty much the first thing we did here.
Stanley Myers was doing the music
for "My Beautiful Laundrette,"
and Hans was always in the other room.
So for some reason, that was where you ended up.
Stanley was always in the front room reading the racy news,
and there was clearly a rather clever chap
in the back doing all the work.
A skinny, lanky guy who was German
with a little computer thing, and everyone thought,
"What the hell's that?" basically. And...
- Because - - I guess it was electronic,
so Hans was doing it
because he knew how to work all those machines
and he knew how to make the eccentric sounds.
Between them, they thought up
what the film should sound like.
And it was pretty obvious when it was a Stanley piece
because it was elegant and beautiful
and when it was a Hans piece,
which was a bit like lead boots.
And it was all rewrites for me.
And Stanley would very gently
steer me in the right direction.
He's an incredibly charming man.
And he was just absolutely brilliant
cos he had this new form of, in a funny way, '80s music,
but he also had the wit and the ability to charm
and to be the whole package, as it were.
Without that character, you know,
he'd still be a great composer,
but he wouldn't have been the successful composer that he is.
No way.
It was just a weird thing,
because, here in England, you were always an equal.
I mean, you were totally involved in the storytelling,
and that was the thing that I thought was really exciting,
these conversations you are having with film directors,
which were far more up my streets
than just playing in a band.
I know that he's the most successful composer
in the world,
but to me, he's the boy in the back room.
It makes me laugh.
By the late 1980s, Hans was gaining a reputation
as a film composer of British films and TV.
He is developing fast.
Yes.
A knock on the door at Lillie Yard late one night
was going to change his life forever.
You know, 11:00 at night -- musicians' hours.
Of course we were working.
So I open the door and there's a guy standing there
and he's going, "Hi. My name's Barry Levinson."
Pause.
"I'm a Hollywood director."
From the first time I met him,
I thought that he was extremely talented,
and that's before he had worked on any of the music.
I just got...
Sometimes you get a feeling with people that you connect.
And he came in and...
I mean, basically, the bottom line of the story is, he went,
"Do you want to do this film
'Rain Man' that I'm working on?"
And I said, "Yes."
Hans's ideas for "Rain Man"
were unusual for a traditional American road movie.
There's a tendency to use sort of guitar music,
that type of travelling across country,
and I didn't think it was appropriate for the piece.
And he came up with that sound, which was very unique
and very distinctive...
...and very different than a normal travelling movie.
You know, I'm sure the studio wasn't thrilled
because it's like, "Alright, I got somebody, Hans Zimmer,"
and they're going, "Who?! For this film?
You know, we got Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.
And who is this composer?"
For his first Hollywood movie,
Hans received an Oscar nomination.
I went for that lunch that they have, the Oscar lunch,
and I picked up, I don't know, five, six, seven.
I mean, I didn't stand up and say, "Anybody got a movie?"
I just sat there and people would come up to me and say,
"Hey, do you wanna do my movie?"
The following year, he composed the music
for yet another Oscar-winning film...
"Driving Miss Daisy."
And then in 1994...
♪ Nants ingonyama ♪
♪ Bagithi baba ♪
The first notes that you hear,
you're in.
And it's magic.
♪ Nants ingonyama ♪
And the vocal that you hear with it...
- ♪ Baba ♪ - ...poetry.
♪ Nqoba ♪
Musical poetry.
- ♪ Siyo Nqoba ♪ - ♪ Ingonyama ♪
The studio had given Hans a strict brief about the opening.
It was supposed to be 20 seconds of Elton's song
and then there was going to be a dialogue scene and...
da-da-da-da, right?
And I forgot about the 20 seconds.
I just got excited about doing the chant with Lebo.
Then I did an arrangement of Elton's tune.
And so I played it to them, and as I'm playing it to them,
I'm going, "Oh, God, I forgot.
It's supposed to be 20 seconds long,
and then it's supposed to become a dialogue piece."
And they sort of shuffled off into a corner,
and they're talking.
