July 18, 2023 • 51 mins
Our staff picks continue at “Here’s The Thing,” where throughout the summer, members of our team select their favorite interviews from the archives. This week, we revisit Alec’s 2021 interview with Hans Zimmer, one of the most celebrated and successful film composers of all time. The German-born Zimmer has scored more than 150 movies including “Gladiator,” “Hannibal,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Last Samurai,” and “The Thin Red Line,” earning him two Academy Awards (“Dune” and “The Lion King”) and four Grammys. His collaboration with director Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight” trilogy, “Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” and “Inception,”) has become one of the most celebrated partnerships in movie history. Zimmer shares with Alec how he knew music was his path, how his partnership with Nolan began, and how his scores seek to enrich a film’s emotional journey.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from My Heart Radio. It's officially summer, and
that means it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing,
where our staff shares their favorite episodes in our Summer
Staff series. Next up is our producer, Zach McNeice.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Thanks Alec. Whether you're a casual movie fan or a
true cinema junkie like me, the name Hans Zimmer is
no doubt synonymous with some of the most loved and
awarded films of the past thirty years. He's an artist
whose work speaks for itself. So without further ado, here's
Alex's conversation with Hans Zimmer.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
The score of a movie has a way of enriching
a film's emotional journey, from the profound to the playful.
It is often an unconscious part of why the feeling
of a movie stays with us long after we leave
the theater. My guest today is one of the all
time masters of film composition, Hans Zimmer. He scored more
(01:38):
than one hundred and fifty movies, including Gladiator, Hannibal, Sherlock Holmes,
The Last Samurai, The Thin Red Line, and many many more.
Hans Zimmer's work has earned him an Academy Award for
The Lion King, two Golden Globes, and countless more nominations.
(01:58):
In two thousand and five, hans Zimmer began working with
director Christopher Nolan. It's become one of the most celebrated
partnerships in movie history. For Nolan, Zimmer has scored the
Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Inception, which features this
song time. Hans Zimmer's work spans an eclectic range of
(02:23):
feature films, television, and documentaries. I wanted to know whether
his scoring process is different when he works on animated films.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
All directors are different from each other. But I once
was invited to a dinner party and at the end
of the table sat Terrence Malick and Vana Hatsuk. You know,
everybody's talking at the long table, and then suddenly everybody
stops talking, and it's just the two great artists chatting,
and they're arguing about which Q and Lion King is better.
(02:55):
You know, these two admirable auteurs are arguing about Lion King,
you know, about a kid's movie. So the weird thing is,
you know, I can talk to Tarry Mallik about animation,
and I can talk to Tom mcgrass, our director on
Boss Baby about Thin Red Line, you know, and in
(03:16):
one way or the other, it's sort of the same thing.
Other than that, you can get away with a lot
more animation. I find, you know, you and I in
a peculiar way, we give life to something that doesn't
have life. I mean, it's, you know, the whole point
about animation, especially now with CG, where things have gotten
(03:37):
so refined and they can do such amazing things, but
the one thing they can't do, they can't really truly
breathe life into it, and so ultimately that the only
real performance is the actors and the musicians. And for instance,
what we did on the last Lion King movie. You know,
we did a remake, and I thought, wh am I
going to do a remake, And I thought, everybody knows
(03:59):
the tunes. Everybody in the orchestra noticed the tunes. All
my musicians and know the tunes. I'm going to spend
a week pretending I'm recording little cues, and in the
last two days I'm literally going to make it about okay,
We're going to run the movie from the beginning to
the end, and you're going to just hold on for
dear life, and we're going to recall the whole thing
as a performance, because I wanted to have that, you know,
(04:21):
the thing that you get in a live performance, the
thing you get in a theater genius mixed with fear
and catastrophe.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, we've had people talk to us and they have
careers and whatever, editing or or what have you. And
I'm curious, not in a relationship, let's say with Nolan,
where you've made a few films with him, or you've
made a couple with Nancy and this is two boss
babies and so forth. But on your maiden voyage with Nolan,
does he send you the script and you start to
(04:49):
get in conversation with him the type of score he
wants and you start to like riff little things before
or do you only really get concretized about it until
you see cut footage.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Let's talk about Chris and my working method, and I
think we set off on the wrong foot right away
because he wanted me to do Batman, and I kept
saying I don't want to do Batman, and Fanny, he said,
why don't you do Batman? I said, I know how
to be the dark Night, but I don't know how
to be Bruce Wayne. And he said, that's easy. Get
(05:21):
a friend and to be the other character. You don't
have to be schizophrenic. So I ask my friend Jameson Howard,
who is one of the most elegant composers in the world,
to be light and let me be my Germanic darkness.
And then I was working on something in Los Angeles.
Chris was shooting in London, and he has a way
of being very persuasive. He's going, well, yes, I got
(05:44):
this shot of Batman standing on top of a building,
and I don't quite know how to get him there
because I don't want to temper it. But is there
something that you can just I mean, it doesn't have
to be good, just give me something that gets him
up there. And so the first time James and I
saw the movie, it had all our rotten little demos
(06:05):
in it. But if you go to something like Inception,
I remember Chris phoning me and he's going, hey, do
you want to come down to the beach with the kids.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Is that how he puts it?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
He's stuck, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
When he needs the music for his movie, let's go
down to the beach with the kids. Well, I think
that's great. I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna call Spielberg
and say, let's go down to the beach with the kids.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
But it worked. He realized that this idea of the
different times in the different dream states was very complicated
to an audience, and I said, look to a musician,
it's the easiest thing, because that's what we do all
the time. You know, you have a bar and you're
divide it into four quarter notes, and you can divide
that time off the four quarter notes into eight notes,
(06:50):
et cetera, and you just keep dividing down and play.
You're always playing this time. So I think at the
end of the day, it doesn't matter if the audience
ever gets the intellectual conceit of the movie. But just
think of me like a river and the audience is
on a little boat, and I take you downstream with
(07:11):
the story. And sometimes it's going to get a little rocky,
and sometimes it's going to get a little boring, but
you sort of know you can trust the river to
take you on this journey and take you to the end.
So Chris loved that, and we do think very similarly.
I mean, I remember him phoning me from Iceland, so
I hadn't seen any footage, right, I just about read
(07:31):
the scripts. He phoned me from Iceland. He's explaining the scene,
which is and then you have to hit this shot,
and then this, and this is the most important scene
in the movie. Our lead character is basically seeing his
whole family through the years, and he's starting to cry
at a certain moment. You know, I have to be poignant,
and I find you. Said to Chris, Chris, I don't
(07:52):
think I can just do this. I don't think I
could wing it without some footage. And I remember all
these cuts in my head. And he says, our sense
of time, our sense of aesthetics seems to be very similar.
Just write it, send it to me. If it doesn't work,
i'll send you the picture. Well, unfortunately it worked. Yeah.
(08:12):
I phoned him. I said, how is it? He goes, well,
it's within two frames where I can go and adjust that.
So then he finishes shooting and I'm going, Okay, show
me the movie. He's going, you know, it's going really
rather well. You know, you imagining my movie and writing freely,
At which point I started to just send him pieces
(08:34):
of music without telling him what they were for. I
wouldn't write anything on them. I just send him music.
But I very strongly, having read the script, knew what
they were for. And I was praying and hoping. There's
a shot in there where Marion Cottier is on a
ledge and her shoe drops just so, and I was
(08:55):
so hoping that this piece I sent for him was
going to end up in that spot. And then months
down the road, when I first saw it, there it was,
and he absolutely got it. So we have this language
without words, because I think what is really important with
music is that to me, it's an autonomous language. I
(09:16):
am speaking to you in English, which obviously is not
my mother tongue, as you might detect from the horrible accent.
But if I were to speak to you in a
couple of chords, I feel unsafer ground and I feel
more articulate. So that's how Chris and I kept working.
We kept coming up with crazy you know. We did
a list, for instance, for Interstellar, of what are the
(09:38):
things we haven't done, you know, and we would cross
off big drums, or I did that one, big horns, Oh,
we did that one. And then Chris said, what about
pipeworgan and that became that, you know, because, as he
said it, this is a movie about space and rockets
and all that stuff. I mean, I saw the shape
(09:59):
of the par argument at the same time I saw
the afterburner of rockets, and I thought both are fabulous
pieces of technology.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Now with Nolan, do you feel that your task is
to help them understand and help yourself understand what they want?
Have you ever had conflicts with director where you said
I don't agree.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
How much truth would you like?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, I mean my rule on this show is I
don't want.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
To ruin my career.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Your career can't be ruined. What I'm asking is are
you there to perform what they want? Or do you
consult with them?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
The director has to trust his composer, and ultimately the
composer needs to go and buy into the direct decision.
But music is indefensible. I can write you something and
play it to you and I think it's the greatest
fucking thing. And I just answered every question you ever
had about your character or whatever, and you don't get it.
