Hans Zimmer is one of the most renowned music composers in Hollywood with several of his scores used in blockbuster films. He usually works with popular filmmakers, but most notably with Christopher Nolan.
They have been collaborating since The Dark Knight trilogy, with the famed musician also lending his talent to Nolan’s other films such as Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk.
Hans Zimmer Shares Honest Thoughts About His Music Being Used In Crap Movies
During an interview on The Jonathan Ross Show, veteran composer Hans Zimmer talked about making music for crap films.
When you get a crap movie, it frees you. It lets you write the most wonderful things because you’re the only good thing happening.
He has worked with several movies from live-actions to animated ones, and he has a great portfolio under his belt. It’s not his fault, though, that some of these projects failed to perform well at the box office. However, it’s a different experience when he’s collaborating with Christopher Nolan.
In a conversation with ReelBlend podcast, Zimmer revealed how he helped the director create the critically acclaimed 2014 film Interstellar.
It goes back to Chris Nolan and Interstellar. Chris asked me to write this piece of music before he’d even written the script. So I play it to him without looking at him.
Once he finished playing, he asked Nolan what he thought about it. He responded with, “Hmm, suppose I better make the movie.” Zimmer admitted he didn’t know Nolan was brewing something in his mind.
Zimmer’s talent was able to motivate the filmmaker to get the project off the ground. It was originally an existing plan from the mid-2000s, and even the legendary director Steven Spielberg was once attached to helm it. Only when Nolan heard the composer’s sample did he find the inspiration to work on it.
There is so much pressure to make beautiful musical compositions for movies with high anticipation, but if one is working on scores for crap movies like Zimmer said, he can be pretty chill about it.
Hans Zimmer Reflects On His Musical Career
In a discussion via Curzon, Hans Zimmer opened up about his early days making music for films, and he noticed that many other musicians were taking inspiration from him.
I thought I found a real language, and that Hans Zimmer’s language for an action movie is different from other people’s. And by the end of the year, every action movie was sounding like my movie!
Zimmer quipped, “I had to change style because everybody else was doing it.” Indeed, everyone wants to be as good as him. There’s no wonder why he is attached to a lot of modern movie franchises.
Interestingly, the composer also remarked in the same interview that he comes “from the Christopher Nolan School of making movies, where we shift time forwards and backwards.” What Zimmer points out here is that he can write music themes even before the movies are made.