And I know what they're talking about.
They're talking about,
"Who are they gonna get to replace me?"
So I'm going over there, and I'm saying,
"Look, guys, I'm really sorry.
I can do this thing in 20 seconds."
They're going, "No, no, no!
That's not what we're talking about at all.
We're thinking we're gonna go
and reanimate the whole opening.
We're gonna take all that dialogue out and da-da-da-da."
♪ Ingonyama ♪
It was an experiment,
and what's in the movie is my original demo.
The African sounds...
♪ Ingonyama ♪
...the unique instruments...
♪ Ingonyama ♪
...it's beyond profound.
♪ The circle of life ♪
And the Oscar goes to Hans Zimmer for "The Lion King"!
So full of life and wonder and beauty.
I wrote a speech, but I realised,
"It's so boring," so I'm not gonna do it.
I'd like to thank my wife because she's my best friend.
I'd like to thank my daughter because she now thinks I'm cool
cos I did "The Lion King"!
I'm incredibly nervous.
I tell you what, writing a score is much easier than this.
Thank you. Just let me go, okay?
♪ Circle ♪
I've listened to how many
songs of how many scores end on...
Exclamation point that is... amazing
and a signature of his.
The directors and the producers were coming in
and I hadn't finished it, so that's why that big drum --
the "Boing!" -- is there, to distract them
from the fact that I hadn't finished the track.
Hans used his mastery of digital technology,
especially sampling, to change the way movie directors
collaborated with their composers.
The standard way of working with a director before Hans
is that there was no way to present the music
other than to play it on the piano --
"Here's your theme,
and here's where the brass comes in down here,
and the strings are playing this."
You know, I wasn't as good of a piano player,
but one of the things I figured out really, really quickly,
that the best way to communicate with a filmmaker
was to play them, like, a fake version of the score,
a synthesised version of the score.
So basically what you have is you have
- all the different instruments - - horns and trumpets.
In those days, nobody did it like this
other than Hans, you know? Nobody demoed things.
Nobody, you know, mocked everything up
so you could hear it beforehand.
Hans was quite unique that way, and I liked that method.
I loved technology. I loved his way of doing it.
And that's why things changed in film music,
you know, when he came on the scene.
Part of it was the technique he was using,
to do it with these "demos."
Hans didn't just change the way composers use technology,
he developed a sound that influenced
a whole generation of movie composers and directors.
I'm fascinated by the idea of time.
The ticking happens a lot in my stuff.
Rather than going for a groovy rhythm,
it's ticking without accents.
It doesn't give the game away,
where the next part or the next cut is.
It just is like a river flowing.
And it sort of takes you on a journey.
In his score for the film "The Thin Red Line,"
he developed a technique of building
an incredible tension over very long scenes.
What it got was this incredible
sort of feeling of fate and dread.
It really was unique at the time.
There's not really anything that quite does that.
He's very influential.
It's part of the language of filmmaking now.
I completely ripped him off on that.
I've ripped him off on other times, and then other times...
I mean, there's probably a few little moments
where he's ripped me off back.
It was everything that music school tells you you can't do.
So there was the...
You're not supposed to do parallel things.
And they're all minors.
And it's asymmetrical.
You know, music school will teach you
you're not supposed to do things
in these sort of parallels.
They're not chords.
A chord needs three notes.
This is two notes, always.
And it just sort of meanders in this...
while this note always stays...
So, you get these really interesting clashes.
And it became a sort of...
a new language in film.
By the 2000s, Hans had established himself
as one of the top composers in Hollywood.
He was always looking for a new way of doing things.
Along with his business partner Steve Kofsky,
he built a studio complex in Santa Monica,
expanding it over several decades,
where teams of composers and sound technicians
work on movies, TV shows and documentaries.
- Hello, boys. - Hi.
What you guys working on at the moment?
Erm..."His Dark Materials," "Wheel of Time."
People here get the opportunity to rub shoulders
with the right kind of directors.
I mean, you know, guys actually sit in meetings.