(10:53):
It doesn't resonate. So there's no way I can sit
there and explain to you why you should like it
and either resonates or it doesn't. That's number one. The
other thing is I like working with directors who spend
a minimum of time talking to me about what music
they want, because as soon as they start talking to
me about what music they want, my mind goes off
(11:15):
into that thing of going My job is to do
something that they can't even imagine. My job is to
knock their socks off. My job is to do something
that is so beyond anything that they could do because
otherwise said do it themselves, and you know, and it
makes me rather redundant or it makes me a musical secretarime.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Do you think that someone to use a more celebrated example,
because everybody knows the story about Alex north composition for
a Space out of Sea?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Do you think that someone like Kubrick lunged in the
direction of the classical repertoire because he knew what the
music was. He didn't have to wait for somebody to
write it there? It is extant, it's real. I know,
I want, you know, fun carry on with the with
the vienna and this and that, just play the Blue
Danube and he doesn't have to rely on anybody do
(12:06):
you find that there were some directors who they just
don't want to keep that control.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Well, well it's not sad, you know. I mean, first
of all, I should let you know that Stanley Kubrick
was the first director that ever fired me, what film
Full Metal Jacket, and Vivian, his daughter, took over. But
it became this weird, strange thing. So I was really
I mean I was maybe eighteen nineteen, and but as
(12:30):
soon as I was fired, in other words, because I
didn't know how to do what he wanted me to do.
Because Stanley Kubrick knew everything, he had studied drumming with
Gene Kruper. He just wanted me to be his musical secretary.
And I'm not very good at that. Take dictation, yeah, absolutely,
take dictation. I mean I would get these tape sent
drumming with ten fingers on his tabletop and go, well,
(12:52):
get a drummer to do exactly that, and you know,
so that didn't work. But then once I was officially fired,
I would get these phone calls where he would go,
I think Vivian's in a bit of trouble. Can you
go up there and see if she's all right? Or
he'd go what do you think of Dolby Stereo. I'm
(13:13):
eighteen years old, you know, I have no idea. I'm
talking to Stanley Cooper.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
How did you end up? I mean, you're eighteen years old.
How does an eighteen year old Hans Zimmer wind up
within fifty miles of Stanley Cooprick? How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Anton first has designer who knew me. They were shooting
for Metal Jacket in the docklands of London, and I
knew Vivian, who then took over, and so I was
really helping Vivian and a son. And then years later
I ran into Vivian and I was just on my
way to London. She said, oh, you really should go
and see Dad. I'm going Why would I go and
(13:48):
see you? And she goes, no, no, no, He's always
talking about you. Whenever movie comes on television that you did.
He's always saying I found him. I was the first
one who gets he forgets the other part, you know.
And it was really busy and I had to go
down to Australia from London, so I didn't go and
see him because I thought that Stanley Kubrick is beyond
(14:09):
his immortal you know, because he was Stanley Kubridge. And
I get to Australia, I get to Sydney and the
guy who's picking me up from the airport coincidentally was
a chap who I'd met on Full Metal Jacket, and
he's got a really sad face. And I realized that,
you know, Stanley had died, which was inconceivable to reach sure.
(14:32):
And I learned, don't say no if somebody says, hey,
come on over, interesting, you know, you come over. And
I learned a lot from him. I learned vast things
from him.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
You know, this is music from the film Chappie. Han
(15:04):
Zimmer discovered his musical talent very early in life. Another
one of our guests who took music seriously at a
very young age is classical pianist Long Long. He was
a musical prodigy, winning his first competition when he was five.
Long Long and I spoke before a live audience in
(15:25):
New York City in twenty nineteen. He talked about his
father's skepticism of playing in competitions.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
He discouraged me to do competitions, and I was like, wow,
did he say why? Yeah, he said that you're too
crazy about being number one. And you are not really
focus on what you should be, you know, learning the
repertoire and to He said, do you want to become
a great musician or you want to just win the prize?
(15:54):
And I said, oh, I said, is that not the same?
I said, what's the different? I said, if I don't
win a prize, how I'm going to become a great musician.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Here the rest of my conversation with celebrated pianist Long
long A Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
hans Zimmer talks about how he went from playing dingy
clubs around England and making coffee for composer Stanley Myers
to realizing what he wanted to do for the rest
of his life. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
(16:43):
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
This piece is from the film Twelve Years a Slave.
(17:10):
Hans Zimmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He's largely self taught,
and even as a child, understood a strong connection between
music and mood.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Well, my father died when I was six, and I
already played the piano, and I enjoyed playing the piano.
But my father died and I realized the only thing
that made my mother happy, that put a smile on
her face was when I played the piano. So I
sort of took on that bird, which then, of course
backfired because at school I was appalling in everything other
(17:45):
than playing music. I got thrown out of nine schools.
Ultimately I ended up in school in England, a fabulous
school called Hertwood House. You know, it was a choice
to go back to Germany or hang out in Swinging Lundon.
So by the time of eighteen, I was in the
back of a fort transit van going up and down
the m one playing every workingman's club and every city pub.
(18:08):
There's the eighties. It was crazy, it was amazing. There
was a company called Working Title. They were making music
videos and one day Channel four, new television station, came about,
and Working Title decided, since we don't know how to
make movies, that's okay, they don't really know that, but
we'll do something called My Beautiful Laundrette, which was a
(18:30):
young Daniel da Lewis, and it was an extraordinary anti
thatcher Rite gay Cross everything you know amazingly, It's just
mind blowing when nobody saw it coming, and Daniel kisses
this Indian boy and you could feel the jaws of
the audience hitting the floor and I loved it.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So Kubrick and that introduction through full metal. When you're
eighteen years old, had you worked on any films or
you've been close to any film sets or studios before that?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yes, yeah, no, no, absolutely. I had a mentor Stanley Myers
that the man who wrote the music for The Deer
Hunter brilliant man. And so Stanley had this coffee machine.
He loved his Italian espresso. He had bought an unbelievably
complicated coffee machine. And so my job was to work
the coffee machine and Stanley would show me how to
(19:29):
write for orchestra. And her first day was Stanley Myers
and Nicholas Rogue sitting there looking at a scene. In
the morning, I was making coffee and they're both going,
we have no idea what to do, And by the
evening they'd come up with a mind blowing, beautiful solution,
musical solution. And I realized this idea of that you
(19:52):
have nothing, and that you make something out of nothing,
and that it is just a conversation and you just
you just breathed the picture in and turn it into notes.
That was a fantastic adventure. And then Stanny and I
had a little studio and Stanny was very good friends
with the producer Jeremy Thomas, who phoned me up one
(20:12):
day and said, would I mind coming in on Saturday
because he had a Riti Sakamoto and Bernardo Bertulucci coming
in to have a look at what Richi had done
on the Last Emperor and would I just go and
run the tape machines for them. So they piled into
my little studio and it turned out that there was
(20:33):
a profound lack of communication and Bettu Lucci had recut
the Last Emperors as flashback, while Sakamoto had scored the
previous version, which was all in chronological order. And the
other thing was Saka Roto's idea was that he was
going to play Banado the stuff have his friend Koji
(20:56):
recorded at Aby wrote, and he was gone because he
had a tour start the following day, and so nothing fit.
So David Byrne from the Talking Heads was the other composer,
and Kong Su, who was a Chinese composer but had
studied in Berlin, was another composer on it. So the
Chinese composer could only speak German, so I was useful
(21:19):
in this case. And Jeremy said, can you just go
up to Happy Road and just sort of sort this out?
You know, we called the orchestra, and I had no
idea what four M, you know, fifty one whatever. Something
that was in Real for was now in Real two,
but I'd never heard and I didn't even know what
scene it was supposed to go. And Bernada would go,
(21:41):
why is it getting quiet in the middle of a shot?
And I'm like tap dancing furiously coming up with excuses
to sort of not put the blame on Ritisakamoto. It
really wasn't his fault. So that was really my other introduction. Yeah,
And it was like, these people look crazy. These people
are genuinely crazy. And there was one day where Danara
(22:04):
was working out at Pinewood and there was something had
gotten the things kept getting lost, are things kept not
happening or whatever? And he fecked me up at my studio.
He goes, where are the Chinese death bells? I didn't
know that we're going to be Chinese deat belts, nor
did I even know that there is such a thing
as Chinese death belts. So I said, well, okay, I'm
(22:24):
really sorry. I'll come right over with that Chinese deathbelts.
So I made up something on the synthesizer because I thought,
if I don't know what they sound like, he won't
know what they sound like. And I came over and
as I got to Pinewood, Bernardo's walking up and down
at the gates to the studio and he's like he's
got his hands beyond his back. And I get out
of the Carlumn saying, look, I'm really sorry. It wasn't
(22:46):
my fault. By the way, it really wasn't, you know.
