Hans Zimmer has just wrapped his world tour, “Hans Zimmer Live,” and the hallways of his Santa Monica studios are stacked with instrument boxes.
His studio space is large and welcoming, oozing with creativity. The composer and musician is currently at work on an undisclosed project. We’re set to talk for 20 minutes, but Zimmer welcomes the distraction. “The more you are here and we’re chatting, the less I have to go and do any work,” he teases. We end up chatting for an hour.
Aside from the tour, Zimmer has reunited with his go-to collaborators Denis Villeneuve for “Dune: Part Two” and Steve McQueen from “Blitz” to score their current projects. The former is currently the topic of discussion and whether it qualifies for the Oscar — and while he thinks it’s unlikely he’ll win a second Oscar for it, he’s not happy about the ruling. The latter has a deep personal connection as his mother sought shelter in the U.K. as a German Jewish refugee.
Zimmer also talks about life on the road, and why that’s when he’s at his happiest. He also reveals his remarkable connection to “Widows” and why scoring that was a full-circle moment for him.
That ‘Blitz’ score is something. It’s really unsettling. What was your approach to it?
It’s not an easy score on the audience, which was very much on purpose. After seeing the film, I said, “I want to write something dissonant. I want an adult to feel the same confusion and terror that a child would feel.”
There are cues throughout it where you create that terror for George, who is trying to find his way back to London to return home. What was the instrument you used to achieve that?
That’s mostly my band; Molly Rogers and Tina Guo, who I know really well. If you say to a violinist or cellist, who spends their lives making beautiful sounds — now I tell them to make “horrific sounds.” So, it was people who I know very well and a lot of chaos where textures change in the middle of a shot. It was about creating contradictions like when the kids are on top of the train, the music is jolly.
And what happens next is so deceiving.
Exactly.
What was it about ‘Blitz’ that spoke to you?
It started as a very personal journey because Steve and I know each other well. We’ve talked about our history, who we are, and where we come from. He knew my mother was a German Jewish refugee during the war in England and lived through the Blitz, and he told me the stories of what it was like to live through it. The main direction Steve gave me before going to see the movie, he said, “You’ll understand your mom better after you’ve seen it.” He was right because the stories that had been just stories, I suddenly felt them. He made me feel the helplessness and sheer terror she must have felt as a young woman. She was still an enemy alien in England. So she was stateless wherever she went. It wasn’t that different from George. Where do you turn? Who’s going to show you kindness?
What I love about working with Steve is that you are working with a true artist and a true visionary. His wife is an eminent historian, so he knows what he’s talking about and has a way of checking on the history. So, it felt right to write something unpleasant and truthful, and not get swallowed up. There’s a tendency to go and do something sentimental, and I think I managed to avoid that at all costs.
Steve is a visionary. I saw him recently at a film festival and we spoke about this score, and I also told him “Justice for ‘Widows.’” That score still holds up, you know?
“Widows” comes from a television series. It was a British show. I was a runner and making tea on that. That’s so crazy. So it was like completing a circle.
Let’s talk ‘Dune: Part Two’ and scoring this world. Returning to Arrakis, how did you approach it?
Listen, I am potentially confronted with an odd problem, which I think is quite interesting because of the amount of music that comes from the first movie into the second. We are not a normal sequel. We’re not like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” you have a theme for Jack Sparrow that comes again. This is different. “Dune: Part One” and “Dune: Part Two” are one story, so it would make no sense for me to go and change the theme for the characters. I knew what the last note of the second one was before I wrote the first note of the first one, and I had the whole arc in my head of how to develop what we were going to do.
There was the story that I was ineligible. What you’re saying you shouldn’t be allowed to use this form of storytelling. “The Lord of the Rings” used this form of storytelling as well. They had one book and one story which they needed because of its sheer size and weightiness, they needed to divide into three parts. We are dividing it into three parts, but we had to split the first book.
Here’s the thing, I’m not going to win an Oscar for the second one if I won an Oscar for the first one, which I did, right? That’s not the point. My point is be careful about these rules because what you’re doing is in the back of the studio’s mind, the Oscars are important, and you’re influencing the way you are saying whether we can create art or not. You’re saying you can’t do that because we won’t allow art to be nominated. We should have the freedom to find ways to create whatever comes to us. Denis made the right choice by splitting a heavy-duty book into two parts.
Before I went on tour, everybody was saying to me, “Oh, the audience’s attention span is terrible these days, and you have to make things short.” Well, that’s not true. The “Pirates” piece is 14 minutes. I think “The Dark Knight” piece is 22 minutes and the audience is with us. And when Denis wants to go and do “Dune” in two long parts, the audience will stay with us. But part of that is you have to go and be able to develop your themes. You have to think of your themes and how you develop them over five hours. So, don’t tell me that makes me ineligible. It really isn’t about me, it’s about the movie.
If you listen to the scores or watch the films, you do hear the evolution of, say, Paul’s arc, right?
There’s a radical development in this character. It’s a tough one for everyone to pull off for Denis and even Timothee because where we are ending up is with a very unlikeable hero. And the audience needs to feel a satisfying experience, that we’re not letting them down. I think that has quite a lot to do with the job of music. It’s not telling you what to feel, but it’s telling you that you can feel, I’m opening doors to have an experience.
I recall speaking about the music of ‘Dune: Part Two’ a while ago, and you said you teased Paul and Chani’s theme in your concerts before people even knew what it was. What was it like performing that after the film had been released?
That might actually be part of the thing that I’m questioning. The way I start the show, I start with the theme and four minutes of Loire Cotler who is the voice of “Dune” singing by herself in front of the audience. There’s a big screen down behind her, so it’s just one person on the stage. After the intermission, Pedro Eustache starts playing exactly the same theme, but this time it’s orchestrated. So, I do the same piece twice, but nobody recognizes that it’s the same piece. Or if they do, they have a different emotional response to it. So within those few notes, there’s a there’s a huge emotional journey.
Are you happier on the road or in a studio?
I think I’m happiest surrounded by musicians and being able to be a musician is so difficult these days. It’s so hard to earn a living, it’s so hard to survive, it’s so hard to be heard. So I feel really happy if I can go out there on the road and have people play their hearts out, and [hear] the response from the audience. And everybody for those three hours are having a good time.
There’s a story to your orchestra and why their performances each night were special, can you share it?
The story of my orchestra is quite simply this. We have played with this orchestra from Odesa, Ukraine, before, and we really liked them, so we booked them again. But COVID hit, so we couldn’t do anything. When we were ready, we called them and said, “Pack your violins.” But the war started, and we managed to get not everybody out. One of the violinist’s cars had broken down trying to get across the border, and just by sheer accident, one of the other orchestra members saw him and gave him a lift. So now we have this orchestra that for three hours every night can’t answer the phone. They don’t know if their homes are being bombed. One night someone couldn’t find their mother, but then the next day, someone found her. These are constant real-life things going on.
Once the tour finished, they couldn’t go back, but we were really lucky with the German government really stepping up big time and giving everybody a home. I can go on about the stories of these people that I am surrounded by, who all have extraordinary life stories that they express in a most beautiful way through their playing, the substance behind each note, and how each note comes with blood, sweat, tears and great commitment. So that’s what makes me happy, the intensity of working with people. They’re walking out with big smiles on their faces.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