You know, Hans brings...
Whoever's working on the project with Hans,
for example, will be in a meeting.
This was your big idea,
so I just want to make sure I don't destroy it.
The beauty of the old show was it was full...
He wasn't afraid to bring in his team into a meeting.
Don't break it.
There's always been ghost-writers in films,
but Hans opened up the door to all of his assistants...
...who were able to experience the meeting
and take that for their own careers moving forward.
At the centre of the complex lies Hans's studio,
an extension of his own personality.
I, as a European working in America,
I miss a Europe that doesn't actually exist any more.
And I myself had these doubts about staying here, you know?
And I wanted to go -- I wanted to go back to Europe.
And I thought, "Hang on. This is Hollywood.
You know, you can be and build whatever you want to do."
So I was very precise about my thinking about this room...
even though it just sort of looks like some crazed German
tossed it together...
because I knew I was going to spend
90%, probably, of my life in this room.
I thought I might as well have some fun with it
and do something which lets people
speak their mind, you know?
A room that is safe.
Hans works in a space that removes you from the world.
You've never been in a space like it.
It's always been fun to hang out there,
sometimes watch him suffer,
have a glass of wine while he suffers.
The environment inside his studio
is so alive with exploration
and discovery that it's a blast.
You know, the sort of samurai thing,
and it's really kind of, you know...
This room is like a Buddhist sort of...
Old Buddhist temple. And...what else?
The keyboard and whatnot, you know?
And you just sit on a nice couch and you just feel it,
you talk about it, you feel it, you talk about it,
you feel it, you talk about it. And he's on the keys.
He's on the keys, he's feeling it.
You know, he's almost, like, having the conversation
with the keys as you talk about it.
And then you find, "Hey, hey, hey, what's that?
What's that? What's that note?
Do that again. Is this written down?
Okay, it's being recorded.
Okay, it's being recorded. Okay."
He doesn't want to read a script.
So he...It's...
You know, it's like being psychoanalysed.
He wants to...
You know, he wants me to tell him the story.
Because we had talked about that...
Not only tell him the story but, like,
"Why must I tell the story?"
It's about getting the big picture.
It's about figuring out what moves somebody,
what doesn't move somebody.
It's about playfulness. Right.
That's why I don't take notes.
Why take notes?
You know, we'll just record it.
We'll just listen to it afterwards.
Okay, this part of our meeting...
There's nothing that stops playfulness
more than seeing somebody taking notes.
You know, suddenly it's a job.
And he asks all kinds of questions, you know?
And I think he's searching for an angle.
And then at some point, he'll be like, "That's it."
Womp, womp, womp. Instead of...
In the case of "Pirates," it was...
He was technically unavailable,
but I really think he just thought
it was a failed endeavour from the outset.
Just the genre, just a pirate movie,
was like, "What are you doing?" Like, "Pass!"
You know, but in a "nice" way.
Like, "I'm doing 'Mission: Impossible.'
I can't do your pirate movie." And so...
So when we were done editing,
I brought it to him and played it to him.
And I think he sort of shifted
and he started playing at that little...
They had fired the original composer.
That's very interesting.
And we had three weeks to finish the score.
So, Hans went home...
and started writing.
And he wrote all the themes overnight.
And then we talked, you know, at length about,
like, the drunken waltz.
Like, "Why is Jack like that with his sea legs?"
What is that? Sort of...
It's not just a waltz, it's a kind of slurred waltz.
Keep a sharp eye.
So, the character of Jack Sparrow is...
The notes go up, positive.
Sort of, you know, the innocence.
There's like an innocence, hope in there.
You know, it's like, "Oh, I can go and do anything, right?"
Now...
...this bit...
...is a bit naughty, right?
That's the wrong chord.
So, you go from naughty to, you know, he's doing something.
- It's still - - It's still benign,
but it's definitely the wrong chord.
Here we are.
We're back on the safety of the optimism, but...
the devil's fifth...
to a minor chord.
So, that's part of his character.