But I wasn't going to blame anybody. I just went
fuck it out to it and Banana went, look, I'm
really sorry. I shouted at you, and he handed me
a box of chocolates and he said, look, even though
I'm the DIY director and I'm paying you, I realized
that the seconds of your life are going by and
I should be more gracious.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
That taught me something. I mean, the more I worked
within the film business at these early days, and mostly
it wasn't so high, and mostly like working title. All
our cutting rooms were either above a strip club or
a pawn shop, and you know, and I would run
up the stairs with my little piece of music and
sing it up to the picture and hold my breath
(23:28):
because if the director didn't like it. But at the
same time I realized it was all entertainment, and should
it go wrong upstairs, maybe I could get a job
downstairs at the pawn.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Shop, you know, or the strip club for that matter.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Ah, the strip club for that matter, absolutely. And then
a working title offered me, like the twentieth movie or
something like this, that it was about the anti apartheid
movement in South Africa called a World apart Blaba Hershey,
beautiful film, beautiful film, Chris Inglis. So We're sitting at
(24:03):
the Grouto Club and I'm getting so what's the budget?
And Tim Bevan says, we're not telling you what the
budget is. Your wife is pregnant, and we know what
you do. You take all the money that you're supposed
to go and take home with you and you just
spend it on making the movie sound good. So we're
not telling you what the budget is this time, So
(24:24):
you go and do the movie and it's going to
be all right. So I did the movie, and it
turned out my daughter was born on the first day
of working on the film, and they opened an account
in her name and put the money in there. So,
you know, whatever you say about the things about filmmaking,
the you know how cynicure you want to be, there
(24:46):
are people who are genuinely have a heart. Gentlemen, gentlemen.
You know. The other thing which I think is so
vital is Hollywood, with all its cheapness and vulgarity, what
have you. It's the last place on earth that commissions
orchestral music on a daily basis, and if we don't
have that, the orchestras will just die.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
At what point were you immersed in the classic Bernard
Herman era of film scoring? Did you listen to a
lot of film scores? And no, none.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Not at all. I come from one of those snobby
European families where we went to the opera once a
week and we had no television because television was considered
the end of culture as we know it. And I
remember I snuck into the little local cinema where they
were playing Once upon a Time in the West, and
(25:41):
it was just like Ennio Morriconi, Sergio Leone, those shots,
and I'm going, that's it, that's it, That's what I
want to do, and there was nothing that could stop
me from doing this.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Did you feel at any point that you needed to
study film itself in order to do your all better?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
No.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
I felt I needed to study mythology. I needed to
study fairy tales. I needed to study psychology. I needed
to read like crazy, and I needed to sit down
and talk to as many dp's as I possibly could,
because if I was the years, they were the eyes.
I was the guy who would never go home. I
(26:23):
was always the kid who was still hanging around in
the cutting room, you know, just badgering the editor, going
why are you doing that? Why are you doing this cut?
And why and how does this work? And you know,
talking to the DP what colors are you going to use?
What the tone of this film? Tell me, what the
color palette is going to be?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Like knowing as we do now that you know, I
might watch The Crown in bed on my computer and
my wife is asleep next to me, and then if
it's Gladiator, you think let's just blow the fucking roof
off the theater and it's just blow it out. You know,
that's forty feet why twenty feet high? Is there a
difference between scoring for TV and for film?
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Not? There should be, There should be, But I don't
make a difference. I just I just feel there's a
right path if somebody has a compelling story. If Peter
Margen comes to me and he goes, I've given up
on doing movies, I want to do the Crown. You
take that very seriously. And Peter's vision is vast.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And what a juggernaut that's been point. Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Absolutely, I love Peter. I've known him. I've known Peter.
I want to say, I've known Peter all my life.
Peter and I speak German. He speaks better German than
I do. You know. We come from that working title
camp European cinema. It's really different. I mean I came
to Hollywood expecting it to be technologically far more advanced
(27:46):
than Europe, and I expected it to be far more collaborative,
and it wasn't. The composer worked alone, and he had
a ghostwriter who would never get a credit. You know,
it's like an army of ghost writers who never saw
their names up in light, and I thought, oh, that
poor boss is going to get their career. You know,
(28:07):
Stanley Meyers, my mentor. I mean he gave me credits
straight away. I mean it wasn't a big deal, and
we would all be in the room together. So I
learned from Stephen Fears. I learned from Nick Rourke. I
learned from John Flessinger. I learned from Tarry Malleck.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
You did Pacific Heights.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
We did Pacific Heights.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
I auditioned for that movie. I remember I was involved.
He did a movie The Believers, Yes, that Marty Sheen did,
and I was going to do that movie Ellen Barkin
and I think we're pretty close to getting those jobs.
And then the casting director cut our throats and got
rid of us because they felt we were too young.
I remember, I was just overwhelmed with a passion to
(28:45):
work with slashinger. What was he like?
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Same with me. Any director who in the middle of
scoring says, I'm so sorry, but I have to take
a few days off because I'm directing an opera in Salzburg.
Is okay with me? Do you know what I mean?
It's like at the end of all the scoring sessions,
he made a list of all the quotes of classical
music I'd used, which was that's great. It was a game.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
But again, knowing that writing music and performing music, what
happened to when you go and record it and you
hear it and you go it's that right.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Well, one of the things is to be absolutely clear
we are making a recording. We're not doing a concert.
You don't have the freese of a live performance going on.
So I try to have a bit of that going on.
For instance, I tell directors before I start working with them,
and they all get it. I will not make a
(29:39):
change during the scoring session in front of the orchestra,
will take it off the stands, I'll go home, I'll
rewrite it whatever you want, but I will not do
it in front of the orchestra because when the orchestra
is playing, it's about a performance, and we don't want
to stop, and we don't want to bore them, and
we certainly don't want to show any insecurity. The lion
tyming and film comp housing seem to have a close link.
(30:02):
You know, both can kill you. I mean the director
will eat your life. And if it's not the directors.
There's there's a whole bunch of guys in the brass
section who are just looking at you, going, okay, kid,
let's see what hams. Let's see where.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You had some of that early on?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yeah, absolutely, and now we're fine.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I actually had the one of the greatest compliments recently.
There's a percussionist in London who's played on everything from
you know, Star Wars plus all the classics, and I
saw him the other day. He goes Hamps. We were
worried about you when you went to Hollywood because we
thought you're just going to become one of those prats.
But you know something, you came back. You're still one
(30:42):
of us. You're still a complete music bastard and we
love you for that. So I thought that was like
the best compliment I could have, and it meant whatever
we were doing was going to be okay because I
was still part of them.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Now, when you see footage doesn't perform Romans ever.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Motivate you one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Really, what's an example of a performance by an actor
in a film you did that really helped lift you
to the level you wanted to go in terms of
your score.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Jack Nicholson in as good as it gets. Really didn't
know what to do. I was really struggling, and finally
I said to Jim Burks, Jim, what are you doing
in the weekend? Do you mind sitting on my couch
and let me just look at Jack. Look at what
he's doing. I mean, there's a history. Before Jack started
filming the movie, I was at his house going over, like,
(31:35):
he's going to play the piano. He didn't want to
play the piano. I'm going it's easy. I can go
and replace anything that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
No, Jack didn't want to play the piano.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Didn't want to play the piano. I think he just
wanted to talk to Jim a bit. But so Jim's
sitting there and we just started to work out together
what this character would be, Like it's the way his
legs moved, or it's just a little something in the shoulder.
It's never something he says, it's body language, it's a ballet.
(32:06):
And literally it was two days of just experimenting. Jim
sitting there and we worked the whole thing out, and
so you know, I totally understood what Jack was trying
to do.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Helen Hunt, she wont to ask for I love that film.
He did too. Here do too, he did too. And
what I love is there's an almost pugilistic quality to
when he says his lines the woman of the legendary
line when he's at the elevator and the woman says,
how do you write those female? Do you write those
women so well? I think of a man and I
take away reason and accountability right, one of the greatest
(32:37):
lines in Hollywood history.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
There's another bit in it at the end when he
doesn't know how to go and see the Helen Hunt character,
and Greg Kinnear says to him, but you already have
an advantage, he already prepared to humiliate yourself. And in
a funny way, I've made that sort of my light
motif of how I'm going to go and play a
(32:59):
piece of music to a director or anybody for that matter.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I'm sure, I'm sure that these examples have been There
might be none, or certainly few and far between. But
have you ever just pushed out your best effort and
you thought I can't save this movie?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yes, and being wrong at the same time, thinking this
is terrible, and then the audience loved it. You know,
don't try to predict anything.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
That's a very good point, you know, to.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Th own self be true. I mean, look, you and
I we did a movie Pearl Harbor. Yeah, there's a line.
And girl and boy met forty five minutes ago in
the story and they're sitting next to each other and
she says to him, if I have one more night
to live, I want to spend it with you. And
I said to Michael Bay, Michael, you gotta get rid
(33:46):
of that line. I learn from Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott
always would say sentimentality, that's unanned emotion. And he's going, yeah,
don't worry, I'll get rid of it. He never got
rid of it. It's the favorite line in the movie
by teenage girls.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Oh God, Hans Zimmer, this is to every captive soul
from the motion picture Hannibal. When we return, Hans Zimmer
(34:49):
talks about how an invitation from musician Pharrell Williams helped
him overcome stage fright. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is
(35:16):
here's the thing. In twenty sixteen, Hans Zimmer did something
he hadn't done in decades, played in front of an audience.
