This programme contains some strong language
Ladies and gentlemen, Hans Zimmer! APPLAUSE
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.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: 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 as successful a musician for all that time.
I've been doing this for, what, 40 years?
Somebody the other day said, "When are you going to slow down?"
"What do you mean "slow down"? I'm just getting going!
"I'm just getting started."
CHEERING
Hans is experimenting with some ideas for the soundtrack of a new
BBC natural history documentary.
MUSIC PLAYS ON COMPUTER
Just trying to get you 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.
LAUGHS: 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. HE CHUCKLES
ATTENBOROUGH: This is a stronghold for one of Antarctica's
most remarkable inhabitants.
ANIMAL YAWNS
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 sixth 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 six-year-old, seven-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 defocused.
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.
In desperation, his mother moved to England,
looking for a more progressive education for him.
She approached a new school - Hurtwood House.
He'd had a very chequered experience with all his previous schools.
CHUCKLES: His mother writes, saying, "You may have noticed that Hans
"has a strong urge for freedom and that he is very impetuous.
"That is a reason why he has come to blows with his educators
"in the past who expected him to conform."
There was that moment after the first term,
where I'm sitting outside the headmaster's office
and she's having the mother/headmaster conversation.
And she comes out and she's crying,
and I'm thinking, "Oh, OK. Here we go again. Next school."
And she walks towards me and she's crying
and she goes, "I don't believe it. He likes you!"
I like to think of Hans as the genius
that the traditional educational system failed to crush.
And if we played a small part in that,
then I'm very proud to have done so.
After leaving school,
Hans immediately 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?
MUSIC FROM: The Dark Knight by Hans Zimmer
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,
Hans started writing jingles and TV theme tunes,
the first steps on his road to film composing.
# Going for gold! #
# Video killed the radio star... #
He even found time to make a fleeting guest appearance
in the promo for hit song Video Killed The Radio Star
by Buggles.
# Oh Oh, oh... #
EXPLOSION
It was in this unassuming yard in West London
that Hans really began to hone his writing 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... INDISTINCT
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. HE LAUGHS
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."
MUSIC FROM: Rain Man by Hans Zimmer
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,
"All right, 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?"
Hans had to relocate to Los Angeles to work on the film.
In terms of the way composers worked in Hollywood,
Hans found it all a bit old-fashioned.
I expected Hollywood to be technologically so advanced.
And I got there and it was like we were in the stone ages.
You know, I brought all this kit and caboodle and electronics
and stuff with me, and I said, "Where do I plug in?"
And they said, "What do you mean, plug in?"
You know, "We still write on paper."
"Oh, OK. That's interesting."
And, I mean, I did Rain Man in Barry Levinson's office...
LAUGHS: ..because I didn't know anybody.
He was literally in the next room working on stuff, and I'd wander in,
and I hear some music and sometimes it begins to feed one another.
So, sometimes, he came up with a piece of music for some section,
and I said, "Gee, I wonder if I could play it over here."
It was sort of non-traditional, in a way, to do it,
but it seemed exciting that way.
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?"
MUSIC FROM: Driving Miss Daisy by Hans Zimmer
The following year, he composed the music for yet another
Oscar-winning film...
..Driving Miss Daisy.
And then in 1994...
MUSIC: Circle of Life
The first notes that you hear, you're in and it's magic.
And the vocal that you hear with it...
..poetry. Musical poetry.
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 going to 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 going to go and reanimate the whole opening.
"We're going to take all that dialogue out and da-da-da-da."
It was an experiment, and what's in the movie is my original demo.
The African sounds,
the unique instruments...
..it's beyond profound.
# The circle of life... #
And the Oscar goes to Hans Zimmer for The Lion King!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
So full of life and wonder and beauty.
I wrote a speech, but I realised, "It's so boring,"
so I'm not going to 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! LAUGHTER
I'm incredibly nervous.
I tell you what - writing a score is much easier than this.
Thank you. Just let me go, OK?
APPLAUSE
I've listened to how many songs of how many scores, and on...
EMPHATIC DRUMBEAT
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 film-maker 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, trumpets.
HE PLAYS TRUMPET PART ON SYNTH
Just seeing how Hans was able to manipulate sounds to picture...
Violins...
..whether it would be a bagpipe or a flute or a guitar,
he kept playing this from the keyboard.
It just fired my imagination.
And I think a lot of us have just followed that lead.
But I do recall him saying to me, you know,
"The way you're going to...get a career here, Harry,
"is your demos are going to sound better than anybody else's."
What else have we got? Lots of percussion.
PERCUSSIVE SOUNDS PLAY
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 film-making 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...
HE PLAYS KEYBOARD
So, you get these really interesting clashes.
And it became a sort of... A new language in film.
MUSIC FROM: The Thin Red Line by Hans Zimmer
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.
In these control rooms, this is where we've mixed
some of the biggest movies you've heard.
I mean, all the major motion pictures that Hans has worked on
have been mixed here.
Hello, boys. Hi.
What are you guys working on at the moment?
Erm... His Dark Materials, Wheel Of Time.
We did all the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
Yeah, we've done Spider-Man.