He is definitely naughty.
And then he does something unexpected.
He changes key right in the middle of the phrase,
but only for one second.
And it resolves in a sort of classical way,
which is really a lie
because he goes to something even naughtier,
etcetera, etcetera.
So each phrase is part of his...
I'm describing his character.
It kind of rolls like you're on the deck of a boat.
Boat and rum make for unsteady rhythms.
It's not clever. It's just fun.
I think Hans has an approach, which I wouldn't call unifying,
but I do recognise it over and over again.
It's this great ability to build a theme.
In the "Da Vinci Code," Hans refined the technique
he pioneered in "The Thin Red Line"
of using a small number of notes to create complex,
driving themes.
I mean, this is so simple.
The simpler these things are, the more I fear
I'm going to get found out.
I mean, look, I can't think of any artist who doesn't think,
"They're gonna catch me at it. They're gonna find out."
You get some very simple notes
that inspire other simple notes that go with it,
and you can go and play with these rounds.
It's not easy,
but it's incredibly powerful and stirring.
That's one of his patterns that you will see
and with different kinds
of themes, different sorts of tunes.
Some of them are just one or two notes.
Some are very melodic, like this one.
But getting that music, through repetition,
to sort of evolve into something
go from one place to another,
well, that's what every movie wants to be is a journey.
And, you know, his cues often convey that.
It's a journey. It takes you on a journey,
and you add experiences every time round.
I mean, you've heard it,
so now you need to add another layer of experience,
a layer of time, layer of something to it.
This technique of creating longer themes
that build and build found their ultimate expression
in the films of one of Hans's key collaborators.
I've never liked music that feels layered onto the movie,
like sauce going onto a piece of meat.
You know, to me, good film music really should be baked
into the DNA of what the actual film is
and woven into the fabric of the film itself.
And Hans was very on board with that process.
There's certain things which...
I know they're good ideas,
but I'm not good enough to do them yet,
so I use the next movie to actually go
and get a little bit better at them.
Hans's work with Nolan
would result in some of his most memorable scores,
involving war movies,
dream-stealers...
...and superheroes.
It's not who I am underneath...
but what I do...
that defines me.
What he was doing on "Batman Begins"
is he was distilling the essence of this great icon,
not into a complex melody, into an idea
of almost the sound effects approach of these bat flaps,
these kind of big whooshes of noise.
Literally two notes, but the recording process
that went into that -- the layering process,
the hundreds and hundreds of tracks of sound
that is supporting that,
musically and harmonically and all the rest,
and the different combinations that allowed from us --
is extraordinary.
At times, the music is very, very minimal,
but the production methodology is always extremely expansive
and full of design ideas and imagination.
I mean, that's nothing, right?
And then the theme is...
It's two notes, right?
That's it.
And only at the end does it break.
And it goes...
Still the same two notes.
And it becomes triumphant for one moment...
...before it recedes back into darkness.
You know, just for one moment, you can see...
You know, quite maniacal.
He's fascinated just by sound itself,
beyond the emotional qualities of music.
He has the best samples, for example,
of anyone in the world,
but he continually strives to improve them.
When it came to "The Joker Suite,"
I remember talking to him.
He was like, "I'm convinced that the Joker
should be a piece of music and started from one note."
I was like, "Oh, God, here we go!"
You know, but if anyone could do it, it would be --
That's more the thought of an inventor.
- Do you see what I mean? - Come on, come on!
I want you to do it. I want you to do it.
Come on, hit me. Come on, hit me!
There's something anarchic about the Joker.
Hit me!
By the time I'd bumped into him again, he was like,
"I think I have to concede. It has to be two notes."
So, he spent ages on this,
and it became the iconic, sort of distorted violin thing
that's just the two notes going...
I thought that Joker was
the most interesting character in that movie.
He was always in control of the situation
and was the only one who always spoke the truth.
And then this idea of these endless rises
that start in one pitch and just climb and climb
and climb and climb and climb.
Ay!
Come on!