The result was Hans Zimmer Live an arena style concert series,
which wouldn't have happened without encouragement from his friends.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
There was like a cabal ganging up on me. There
was Frell, Williams, Johnny Ma and my friend Anne Marie Simpson,
great violinist, and they're all sitting here and they're going,
you know, Hans, you can't hide behind the screen for
the rest of your life. Sometimes it is your duty
to look an audience in the eye, especially after you've
(35:57):
done so much. I'm gonna rrible idea. I think I
should just stay in this room, I mean. And so
this goes on and I keep saying no and then
get up and they're walking out of my room. And
right at the end, Farrell turns around and he says, Hey,
I'm going to play the Grammys. Do you want to
play guitar for me? And I thought only an idiot
(36:18):
would say no. So it was his show. The Grammys
were his show. I'm playing guitar. Through the whole performance,
he kept his eyes on me. He just to make
sure that I was okay, that was safe, which was
such an act of kindness. And I was going, Oh,
it's not so bad. This is actually good fun. So
(36:38):
I phoned. I felt, my friend Harvey Goldsmith, who promoted
the original Live Aid and everything else. I mean he
brought Springsteen to England, etc. And I'm saying, Harvey, if
I did a concert, I mean, do you think anybody
would come? He goes, yeah, I think so. So in
twenty fourteen, we did two nights in London and a
(36:59):
rock and roll and I thought it was important. Number one,
it was important to be a rock and roll venue,
and it would be fun to pawn orchestra into it,
or we can go more extreme. Because then we went
and did courchella, and I thought, oh, we have to
do courchella because we got to have an orchestra in
the middle of the desert and a choir. And secondly,
I want to change the way people perceive orchestras and
(37:23):
choirs because I can understand that going to a classical concert,
unless it's an amazing conductor, seeing a guy with his
back to you all night while there's a whole bunch
of guys and girls reading the paper is like a
bad marriage on a Sunday morning. So I said to
the orchestra, if I get rid of the conductor, I mean,
(37:44):
we have enough technology. We can go and show things
up on the conducting up on the screen. You know,
it doesn't have to be in the sideline. You will
have an autonomous sideline to the audience. Will that work?
And they said, yeah, absolutely, we'll have We'll have a
go at it, and that basically became the basis of
that tour and the idea of being surrounded by not
(38:07):
only great orchestral class, but great rock and roll class.
Because great musicians are great musicians. You either move me
or you don't move me.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
You know, it's interesting how when you write music. I
want to tee this up with the story, which was
I was haunted by the sequence in Cold Blood where
Robert Blake is watching Scott Wilson have sex with the
prostitute and he's sitting on the bed and that transforms
into his mother with a John and the father comes
in and it's this horribly painful, traumatic thing for the
(38:39):
Robert Blake character, and he's sitting there with tears running
down his eyes and the rain behind him in the
window running down the window, and they play this Mexican
ballad and I drove myself to the brink of insanity
trying to find out what the name of the song
was who the singer was, and of course who wrote it?
And I couldn't take it anymore. So you know, when
you're with c as an agency, they can get you
(39:01):
on the phone with anybody. So the next thing you know,
I'm on the phone with Quincy. Right. I said, now
this song in this thing? He said, yeah, yeah, man, Nina,
the song is Nina Baby. That's the name of so Nina.
And I go who wrote the song? And is a pause?
He goes, I wrote a baby. I wrote it. I
mean what you're talking about, man, I wrote the song
like I write all the songs. Did you feel that
(39:25):
they were parts of your career where you went to
learn to write music you thought you couldn't write, whether
you know, from.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
The culture, Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean I had
this from Penny Marshall. But she comes to me and
she goes, forties girls baseball. Though I'm going I know
nothing about being a girl. I know nothing about the forties.
I don't know anything about jazz, you know. And she goes,
(39:51):
don't worry about it, just do it, and oh yeah,
And I say I know nothing about baseball. She goes,
when they hit it, that's good. You know, I was
basically my brief. It took me a while to figure
out how I could solve this because I really don't
know anything about jazz.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
You felt you didn't know anything about jazz. You weren't
a jazz fan.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yes, but I didn't know how to do it about it,
And I thought, well, hang on, everybody's got like some
crazy uncle that when drunk will play boogie boogie on
the piano. So I thought, well, I can be that
guy playing boogie woogie in the piano and just orchestrated
and shoved in front of a bunch of very good players.
(40:31):
So that's how that score came about. Here's the thing.
Penny was a huge influence because she left having a chat,
especially between the hours of three am and seven.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I had some chats with Penny.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Right, okay, So so since I was one of the
few pans and musicians, therefore I was up and I
would use those charts. For instance, I remember one Penny,
how do you make a good movie? That's easy. All
you have to do is protect your star. And by
that I don't mean the actor, I mean your main character.
(41:06):
Don't let him say anything that's out of character, coming
off his mouth, don't let him wear anything that's not
in character, don't have his hair be stupid. Because when
you know what your main character is, then the rest
of the story will group around it. And I thought
that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, now what about with ron Howard? I mean, the
Frost Nixon thing is obviously a very dry, very powdery
kind of a drama, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Oh, man, that was a tough one.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I mean O'shan and Frank. I mean, Frank is just
such a wonderful malvolioesque, you know, kind of presence and
everything he does, he just drips with a kind of danger.
You know what did Ronnie tell you he wanted for
that film?
Speaker 3 (41:46):
We all loved the play. And you know that's back
to Peter Margan and the crowd. I mean, that's a
Peter Margen thing. So ostensibly we had a meeting every
day for two weeks before he went out shooting to
talk about the song, to make the songs, to be
the right thing for the era. And I don't think
we actually got any songs in it. You know, I
would go, well, if you give me this close up,
(42:09):
I can give you this piece of music. Oh, I
can do something like this, and you know, so for
two weeks we sort of worked out camera moves and
we've worked out how to transform a play into a movie.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Now. One of the junctures in which I intersected with
your movie was a documentary series called Evidence of Revision.
It's considered the Citizen Kane of JFK Conspiracy Films. It's
nine hours long, divided into five parts. I'm listening to
this and this music comes on and I'm going, oh man,
(42:46):
this music is so fucking beautiful, and it's the last Samurai. Now.
He sampled a couple of your pieces for this thing, Hannibal.
He plays to every captive soul, oh yes, and oh
my god, you just the tears start rolling down your face.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
There's a big story involved for a Telly piece. Why
it's worth making movies? To me, Ridley had just come
back from Florence, I think, to finished shooting the movie.
It's Sunday night, eleven o'clock in the evening at Fox
in the cutting room, and it's Ridley, it's Pietro Scalia,
the editor, and me and the picture on the avit
(43:30):
is parked on a tear running down Claric Starling's face.
And I say to him, to both of them, I say, well,
she's crying because she's in love with him and she
has to betray him now, and really goes no, no, no,
it's a tear of disgust. It's disgusted this.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Monthster when he has her up against the refrigerator.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Yeah, exactly, exactly right. So this goes on, So it
gets more and more heat in this conversation, and finally
we're standing and three grown men at eleven o'clock at
night on a Sunday are shouting at each other about
the meaning of a tear on a woman's face. And
I had one of those we had moments, you know
where the camera pulls back and I see us all
(44:11):
I thought, what a great job we are discussing Julie.
And I'm going, this is the most important thing to
us at this moment. And that's what this piece is about.
Because I said, Okay, Reddy, this is what I'm going
to do. I'm going to write the whole score is
going to be a romantic comedy. And he's going, okay, fine,
(44:35):
all right, if you can pull that off, fine romantic comedy.
So that is my big love theme.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
What's the movie of yours. You watch, will you sit
there when it's screens and you go, you know, it's
not that bad. Actually it's pretty good. It really does work.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Yeah, I know, I'm binary. It's shit. It's not shit.
I think they could all do with a bit of
a do over, an improvement. But I tell you the
opening to The Lion King, I mean, it was really
important to me. I wanted that African voice. My friend Lebo,
who I discovered at a car wash, he was a
political refuge to you, but he was working at a
(45:12):
car wash. I said, come and just come and do
this thing. And you know, like within the first notes,
you know you're now not in Kansas anymore.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
What advice do you have for people who you're working
with who are young people who want to because I'm
assuming that actors can come and go they have their
houseyon period, writers, directors, but it seems like composers, when
you hit it you can stay there for a very
long time. Your career has been a very long time
now and you've stayed at the top of this business
(45:43):
for a very long time. What advice do you have
for people who want to get into that part of
the business, Just say.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yes, you know, like when Penny Marshall says, do you
not do a movie about baseball and swing? Go yes,
I know nothing about it. Just be honest, I know
nothing about it. Sounds interesting, right, you know?
