Tuesday 17th July 2012
HANS Zimmer will be invited to write the music for Virgulle’s Vestral. He obviously sees eye-to-eye with Ridley Scott – or Christopher Nolan – and has a proven track record: knows the score, so to speak.
Man after my own heart, Hans is. Listen:
“I wake up around noon, light a cigarette, get a cup of coffee, sit in the bathtub for an hour and daydream.”
“You have to remain flexible, and you must be your own critic at all times.”
“I don’t drive.”
“If something happened where I couldn’t write music anymore, it would kill me. It’s not just a job. It’s not just a hobby. It’s why I get up in the morning.”
Those delving into his past will be amused to know he played keyboards on the video version of The Buggles’ debut hit single, Video Killed the Radio Star, which, incidentally, was the first ever track broadcast on MTV: foresight indeed.
Surprisingly, he has won only one Oscar – for The Lion King, on which he worked for four years.
The Academy disqualified his nominations for the previous Batman scores on the grounds that there were too many composers’ names on the credits. These were both collaborations with James Newton Howard (Water for Elephants, The Hunger Games).
“I had this idea that it should be possible to create some kind of community… not having ‘you are the composer, you are the arranger, you are the orchestrator’… just sort of helped us.”
It was listening over and over to You’re So Cool – the opening sequence in True Romance – that awoke my interest in Zimmer. I didn’t realise how often I’d heard his work before: from A World Apart to Rain Man, from Driving Miss Daisy to Pearl Harbor.
He was talking of taking a few years break after The Dark Knight, claiming exhaustion. During the subsequent four years, however, his output has included two more Madagascar’s, two more Pirates of the Caribbean and two Sherlock Holmes films.
It has also recently been confirmed that he will be the composer on the forthcoming Man of Steel.
What beautiful music. What a remarkable man.
What a remarkable and accomplished man, however self-contradictory he is. Compare: “Writing music is… why I get up in the morning” with “I wake up around noon”.