This idea of just one note metamorphosising
in this absolute incredible...
and very quietly as well.
I wanted you to lean in a little bit to pick it out.
I wanted you to lean in to the darkness.
Could you please just give me a minute?!
That, to me,
is something no-one had really ever done.
You had people who wrote
extremely note-y symphonic music
and you had, like, rock guys
who just about crossed over enough
to be able to scramble together a film score,
but to have someone sort of right in the middle
who could sort of steal
the underlying structural techniques
of modern, popular music
and then understand enough of all the vocabulary
of all sorts of different kinds of,
and often symphonic, music and sort of put that together.
People don't even need to think about this
when they're watching a movie,
but it's one of the reasons that he's able to deliver
so much of the feeling you need and the storytelling
without being invasive and fussy and pompous.
The more I worked with Hans, the more I realised
the value of his creative contributions
to the conceptual underpinnings of what the films could be.
With prompting from Nolan,
Hans developed radical new ways of scoring a movie.
With "Interstellar,"
I actually got him to do his first demo
on the basis of a short letter that I wrote him,
explaining the feelings,
the sort of fable at the heart
of what the film was going to be
without even telling him the genre.
And I did that while I was writing the script.
I gave him one day to give me his first impression
of the emotions I was talking about.
And what he did for me in that one day
became the basis of the entire score.
Chris made me write this whole score away from picture.
It was a good experiment.
I was writing freely.
You know, I wasn't a slave to the edit, as it were.
He stopped writing pieces of music
that are integral to the structure of the film,
and he started just writing music
and not watching the picture.
So, he would create a 35-minute piece
that he would try against picture
and it would inform, then, the process.
By writing these big, long pieces of music,
it gives you more of a sense of what the picture is
and how the music can help it.
A couple months ago, I was rewatching the movie
with my friends and we're all sobbing.
And I realised that the way
that my friends were experiencing the movie
was completely different from how I was,
because I was able to hear how my father loves, you know,
because that movie is about a father and a daughter.
And to be able to hear how my father loves
and how he sees his children,
I think, is probably the greatest privilege of my life.
He worked really, really hard.
You'd catch him in the mornings, catch him at night.
But throughout the day,
every single day, he was working.
Yeah, I'm glad that he takes more breaks now,
not just for us to be able to spend time with him
but also for himself.
Because he hasn't been around in my life --
and the life of his children --
all too much, he's tried to really make up for it.
I think every parent comes with flaws,
but he's really tried to show us how he can love.
He doesn't always say it, but he shows us with his gestures.
He tells you with his eyes, "I understand.
I'm here.
I'm sorry I wasn't earlier, but I'm here now."
Having conquered the world of superheroes
and science-fiction epics,
Hans was on the lookout for new collaborators and new projects.
He sought one out.
It was a world away from Hollywood blockbusters.
I made a film called "Shame."
And there was a piece of music, there was a little temp music
we were using by Hans Zimmer.
It was close to him, but not exactly.
So we were just playing with it.
I thought it was great. I thought it was okay.
It's not that piece of music, obviously not.
But, yeah, it is obviously hugely inspired by it.
So I was in New Orleans, in a hotel room,
and I get this call early in the morning
and it's Hans Zimmer.
And I said, "Oh, shit,
this guy's gonna sue me or something.
What's going on?" I immediately thought...
He goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no!
But why didn't you ask me to work with you?"
I thought, "Well, I never thought I could, you know."
He was like, you know, "You should ask me.
I'm interested in working with filmmakers,
great filmmakers like yourself."
I said, "Okay, well, I'm working on this film
called '12 Years a Slave.'
Are you interested in working on it?"
He goes, "Yeah, of course!"
"Okay, but you're pretty expensive."
"Don't worry about that.
Listen, I would love to work with you."
And that was it.
That was the start of our relationship.
Hans is lavish with what he brings you.
You know, "12 Years a Slave" is the really good example,
that we were there with empty pockets
and he was getting people on planes
and first-class musicians to come over from Germany
and start working with us and developing...