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Hold yes.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
I remember being on the phone with Ron, just out
of courtesy. Right at the end. I thought I should say, well,
what are you working on? And he said the Da
Vinci Code. I'm going, oh my god, it's like run
on monologue. It's totally uncinematic. How can you? I mean,
how are you going to do that? And it's a phenomena.
How are you going to deal with the phenomena? And
(46:26):
he goes, yeah, I know. And ten minutes later, my
agent fil to me. He goes, what did you say
to Ron? I'm sorry. I know he's setting off on
this journey and I just probably really, like, you know,
made it even worse for him. He goes, no, no, no,
he wants you to do the film. He wants you
to solve it for him, you know. And it gave
(46:48):
me a year of being able to immerse myself in
art and in literature and to hang out at the
Louver at night.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
You know, this is why people say to me, why
am I on the border the Philharmonic, I said. The
movies often disappoint me, The theater sometimes disappoint me. The
symphony never disappoints me. When now I go see the
New York Philharmonic play, I'm never disappointed.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Your music. Is there a joint ownership of that movie
and the publishing rights and so forth for the soundtrack,
album and so forth? Do you have some control or
do the studio? Is it a buyout and they own it?
Speaker 3 (47:25):
They own it. But there's a law that says you
are allowed to perform anything you want to perform, all right,
So I think it would be heenous to not be
able to own my life. Wow, you know, because that's
really what it is, isn't it. I mean, you know
that thing Bernardo said to me. You know, as the
(47:47):
seconds of life are taking away, we are creating these things.
You know.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Had an actor turned to me once he said to me,
you're gonna go back to your trailer, I said it.
He goes, Why do you go to your trailer?
Speaker 3 (47:58):
He said?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
The sets where you want to be even when you're
not shooting, he said, pull up a chair, he goes.
Just be a part of it. Absolutely, Just watch them shoot,
And as I've gotten older, when I read a script,
I say to myself, could I stay on the set
during the entire shooting process of this movie and just
be a witness and watch them do this movie? Do?
I love it that much? And that's become a metric
(48:19):
for me. Actually, and I spend far more time on
the set now than I used to. I never go
to my trailer anymore. Is too boring.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
I think my whole career is based on I would
always hang around and be the guy asking the stupid questions.
You know, not be afraid. Why are you doing it
like that? You know, tell me, explain this part to
me or whatever. You know, everything informs everything.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
But you nailed it when you said this is our lives.
We spent our lives doing this.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
It is our lives. And that's what Parrell and Johnny
mob were so right about that I should stop hiding that,
I should do things in real time, be on a stage.
If I'm going to have a pratfall. Yes, if I
go Hello Oslo in Stockholm, they will forgive me.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Let me just finish by saying this, as you're scoring
the sequel to Boss Baby, please make me look funny,
made me look smart, made me look powerful. Okay, when
you're writing the music, just have that in mind. If
you don't mind made me look.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Powerful, we have not only have we fulfilled that free
fuck you know you getting away with that line. I
have a beautiful voice. I mean, just start at pausing,
just have your voice, just let it lay there, let
them all be enthralled.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Well, listen, thank you. You're one of the greats man.
I mean, your movie scores are just I mean, these
people that you work with, they're lucky to have you. Boy,
what a difference you make.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
It's just been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Composer Hans Zimmer. This is from the motion picture The
Last Samurai. I'm Alec Baldwin. And this is here's the
thing from iHeart Video
Speaker 4 (51:06):
U
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from My Heart Radio. It's officially summer, and
that means it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing,
where our staff shares their favorite episodes in our Summer
Staff series. Next up is our producer, Zach McNeice.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Thanks Alec. Whether you're a casual movie fan or a
true cinema junkie like me, the name Hans Zimmer is
no doubt synonymous with some of the most loved and
awarded films of the past thirty years. He's an artist
whose work speaks for itself. So without further ado, here's
Alex's conversation with Hans Zimmer.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
The score of a movie has a way of enriching
a film's emotional journey, from the profound to the playful.
It is often an unconscious part of why the feeling
of a movie stays with us long after we leave
the theater. My guest today is one of the all
time masters of film composition, Hans Zimmer. He scored more
(01:38):
than one hundred and fifty movies, including Gladiator, Hannibal, Sherlock Holmes,
The Last Samurai, The Thin Red Line, and many many more.
Hans Zimmer's work has earned him an Academy Award for
The Lion King, two Golden Globes, and countless more nominations.
(01:58):
In two thousand and five, hans Zimmer began working with
director Christopher Nolan. It's become one of the most celebrated
partnerships in movie history. For Nolan, Zimmer has scored the
Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Inception, which features this
song time. Hans Zimmer's work spans an eclectic range of
(02:23):
feature films, television, and documentaries. I wanted to know whether
his scoring process is different when he works on animated films.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
All directors are different from each other. But I once
was invited to a dinner party and at the end
of the table sat Terrence Malick and Vana Hatsuk. You know,
everybody's talking at the long table, and then suddenly everybody
stops talking, and it's just the two great artists chatting,
and they're arguing about which Q and Lion King is better.
(02:55):
You know, these two admirable auteurs are arguing about Lion King,
you know, about a kid's movie. So the weird thing is,
you know, I can talk to Tarry Mallik about animation,
and I can talk to Tom mcgrass, our director on
Boss Baby about Thin Red Line, you know, and in
(03:16):
one way or the other, it's sort of the same thing.
Other than that, you can get away with a lot
more animation. I find, you know, you and I in
a peculiar way, we give life to something that doesn't
have life. I mean, it's, you know, the whole point
about animation, especially now with CG, where things have gotten
(03:37):
so refined and they can do such amazing things, but
the one thing they can't do, they can't really truly
breathe life into it, and so ultimately that the only
real performance is the actors and the musicians. And for instance,
what we did on the last Lion King movie. You know,
we did a remake, and I thought, wh am I
going to do a remake, And I thought, everybody knows
(03:59):
the tunes. Everybody in the orchestra noticed the tunes. All
my musicians and know the tunes. I'm going to spend
a week pretending I'm recording little cues, and in the
last two days I'm literally going to make it about okay,
We're going to run the movie from the beginning to
the end, and you're going to just hold on for
dear life, and we're going to recall the whole thing
as a performance, because I wanted to have that, you know,
(04:21):
the thing that you get in a live performance, the
thing you get in a theater genius mixed with fear
and catastrophe.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Well, we've had people talk to us and they have
careers and whatever, editing or or what have you. And
I'm curious, not in a relationship, let's say with Nolan,
where you've made a few films with him, or you've
made a couple with Nancy and this is two boss
babies and so forth. But on your maiden voyage with Nolan,
does he send you the script and you start to
(04:49):
get in conversation with him the type of score he
wants and you start to like riff little things before
or do you only really get concretized about it until
you see cut footage.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Let's talk about Chris and my working method, and I
think we set off on the wrong foot right away
because he wanted me to do Batman, and I kept
saying I don't want to do Batman, and Fanny, he said,
why don't you do Batman? I said, I know how
to be the dark Night, but I don't know how
to be Bruce Wayne. And he said, that's easy. Get
(05:21):
a friend and to be the other character. You don't
have to be schizophrenic. So I ask my friend Jameson Howard,
who is one of the most elegant composers in the world,
to be light and let me be my Germanic darkness.
And then I was working on something in Los Angeles.
Chris was shooting in London, and he has a way
of being very persuasive. He's going, well, yes, I got
(05:44):
this shot of Batman standing on top of a building,
and I don't quite know how to get him there
because I don't want to temper it. But is there
something that you can just I mean, it doesn't have
to be good, just give me something that gets him
up there. And so the first time James and I
saw the movie, it had all our rotten little demos
(06:05):
in it. But if you go to something like Inception,
I remember Chris phoning me and he's going, hey, do
you want to come down to the beach with the kids.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Is that how he puts it?
Speaker 3 (06:15):
He's stuck, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
When he needs the music for his movie, let's go
down to the beach with the kids. Well, I think
that's great. I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna call Spielberg
and say, let's go down to the beach with the kids.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
But it worked. He realized that this idea of the
different times in the different dream states was very complicated
to an audience, and I said, look to a musician,
it's the easiest thing, because that's what we do all
the time. You know, you have a bar and you're
divide it into four quarter notes, and you can divide
that time off the four quarter notes into eight notes,
(06:50):
et cetera, and you just keep dividing down and play.
You're always playing this time. So I think at the
end of the day, it doesn't matter if the audience
ever gets the intellectual conceit of the movie. But just
think of me like a river and the audience is
on a little boat, and I take you downstream with
(07:11):
the story. And sometimes it's going to get a little rocky,
and sometimes it's going to get a little boring, but
you sort of know you can trust the river to
take you on this journey and take you to the end.
So Chris loved that, and we do think very similarly.
