Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Hans Zimmer is an Academy Award-winning film composer who is known for combining electronic and orchestral music on scores for Christopher Nolan's
The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012) and Disney's
Pirates Of The Caribbean (2006-2011) series, among other notable works. His innovative style grew out of a rather confused childhood where he was equally interested in music and technology thanks to his engineer/inventor father and pianist mother. The young composer came up with creative ways to experiment with new sounds, including, to his mother's horror, attaching a chainsaw to a piano.
Zimmer eventually realized that there wasn't much of a difference between composing music and building technology. "It's all about inventing and it's all about that playfulness, and that game and aesthetics," he
explained in a 2013 Mashable interview.
Zimmer's parents thought television was a bane to culture, so they didn't have one at home. As a result, Zimmer didn't discover his love of film scores until he snuck into the local movie theater to see the spaghetti western Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) at 12 years old. Ennio Morricone's score, which brought an anachronistic electric guitar to the Old West, fascinated Zimmer and set him on his own path to making music.
Zimmer won his first Academy Award for Best Original Score for his work in the 1994 Disney movie
The Lion King. He didn't even want to take the job at first, but when he realized he could bring his 6-year-old daughter, Zoe, to the premiere for once, he changed his mind.
"I thought, 'I can't take her to a Ridley Scott bloodbath,' so I thought a cartoon would be a good thing," he
told Classic FM in 2022.
Zimmer wanted to go to South Africa to record the choirs for The Lion King score but couldn't go for his own safety. He had earned a reputation for making subversive movies after visiting the country to work on The Power Of One, a historical film set during the rise of apartheid, in 1992. Disney execs feared the composer would be killed if he returned to South Africa, so his partner Lebo M, a South African film composer, was sent in his stead.
Zimmer started his music career in the UK, playing synthesizers and keyboards with various bands. One of them was the new wave act the Buggles, whose synth-pop hit "
Video Killed The Radio Star" became the first music video to air on MTV in the US in 1981. Zimmer can be spotted in the music video, but by the time it aired he had already moved on to film work, partnering with renowned composer Stanley Myers. Together, they founded the Lillie Yard studio in London and collaborated on scores for
Moonlighting (1982) and
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
Before he started making big bucks, Zimmer took on smaller projects to help pay the rent. One of them was writing the theme song "
Going For Gold" for the BBC TV game show of the same name in 1987.
Zimmer landed his big break in Hollywood with his score for director Barry Levinson's 1988 movie Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Levinson's wife suggested Zimmer for the gig after hearing his composition for the drama A World Apart on a soundtrack album earlier that year. His score for Rain Man garnered an Oscar nomination, which ultimately went to Dave Grusin for The Milagro Beanfield War.
Zimmer's most ubiquitous work is "Journey To The Line," an emotional piece he created for Terrence Malick's 1998 war film The Thin Red Line. Beginning with the quiet intensity of a ticking clock, it slowly incorporates the swell of strings and other instrumentation on its way to a dramatic climax. Hollywood took notice of the piece's universality and started using it everywhere, including as a placeholder for where an emotional theme is called for in a script. It became known as "the forbidden cue" among frustrated composers who were expected to imitate it.
Zimmer says his strangest project was the score for the 1993 Tony Scott film True Romance. After initially being promised a huge budget, Zimmer was only left with enough money to hire nine musicians, so he got creative and rounded up the most incongruous group of players he could find to give the score a diverse feel.
Zimmer's score for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), which he co-composed with James Newton Howard, was initially disqualified from being nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score because it had too many composers attached to it (Zimmer and Howard had extended credits to a sound designer, a music editor and an arranger who were integral to the project). Zimmer successfully fought for the decision to be reversed, arguing the collaborative nature of modern production and the importance of crediting those involved. While the film still didn't garner a nomination, it was no longer barred from consideration. Zimmer and Howard did, however, win the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for The Dark Knight in 2009.
Zimmer uses music to inspire people's emotions, not manipulate them. "I try to never tell you what to feel," he explained in
a 2018 CBC Radio interview. "I just try to use the music in a funny way to open a door for you to come and have the possibility of having an emotional experience."
Zimmer's notes on Ridley Scott's Gladiator set a different expectation for the 2000 film, which initially launched straight into a battle scene until Zimmer suggested something more poetic. He composed an ethereal piece of music with vocals by Lisa Gerrard that plays over a dreamlike sequence of a hand grazing over a field of wheat. "I did something at the beginning that says to you, 'It's not just a gladiator movie. This is something special.' So, the opening music set a tone," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2009.
Zimmer won a 2000 Golden Globe for Best Original Score for his work on the movie.
Aside from The Lion King, Zimmer also won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for the 2021 movie Dune. Despite all of the major films he's worked on and his long list of accolades, Zimmer says his proudest achievement is composing the music for the BBC nature documentaries Planet Earth II (2016) and Blue Earth II (2017), presented by Sir David Attenborough. He told BBC Radio in 2022: "It's the only thing that actually means something to this world and ultimately might have an impact on how we approach this world."