We've done all the major tent pole movies, as well as, obviously,
some independent pictures like 12 Years A Slave
and things like that.
Hello, Steven.
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...
INDISTINCT CONVERSATION
..who were able to experience the meeting
and take that for their own careers moving forward.
I should know these terms by now, but I'll never learn!
Hans wanted his place to be a magnet for young composing talent...
Let's start with a slow one first. OK.
..a talent he was keen to promote.
We're going to explore a few options,
but I just want you to do your thing. OK.
I'm ready!
There's lots of things about being a composer,
but being in groups is not one of them.
I mean, they are a very solitary lot.
We sit alone and just ponder our navels an awful lot and work,
so being in a group of composers was very interesting.
This is where those people said they don't have enough to do
and they can... They can spend hours eating and... Go and work!
The number of people that were spawned by his career is amazing.
I wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for Hans. It's obvious.
Are you wearing white socks yet? No. Just checking!
I think from his own experience,
of him having worked up from being assistants
and making coffee and things like that,
I think he knows how important it is to sort of make sure
that everyone feels included.
That's Alan. He's from Brooklyn. I don't hold that against him.
Go, Giants!
You know, Hollywood is a hard place and nobody gives you a chance.
And I was given a chance by Barry Levinson all these years ago.
You know, he could have had any composer he wanted for Rain Man
and, you know, he gave the job to me.
And somehow I'm trying to keep that idea going
and have other people come in here
and see if we can't give them a chance.
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? OK, it's being recorded.
"OK, it's being recorded. OK."
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.
OK, this part of our meeting...
There's nothing that stops playfulness more than
seeing somebody taking notes.
You know, suddenly it's the 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... HE HUMS RHYTHM
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... HE HUMS TUNE
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.
HANS PLAYS KEYBOARD
So, the character of Jack Sparrow is...
HE PLAYS MOTIF
The notes go up positive.
Sort of, you know, the innocence.
There's like an innocence, hope, and...
You know, it's like, "Oh, I can go and do anything, right?"
Now... HE PLAYS NEXT PASSAGE
..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.
HE PLAYS NEXT PASSAGE
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.
HE PLAYS CHORD
And it resolves in a sort of classical way,
which is really a lie...
..because he goes to something even naughtier, etc, etc.
So each phrase is part of his... I'm describing his character.
MUSIC FROM: Pirates Of The Caribbean by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer
HE HUMS MELODY
It kind of rolls like you're on the deck of a boat.
Boat and rum make for unsteady rhythms.
Arriving on a sinking dinghy,
that's the fanfare that he travels with -
"I bring with me my own soundtrack."
He's still the greatest pirate of the seven seas.
That allows the music to be quite big...
..because it's consistent with that character.
It's what he's hearing.
APPLAUSE
And it was just fun to do.
It's not clever. It's just fun.
Yes!
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 going to catch me at it. They're going to 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.
MUSIC FROM: The Da Vinci Code by Hans Zimmer
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.
HE PLAYS EXCERPT
I mean, that's nothing, right? And then the theme is...
HE PLAYS THEME
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...
but before it recedes back into darkness.
You know, just for one moment, you can see...
You know, quite... INDISTINCT
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.
Come on, hit me. Come on, hit me!
There's something anarchic about the Joker.
Hit me!
By the time I'd bumped into me 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... HE HUMS
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.
ELECTRICAL JOLT, JOKER LAUGHS
JOKER LAUGHS, FLUTTERS LIPS
Come on!
This idea of just a 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 into 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, called 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 OK.
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 going to sue me or something.
"What's going on?" I 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 film-makers, great film-makers like yourself."
I said, "OK, well, I'm working this film called 12 Years A Slave."
"Are you interested in working on it?" He goes, "Yeah, of course!" "OK, 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, etc.
And because the ingredients are fresh
and the ingredients are delicious, I'm hoping it's going to be OK.
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.
But he discovered there were crucial differences.
If you take something like a Chris Nolan's Batman,
there's an enormous amount of sound design music.
It's like literally creating worlds from scratch...
..which, of course, you don't want to do in a natural history.
What you want to do is you want to leave room for the natural sound.
So, yes, there is a difference. You try to work around it.
There's a danger of making animals cute...
..Disney-fying them.
And since I know the other side of the coin,
you know, I know what not to do.
On the other hand, the iguana and the snake scene.
I keep referring to that scene
because I know every director is just immensely envious of it.
The best car chase nobody ever filmed.
And that, of course, was scored like an action scene.
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.
MUSIC FROM: Dune by Hans Zimmer
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 - like, that exploration of religion
and the danger of mixing religion and politics together.
The male characters are not really the male characters
that drives the story forward.
It's the female characters that drive the story forward...
..so 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."
Quite late in the day, he recorded some sort of scratchy noise
that was redolent of sand and dry wind.
I don't know what it was. I think it was a sound effect.
And he remixed everything to include it!
I think it drove everybody nuts on that show.
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.
CHEERING
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.
SCREAMING
"What's going on here?
"Where are the strings? Where are the nice things?"
It was just a provocative thing.
APPLAUSE
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.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
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.