I mean, I remember him phoning me from Iceland, so
I hadn't seen any footage, right, I just about read
(07:31):
the scripts. He phoned me from Iceland. He's explaining the scene,
which is and then you have to hit this shot,
and then this, and this is the most important scene
in the movie. Our lead character is basically seeing his
whole family through the years, and he's starting to cry
at a certain moment. You know, I have to be poignant,
and I find you. Said to Chris, Chris, I don't
(07:52):
think I can just do this. I don't think I
could wing it without some footage. And I remember all
these cuts in my head. And he says, our sense
of time, our sense of aesthetics seems to be very similar.
Just write it, send it to me. If it doesn't work,
i'll send you the picture. Well, unfortunately it worked. Yeah.
(08:12):
I phoned him. I said, how is it? He goes, well,
it's within two frames where I can go and adjust that.
So then he finishes shooting and I'm going, Okay, show
me the movie. He's going, you know, it's going really
rather well. You know, you imagining my movie and writing freely,
At which point I started to just send him pieces
(08:34):
of music without telling him what they were for. I
wouldn't write anything on them. I just send him music.
But I very strongly, having read the script, knew what
they were for. And I was praying and hoping. There's
a shot in there where Marion Cottier is on a
ledge and her shoe drops just so, and I was
(08:55):
so hoping that this piece I sent for him was
going to end up in that spot. And then months
down the road, when I first saw it, there it was,
and he absolutely got it. So we have this language
without words, because I think what is really important with
music is that to me, it's an autonomous language. I
(09:16):
am speaking to you in English, which obviously is not
my mother tongue, as you might detect from the horrible accent.
But if I were to speak to you in a
couple of chords, I feel unsafer ground and I feel
more articulate. So that's how Chris and I kept working.
We kept coming up with crazy you know. We did
a list, for instance, for Interstellar, of what are the
(09:38):
things we haven't done, you know, and we would cross
off big drums, or I did that one, big horns, Oh,
we did that one. And then Chris said, what about
pipeworgan and that became that, you know, because, as he
said it, this is a movie about space and rockets
and all that stuff. I mean, I saw the shape
(09:59):
of the par argument at the same time I saw
the afterburner of rockets, and I thought both are fabulous
pieces of technology.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Now with Nolan, do you feel that your task is
to help them understand and help yourself understand what they want?
Have you ever had conflicts with director where you said
I don't agree.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
How much truth would you like?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, I mean my rule on this show is I
don't want.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
To ruin my career.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Your career can't be ruined. What I'm asking is are
you there to perform what they want? Or do you
consult with them?
Speaker 3 (10:32):
The director has to trust his composer, and ultimately the
composer needs to go and buy into the direct decision.
But music is indefensible. I can write you something and
play it to you and I think it's the greatest
fucking thing. And I just answered every question you ever
had about your character or whatever, and you don't get it.
(10:53):
It doesn't resonate. So there's no way I can sit
there and explain to you why you should like it
and either resonates or it doesn't. That's number one. The
other thing is I like working with directors who spend
a minimum of time talking to me about what music
they want, because as soon as they start talking to
me about what music they want, my mind goes off
(11:15):
into that thing of going My job is to do
something that they can't even imagine. My job is to
knock their socks off. My job is to do something
that is so beyond anything that they could do because
otherwise said do it themselves, and you know, and it
makes me rather redundant or it makes me a musical secretarime.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Do you think that someone to use a more celebrated example,
because everybody knows the story about Alex north composition for
a Space out of Sea?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Do you think that someone like Kubrick lunged in the
direction of the classical repertoire because he knew what the
music was. He didn't have to wait for somebody to
write it there? It is extant, it's real. I know,
I want, you know, fun carry on with the with
the vienna and this and that, just play the Blue
Danube and he doesn't have to rely on anybody do
(12:06):
you find that there were some directors who they just
don't want to keep that control.
Speaker 3 (12:10):
Well, well it's not sad, you know. I mean, first
of all, I should let you know that Stanley Kubrick
was the first director that ever fired me, what film
Full Metal Jacket, and Vivian, his daughter, took over. But
it became this weird, strange thing. So I was really
I mean I was maybe eighteen nineteen, and but as
(12:30):
soon as I was fired, in other words, because I
didn't know how to do what he wanted me to do.
Because Stanley Kubrick knew everything, he had studied drumming with
Gene Kruper. He just wanted me to be his musical secretary.
And I'm not very good at that. Take dictation, yeah, absolutely,
take dictation. I mean I would get these tape sent
drumming with ten fingers on his tabletop and go, well,
(12:52):
get a drummer to do exactly that, and you know,
so that didn't work. But then once I was officially fired,
I would get these phone calls where he would go,
I think Vivian's in a bit of trouble. Can you
go up there and see if she's all right? Or
he'd go what do you think of Dolby Stereo. I'm
(13:13):
eighteen years old, you know, I have no idea. I'm
talking to Stanley Cooper.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
How did you end up? I mean, you're eighteen years old.
How does an eighteen year old Hans Zimmer wind up
within fifty miles of Stanley Cooprick? How did that happen?
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Anton first has designer who knew me. They were shooting
for Metal Jacket in the docklands of London, and I
knew Vivian, who then took over, and so I was
really helping Vivian and a son. And then years later
I ran into Vivian and I was just on my
way to London. She said, oh, you really should go
and see Dad. I'm going Why would I go and
(13:48):
see you? And she goes, no, no, no, He's always
talking about you. Whenever movie comes on television that you did.
He's always saying I found him. I was the first
one who gets he forgets the other part, you know.
And it was really busy and I had to go
down to Australia from London, so I didn't go and
see him because I thought that Stanley Kubrick is beyond
(14:09):
his immortal you know, because he was Stanley Kubridge. And
I get to Australia, I get to Sydney and the
guy who's picking me up from the airport coincidentally was
a chap who I'd met on Full Metal Jacket, and
he's got a really sad face. And I realized that,
you know, Stanley had died, which was inconceivable to reach sure.
(14:32):
And I learned, don't say no if somebody says, hey,
come on over, interesting, you know, you come over. And
I learned a lot from him. I learned vast things
from him.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
You know, this is music from the film Chappie. Han
(15:04):
Zimmer discovered his musical talent very early in life. Another
one of our guests who took music seriously at a
very young age is classical pianist Long Long. He was
a musical prodigy, winning his first competition when he was five.
Long Long and I spoke before a live audience in
(15:25):
New York City in twenty nineteen. He talked about his
father's skepticism of playing in competitions.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
He discouraged me to do competitions, and I was like, wow,
did he say why? Yeah, he said that you're too
crazy about being number one. And you are not really
focus on what you should be, you know, learning the
repertoire and to He said, do you want to become
a great musician or you want to just win the prize?
(15:54):
And I said, oh, I said, is that not the same?
I said, what's the different? I said, if I don't
win a prize, how I'm going to become a great musician.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Here the rest of my conversation with celebrated pianist Long
long A Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
hans Zimmer talks about how he went from playing dingy
clubs around England and making coffee for composer Stanley Myers
to realizing what he wanted to do for the rest
of his life. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
(16:43):
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
This piece is from the film Twelve Years a Slave.
(17:10):
Hans Zimmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He's largely self taught,
and even as a child, understood a strong connection between
music and mood.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Well, my father died when I was six, and I
already played the piano, and I enjoyed playing the piano.
But my father died and I realized the only thing
that made my mother happy, that put a smile on
her face was when I played the piano. So I
sort of took on that bird, which then, of course
backfired because at school I was appalling in everything other
(17:45):
than playing music. I got thrown out of nine schools.
Ultimately I ended up in school in England, a fabulous
school called Hertwood House. You know, it was a choice
to go back to Germany or hang out in Swinging Lundon.
So by the time of eighteen, I was in the
back of a fort transit van going up and down
the m one playing every workingman's club and every city pub.
(18:08):
There's the eighties. It was crazy, it was amazing. There
was a company called Working Title. They were making music
videos and one day Channel four, new television station, came about,
and Working Title decided, since we don't know how to
make movies, that's okay, they don't really know that, but
we'll do something called My Beautiful Laundrette, which was a
(18:30):
young Daniel da Lewis, and it was an extraordinary anti
thatcher Rite gay Cross everything you know amazingly, It's just
mind blowing when nobody saw it coming, and Daniel kisses
this Indian boy and you could feel the jaws of
the audience hitting the floor and I loved it.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
So Kubrick and that introduction through full metal. When you're
eighteen years old, had you worked on any films or
you've been close to any film sets or studios before that?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yes, yeah, no, no, absolutely. I had a mentor Stanley Myers
that the man who wrote the music for The Deer
Hunter brilliant man. And so Stanley had this coffee machine.
He loved his Italian espresso. He had bought an unbelievably
complicated coffee machine. And so my job was to work
the coffee machine and Stanley would show me how to
(19:29):
write for orchestra. And her first day was Stanley Myers
and Nicholas Rogue sitting there looking at a scene. In
the morning, I was making coffee and they're both going,
we have no idea what to do, And by the
evening they'd come up with a mind blowing, beautiful solution,
musical solution. And I realized this idea of that you
(19:52):
have nothing, and that you make something out of nothing,
and that it is just a conversation and you just
you just breathed the picture in and turn it into notes.
