A prolific composer who managed a slave, a steel man, a rush and the only one in 2013 only, Hans Zimmer has an enviable number of classics on his curriculum vitae, and the 56 -year -old is happy to share with you the strengths … and tell the juicy stories behind the scenes.
The fine red line
A year before Terrence Malick filmed this masterpiece of the Second World War, he created a pre-production series in the Zimmer’s own office. “Before leaving, I really wrote to him a complete score, but I don’t think it was left when I finished with the film. I do that with Chris [Nolan] Also, but with Chris, “he laughs,” he generally survives. “”
Malick is known to have rejected his films in the editing room, and he was not different: as the director cut the slim red line from what Zimmer says he is an initial version of six and a half hours, he practically eliminated some of the film’s stars, including the initial protagonist Adrien Brody. “There was even a time when Terry put him in his head that I should try to [edit] One of the scenes with this other young publisher because we would have a different perspective on this subject. I remember working on this thing for two weeks, combing all the daily newspapers and offering something really average, then the publisher, Billy Weber, took a look and returned an hour later after having transformed this shit into something really magical. I realized: “Oh, I’m not going to give myself here! I’m going to start making music now. ‘”
Creation
So how can you feel zimmer when he sees a new advertisement that monitors his bold creation score? “Oh, it’s horrible!” He groaned. “This is a perfect example of the place where everything is bad. This music has become the plan for all action movies, really. And if you get too many imitations, even I am confused!” He even witnessed the first-hand phenomenon: “As we arrived at The Dark Knight Rises, the studio sent a trailer with this temporary track, and they apologized for it. They said:” We put the creation music in there because we did not know what to do with it, so you might perhaps find something else? “So we found a trailer that was only a few solitary notes – it couldn’t be more opposite.”
Where do all these BRAMMS come from? “I remember before making the film,” explains Zimmer, “Chris and I were in London during the first Sherlock Holmes, and of course, it ends up both in the corner of the party speaking of the film that we are about to do while everyone is around us at first. Sound is really that I put a piano in the middle of a church and I put a book on the pedal, in the resonance of the piano.
Caribbean pirates
Ironically, Zimmer was not supposed to work on the pirates of the Caribbean franchise, although he ends up marking the four films. “Pirates is a bit delicate because the first film was this kind of bastard child,” said Zimmer. “Alan Silvestri had originally scored, but I never heard it – people refused to play it for me.”
Director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer courted Zimmer to replace Silvestri, but it was not an easy sale: for one, Zimmer was already in the middle of another composition work, and more importantly, the Pirates of the Caribbean had to go out in five weeks. Instead, Zimmer recommended a colleague for the concert, but “the first meeting they all had, it didn’t go so well,” said Zimmer. “I entered and I saw panic on Gore’s eyes. I don’t think he had to say anything to me – I said:” Okay, okay, I’m going to go home and I will see if I can find something. “” Ask to zimmer what he feels about the result, and the composer is nothing, if it does not seem to be a little sincere! “He laughs.
Fortunately, the first episode of the pirates was a giant of the box office, which gave Zimmer a second (then a third and a fourth) chance of refining what he had found. “For the second film, I wrote a very long and very precise theme of Jack Sparrow,” he said. “But the second pirate film was really the first continuation on which I went to work on, and I thought it would be easy. It was really not! I thought I would reclaim the whole first film, and it was not at all like that.
The Lion King
Another successful that Zimmer reluctantly came was the king of the lion, who earned him an Oscar. “At first, I didn’t want to do Lion King, because I don’t really like Broadway musicals,” he said. “I thought that was what Disney wanted me, but they kept saying:” No, no, no, we really like that you don’t like Broadway musicals. We want it to be different. “” Ironically, the Lion King has really become a Broadway musical three years after the film’s bow, and this stage production is now the highest Broadway show of all the time.
So what do you remember zimmer this night at the Oscars? “First of all, I was convinced that I was not going to win it,” he said. “I thought it would go to Forrest Gump. So when they called my name, I sat there, I didn’t hear it. And then my wife was going,” get up “. And then I went up to this stage and I am given this golden thing, looking at people, and I just remember all the teeth, everyone smiling and applauding. Coming and said: “There are ruins.”
The Oscars, he says, “are incredibly attractive. You see people that you admire and who, in your opinion, have incredible artistic integrity to be ridiculed on this scene. I have included.”
12 years of slave
Zimmer is likely to be back in the price race this year for his work on 12 years of slave. He is such a fan of director Steve McQueen that he didn’t need much to court to come on board. “We had a mysterious conversation a few years ago when he told me that he was working on something and asked me if I was even interested in working with him,” said Zimmer. “And I love it, so of course, I was much more than interested at a distance!”
A large part of the film is noted with the same theme of four notes, which Zimmer adapts in a fluid way, according to the mood of the scene. “Music can really make you cry. I don’t want to say that it is like a horrible and manipulative thing, but music can go to some parts of your psyche that other things can not happen … I try to do something that resonates very quickly and takes you on a trip. If you are courageous enough to watch [12 Years a Slave] Twice, in a way, your emotional dominoes are already starting to fall when you hear these first notes. “”
The black knight goes up
“I receive a lot of shit from people who say:” All his scores look like creation “, or” all his scores look like Batman “”, laughs Zimmer. “Well, I’m sorry, guys! I didn’t know when we started Batman that it was going to turn into nine years to have to stay in this syntax and this style. In each film, we added something new, but the rest really started me.”
Regarding the Dark Knight Rises, the culmination of these nine years of work, Zimmer had a brand new brainstoral: to announce the ugly scourge, he wanted a massive song which would be animated by 100,000 different votes. Logistically, however, this kind of track would not be easy to install, and if Zimmer even used a lean 100 people on his song, the chances were high that one of them could flee something from super-secret production. “At the same time, it was important for Chris that the character of Bane was not revealed for the first time by someone who took a questionable photo with his iPhone on the set,” said Zimmer. They therefore proposed a neat tip: Nolan and Zimmer launched a website starring the song and incorporated it lots of secret messages which, when executed through a spectrograph and typed on Twitter, would reveal the first official image of Bane Pixel by Pixel.
“Now that the song was there in the world, I said,” I want my 100,000 people, “recalls Zimmer.” So I thought, why I don’t break the fourth wall and did not reach out to fans? So we did this thing on the internet where they could put their headphones and make the song at home to their computer and send it. And I literally fuel 100,000 tracks of all our fans making the song … I did not know that we were going to spend nine years to make Batman, so it was important to me that the last was inclusive, that the doors were open. The people who had loved him and supported us could be part of it. “”
Steel man
Zimmer has been working on his job for decades, but it was only when he undertook comic book projects like The Dark Knight and Man of Steel that he noticed that he had attracted an unusual fans base. “You are going to Amazon.com and you see what people write on the soundtrack, and you actually have this rather intimate conversation without ever knowing this person, simply seeing how they react to your music,” he said.
What is delicate with comic book movies like Man of Steel, says Zimmer, is that if an audience may think that he wants an ultra -failed adaptation, the filmmaker’s responsibility is to take risks – and sometimes these chances do not go well with angry fanboys. “I have a lot,” admits Zimmer. “Look at the poor Ben Affleck! And honestly, there were really unpleasant things when Chris threw Heath Ledger as a joker in The Dark Knight, because everyone said that only Jack Nicholson could do it. But here is the truth about what my work is: our work as a filmmakers is never to ask an audience:” What do you want to see? “Because they say:” I don’t know … Indiana Jones 5 or Star Wars 27? Because it’s not their work to find an original way of thinking about it, or a new subject.
– Vulture