You know, we wanted a kind of slightly home-made feel
about some of the score in "12 Years a Slave,"
particularly in that area
where he's trying to write using juice.
I loved working on it so much.
I thought it was important.
Nobody believed in it.
We had no budget.
It's very few of us, but I remember
Steve being in the room, and it's like...
The intimacy was vital.
It was a very low-budget film,
and it was really Hans's generosity
at bringing the right ingredient over
and getting him to work with us.
I'm a short-order cook.
You know, I go out, I find...
I go shopping.
Oh, good ingredients -- you know,
fresh tomatoes, special...
"Oh, look at those carrots!
They look really good," you know?
And then I spend forever peeling and chopping, etcetera.
And because the ingredients are fresh
and the ingredients are delicious,
I'm hoping it's gonna be okay.
He's like a kid that doesn't want to do his homework,
and it's like, "Come on, what the fuck?"
But at the same time, he's working.
He's... It's working, he's working.
Shit takes time. You know, anything takes time. You know?
This desire never to be pigeonholed
even led him to score Natural History films.
Hans brought all his feature-film experience
to these projects.
The iguana and the snake scene.
The best car chase nobody ever filmed.
I know every director is just immensely envious of it.
He's always changed. He changes and changes.
Yeah, he uses a sound for a while
as he kind of perfects it, and then there's this era
of that sound on films, and then he'll change again.
He gets bored with his own sound.
Hans's most recent work
not only earned him his second Oscar,
but it might be the most radical
reinvention of his sound ever.
His brief was to create what the director,
Denis Villeneuve, described as an alien score.
The idea for doing that, it should be a score
that will use unknown instruments...
that the sound would be something
that would come from another time,
from another place.
It was also very important that the score would have
some kind of spiritual quality.
It's one of the main theme of "Dune,"
is that exploration of religion
and the danger of mixing religion and politics together.
It was really important for me
to find a great female voice...
...and then frame her...
with all these instruments
which we built, which we synthesised,
which we drove people crazy that write software, you know.
"Can you build me a resonator that will turn Tina Guo's cello
into a Tibetan war horn?"
"What does a Tibetan war horn sound like?"
"I have no idea."
As much as he has designed all those alien instruments,
he decided that the instrument that will have survived
10,000 years in the future will be the bagpipes.
He started to compose with the bagpipes,
which was, like, very fresh, surprising and interesting.
And the Oscar goes to Hans Zimmer, "Dune."
I don't think anybody's ever won an Oscar for a score
that blatantly is bagpipes, heavy-metal guitars
and a woman screaming at you.
"What's going on here? Where are the strings?
Where are the nice things?"
It was just a provocative thing.
Hans began his musical career in a band
touring working men's clubs.
His life has turned full circle
as he takes his scores on the road.
But these days, the venues have changed.
His enthusiasm has increased.
I think it's going out on tour that's responsible for that.
He loves the people he works with.
He loves touring. It feeds him.
It nurtures him.
When he's on a stage, there's nobody who quite
has that relationship with the audience.
They come in to see a maestro and they end up seeing
somebody who feels like a friend by the end of the show.
I used to be so afraid of being on stage,
but nowadays, it was just like dinner party
with 12,000 people, just having a chat.
He's basically had a midlife crisis and become a rock star.
I'm still learning something.
I just want to use all those things I've learned.
And I want to go and play with all these synthesisers,
and I want to go and tell all these stories,
and I want to go and work with all these directors.
He is not the norm, and that's, like,
why he has the career that he does.
Like, he doesn't want to do things
the way other people have done it,
and he thrives on it.
You know, he loves it.
Things moved really fast.
Life isn't as long as you think it is.
You have a choice.
You can go and try to live a playful life,
or you can go and live a life which excludes playfulness.
And it doesn't get you anywhere.
Playfulness gets you somewhere.
It's fun, it's inspiring, just making a racket
and hopefully have a bit of a laugh.
It's wonderful.