That was a fantastic adventure. And then Stanny and I
had a little studio and Stanny was very good friends
with the producer Jeremy Thomas, who phoned me up one
(20:12):
day and said, would I mind coming in on Saturday
because he had a Riti Sakamoto and Bernardo Bertulucci coming
in to have a look at what Richi had done
on the Last Emperor and would I just go and
run the tape machines for them. So they piled into
my little studio and it turned out that there was
(20:33):
a profound lack of communication and Bettu Lucci had recut
the Last Emperors as flashback, while Sakamoto had scored the
previous version, which was all in chronological order. And the
other thing was Saka Roto's idea was that he was
going to play Banado the stuff have his friend Koji
(20:56):
recorded at Aby wrote, and he was gone because he
had a tour start the following day, and so nothing fit.
So David Byrne from the Talking Heads was the other composer,
and Kong Su, who was a Chinese composer but had
studied in Berlin, was another composer on it. So the
Chinese composer could only speak German, so I was useful
(21:19):
in this case. And Jeremy said, can you just go
up to Happy Road and just sort of sort this out?
You know, we called the orchestra, and I had no
idea what four M, you know, fifty one whatever. Something
that was in Real for was now in Real two,
but I'd never heard and I didn't even know what
scene it was supposed to go. And Bernada would go,
(21:41):
why is it getting quiet in the middle of a shot?
And I'm like tap dancing furiously coming up with excuses
to sort of not put the blame on Ritisakamoto. It
really wasn't his fault. So that was really my other introduction. Yeah,
And it was like, these people look crazy. These people
are genuinely crazy. And there was one day where Danara
(22:04):
was working out at Pinewood and there was something had
gotten the things kept getting lost, are things kept not
happening or whatever? And he fecked me up at my studio.
He goes, where are the Chinese death bells? I didn't
know that we're going to be Chinese deat belts, nor
did I even know that there is such a thing
as Chinese death belts. So I said, well, okay, I'm
(22:24):
really sorry. I'll come right over with that Chinese deathbelts.
So I made up something on the synthesizer because I thought,
if I don't know what they sound like, he won't
know what they sound like. And I came over and
as I got to Pinewood, Bernardo's walking up and down
at the gates to the studio and he's like he's
got his hands beyond his back. And I get out
of the Carlumn saying, look, I'm really sorry. It wasn't
(22:46):
my fault. By the way, it really wasn't, you know.
But I wasn't going to blame anybody. I just went
fuck it out to it and Banana went, look, I'm
really sorry. I shouted at you, and he handed me
a box of chocolates and he said, look, even though
I'm the DIY director and I'm paying you, I realized
that the seconds of your life are going by and
I should be more gracious.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
That taught me something. I mean, the more I worked
within the film business at these early days, and mostly
it wasn't so high, and mostly like working title. All
our cutting rooms were either above a strip club or
a pawn shop, and you know, and I would run
up the stairs with my little piece of music and
sing it up to the picture and hold my breath
(23:28):
because if the director didn't like it. But at the
same time I realized it was all entertainment, and should
it go wrong upstairs, maybe I could get a job
downstairs at the pawn.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Shop, you know, or the strip club for that matter.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Ah, the strip club for that matter, absolutely. And then
a working title offered me, like the twentieth movie or
something like this, that it was about the anti apartheid
movement in South Africa called a World apart Blaba Hershey,
beautiful film, beautiful film, Chris Inglis. So We're sitting at
(24:03):
the Grouto Club and I'm getting so what's the budget?
And Tim Bevan says, we're not telling you what the
budget is. Your wife is pregnant, and we know what
you do. You take all the money that you're supposed
to go and take home with you and you just
spend it on making the movie sound good. So we're
not telling you what the budget is this time, So
(24:24):
you go and do the movie and it's going to
be all right. So I did the movie, and it
turned out my daughter was born on the first day
of working on the film, and they opened an account
in her name and put the money in there. So,
you know, whatever you say about the things about filmmaking,
the you know how cynicure you want to be, there
(24:46):
are people who are genuinely have a heart. Gentlemen, gentlemen.
You know. The other thing which I think is so
vital is Hollywood, with all its cheapness and vulgarity, what
have you. It's the last place on earth that commissions
orchestral music on a daily basis, and if we don't
have that, the orchestras will just die.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
At what point were you immersed in the classic Bernard
Herman era of film scoring? Did you listen to a
lot of film scores? And no, none.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Not at all. I come from one of those snobby
European families where we went to the opera once a
week and we had no television because television was considered
the end of culture as we know it. And I
remember I snuck into the little local cinema where they
were playing Once upon a Time in the West, and
(25:41):
it was just like Ennio Morriconi, Sergio Leone, those shots,
and I'm going, that's it, that's it, That's what I
want to do, and there was nothing that could stop
me from doing this.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Did you feel at any point that you needed to
study film itself in order to do your all better?
Speaker 2 (26:01):
No.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
I felt I needed to study mythology. I needed to
study fairy tales. I needed to study psychology. I needed
to read like crazy, and I needed to sit down
and talk to as many dp's as I possibly could,
because if I was the years, they were the eyes.
I was the guy who would never go home. I
(26:23):
was always the kid who was still hanging around in
the cutting room, you know, just badgering the editor, going
why are you doing that? Why are you doing this cut?
And why and how does this work? And you know,
talking to the DP what colors are you going to use?
What the tone of this film? Tell me, what the
color palette is going to be?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Like knowing as we do now that you know, I
might watch The Crown in bed on my computer and
my wife is asleep next to me, and then if
it's Gladiator, you think let's just blow the fucking roof
off the theater and it's just blow it out. You know,
that's forty feet why twenty feet high? Is there a
difference between scoring for TV and for film?
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Not? There should be, There should be, But I don't
make a difference. I just I just feel there's a
right path if somebody has a compelling story. If Peter
Margen comes to me and he goes, I've given up
on doing movies, I want to do the Crown. You
take that very seriously. And Peter's vision is vast.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
And what a juggernaut that's been point. Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
Absolutely, I love Peter. I've known him. I've known Peter.
I want to say, I've known Peter all my life.
Peter and I speak German. He speaks better German than
I do. You know. We come from that working title
camp European cinema. It's really different. I mean I came
to Hollywood expecting it to be technologically far more advanced
(27:46):
than Europe, and I expected it to be far more collaborative,
and it wasn't. The composer worked alone, and he had
a ghostwriter who would never get a credit. You know,
it's like an army of ghost writers who never saw
their names up in light, and I thought, oh, that
poor boss is going to get their career. You know,
(28:07):
Stanley Meyers, my mentor. I mean he gave me credits
straight away. I mean it wasn't a big deal, and
we would all be in the room together. So I
learned from Stephen Fears. I learned from Nick Rourke. I
learned from John Flessinger. I learned from Tarry Malleck.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
You did Pacific Heights.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
We did Pacific Heights.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
I auditioned for that movie. I remember I was involved.
He did a movie The Believers, Yes, that Marty Sheen did,
and I was going to do that movie Ellen Barkin
and I think we're pretty close to getting those jobs.
And then the casting director cut our throats and got
rid of us because they felt we were too young.
I remember, I was just overwhelmed with a passion to
(28:45):
work with slashinger. What was he like?
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Same with me. Any director who in the middle of
scoring says, I'm so sorry, but I have to take
a few days off because I'm directing an opera in Salzburg.
Is okay with me? Do you know what I mean?
It's like at the end of all the scoring sessions,
he made a list of all the quotes of classical
music I'd used, which was that's great. It was a game.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
But again, knowing that writing music and performing music, what
happened to when you go and record it and you
hear it and you go it's that right.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Well, one of the things is to be absolutely clear
we are making a recording. We're not doing a concert.
You don't have the freese of a live performance going on.
So I try to have a bit of that going on.
For instance, I tell directors before I start working with them,
and they all get it. I will not make a
(29:39):
change during the scoring session in front of the orchestra,
will take it off the stands, I'll go home, I'll
rewrite it whatever you want, but I will not do
it in front of the orchestra because when the orchestra
is playing, it's about a performance, and we don't want
to stop, and we don't want to bore them, and
we certainly don't want to show any insecurity. The lion
tyming and film comp housing seem to have a close link.
(30:02):
You know, both can kill you. I mean the director
will eat your life. And if it's not the directors.
There's there's a whole bunch of guys in the brass
section who are just looking at you, going, okay, kid,
let's see what hams. Let's see where.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
You had some of that early on?
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Yeah, absolutely, and now we're fine.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Now.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
I actually had the one of the greatest compliments recently.
There's a percussionist in London who's played on everything from
you know, Star Wars plus all the classics, and I
saw him the other day. He goes Hamps. We were
worried about you when you went to Hollywood because we
thought you're just going to become one of those prats.
But you know something, you came back. You're still one
(30:42):
of us. You're still a complete music bastard and we
love you for that. So I thought that was like
the best compliment I could have, and it meant whatever
we were doing was going to be okay because I
was still part of them.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Now, when you see footage doesn't perform Romans ever.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
Motivate you one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Really, what's an example of a performance by an actor
in a film you did that really helped lift you
to the level you wanted to go in terms of
your score.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
Jack Nicholson in as good as it gets. Really didn't
know what to do. I was really struggling, and finally
I said to Jim Burks, Jim, what are you doing
in the weekend? Do you mind sitting on my couch
and let me just look at Jack. Look at what
he's doing. I mean, there's a history. Before Jack started
filming the movie, I was at his house going over, like,
(31:35):
he's going to play the piano. He didn't want to
play the piano. I'm going it's easy. I can go
and replace anything that's wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
No, Jack didn't want to play the piano.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Didn't want to play the piano. I think he just
wanted to talk to Jim a bit. But so Jim's
sitting there and we just started to work out together
what this character would be, Like it's the way his
legs moved, or it's just a little something in the shoulder.
It's never something he says, it's body language, it's a ballet.
(32:06):
And literally it was two days of just experimenting. Jim
sitting there and we worked the whole thing out, and
so you know, I totally understood what Jack was trying
to do.
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Helen Hunt, she wont to ask for I love that film.
He did too. Here do too, he did too. And
what I love is there's an almost pugilistic quality to
when he says his lines the woman of the legendary
line when he's at the elevator and the woman says,
how do you write those female? Do you write those
women so well? I think of a man and I
take away reason and accountability right, one of the greatest
(32:37):
lines in Hollywood history.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
There's another bit in it at the end when he
doesn't know how to go and see the Helen Hunt character,
and Greg Kinnear says to him, but you already have
an advantage, he already prepared to humiliate yourself. And in
a funny way, I've made that sort of my light
motif of how I'm going to go and play a
(32:59):
piece of music to a director or anybody for that matter.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
I'm sure, I'm sure that these examples have been There
might be none, or certainly few and far between. But
have you ever just pushed out your best effort and
you thought I can't save this movie?
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Yes, and being wrong at the same time, thinking this
is terrible, and then the audience loved it. You know,
don't try to predict anything.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
That's a very good point, you know, to.
Speaker 3 (33:25):
Th own self be true. I mean, look, you and
I we did a movie Pearl Harbor. Yeah, there's a line.
And girl and boy met forty five minutes ago in
the story and they're sitting next to each other and
she says to him, if I have one more night
to live, I want to spend it with you. And
I said to Michael Bay, Michael, you gotta get rid
(33:46):
of that line. I learn from Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott
always would say sentimentality, that's unanned emotion. And he's going, yeah,
don't worry, I'll get rid of it. He never got
rid of it. It's the favorite line in the movie
by teenage girls.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Oh God, Hans Zimmer, this is to every captive soul
from the motion picture Hannibal. When we return, Hans Zimmer
(34:49):
talks about how an invitation from musician Pharrell Williams helped
him overcome stage fright. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is
(35:16):
here's the thing. In twenty sixteen, Hans Zimmer did something
he hadn't done in decades, played in front of an audience.
The result was Hans Zimmer Live an arena style concert series,
which wouldn't have happened without encouragement from his friends.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
There was like a cabal ganging up on me. There
was Frell, Williams, Johnny Ma and my friend Anne Marie Simpson,
great violinist, and they're all sitting here and they're going,
you know, Hans, you can't hide behind the screen for
the rest of your life. Sometimes it is your duty
to look an audience in the eye, especially after you've
(35:57):
done so much. I'm gonna rrible idea. I think I
should just stay in this room, I mean. And so
this goes on and I keep saying no and then
get up and they're walking out of my room. And
right at the end, Farrell turns around and he says, Hey,
I'm going to play the Grammys. Do you want to
play guitar for me? And I thought only an idiot
(36:18):
would say no. So it was his show. The Grammys
were his show. I'm playing guitar. Through the whole performance,
he kept his eyes on me. He just to make
sure that I was okay, that was safe, which was
such an act of kindness. And I was going, Oh,
it's not so bad. This is actually good fun. So
(36:38):
I phoned. I felt, my friend Harvey Goldsmith, who promoted
the original Live Aid and everything else. I mean he
brought Springsteen to England, etc. And I'm saying, Harvey, if
I did a concert, I mean, do you think anybody
would come? He goes, yeah, I think so. So in
twenty fourteen, we did two nights in London and a
(36:59):
rock and roll and I thought it was important. Number one,
it was important to be a rock and roll venue,
and it would be fun to pawn orchestra into it,
or we can go more extreme. Because then we went
and did courchella, and I thought, oh, we have to
do courchella because we got to have an orchestra in
the middle of the desert and a choir. And secondly,
I want to change the way people perceive orchestras and
(37:23):
choirs because I can understand that going to a classical concert,
unless it's an amazing conductor, seeing a guy with his
back to you all night while there's a whole bunch
of guys and girls reading the paper is like a
bad marriage on a Sunday morning. So I said to
the orchestra, if I get rid of the conductor, I mean,
(37:44):
we have enough technology. We can go and show things
up on the conducting up on the screen. You know,
it doesn't have to be in the sideline. You will
have an autonomous sideline to the audience. Will that work?
And they said, yeah, absolutely, we'll have We'll have a
go at it, and that basically became the basis of
that tour and the idea of being surrounded by not
(38:07):
only great orchestral class, but great rock and roll class.
Because great musicians are great musicians. You either move me
or you don't move me.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
You know, it's interesting how when you write music. I
want to tee this up with the story, which was
I was haunted by the sequence in Cold Blood where
Robert Blake is watching Scott Wilson have sex with the
prostitute and he's sitting on the bed and that transforms
into his mother with a John and the father comes
in and it's this horribly painful, traumatic thing for the
(38:39):
Robert Blake character, and he's sitting there with tears running
down his eyes and the rain behind him in the
window running down the window, and they play this Mexican
ballad and I drove myself to the brink of insanity
trying to find out what the name of the song
was who the singer was, and of course who wrote it?
And I couldn't take it anymore. So you know, when
you're with c as an agency, they can get you
(39:01):
on the phone with anybody. So the next thing you know,
I'm on the phone with Quincy. Right. I said, now
this song in this thing? He said, yeah, yeah, man, Nina,
the song is Nina Baby. That's the name of so Nina.
And I go who wrote the song? And is a pause?
He goes, I wrote a baby. I wrote it. I
mean what you're talking about, man, I wrote the song
like I write all the songs. Did you feel that
(39:25):
they were parts of your career where you went to
learn to write music you thought you couldn't write, whether
you know, from.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
The culture, Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean I had
this from Penny Marshall. But she comes to me and
she goes, forties girls baseball. Though I'm going I know
nothing about being a girl. I know nothing about the forties.
I don't know anything about jazz, you know. And she goes,
(39:51):
don't worry about it, just do it, and oh yeah,
And I say I know nothing about baseball. She goes,
when they hit it, that's good. You know, I was
basically my brief. It took me a while to figure
out how I could solve this because I really don't
know anything about jazz.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
You felt you didn't know anything about jazz. You weren't
a jazz fan.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yes, but I didn't know how to do it about it,
And I thought, well, hang on, everybody's got like some
crazy uncle that when drunk will play boogie boogie on
the piano. So I thought, well, I can be that
guy playing boogie woogie in the piano and just orchestrated
and shoved in front of a bunch of very good players.
(40:31):
So that's how that score came about. Here's the thing.
Penny was a huge influence because she left having a chat,
especially between the hours of three am and seven.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
I had some chats with Penny.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
Right, okay, So so since I was one of the
few pans and musicians, therefore I was up and I
would use those charts. For instance, I remember one Penny,
how do you make a good movie? That's easy. All
you have to do is protect your star. And by
that I don't mean the actor, I mean your main character.
(41:06):
Don't let him say anything that's out of character, coming
off his mouth, don't let him wear anything that's not
in character, don't have his hair be stupid. Because when
you know what your main character is, then the rest
of the story will group around it. And I thought
that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, now what about with ron Howard? I mean, the
Frost Nixon thing is obviously a very dry, very powdery
kind of a drama, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (41:31):
Oh, man, that was a tough one.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
I mean O'shan and Frank. I mean, Frank is just
such a wonderful malvolioesque, you know, kind of presence and
everything he does, he just drips with a kind of danger.
You know what did Ronnie tell you he wanted for
that film?
Speaker 3 (41:46):
We all loved the play. And you know that's back
to Peter Margan and the crowd. I mean, that's a
Peter Margen thing. So ostensibly we had a meeting every
day for two weeks before he went out shooting to
talk about the song, to make the songs, to be
the right thing for the era. And I don't think
we actually got any songs in it. You know, I
would go, well, if you give me this close up,
(42:09):
I can give you this piece of music. Oh, I
can do something like this, and you know, so for
two weeks we sort of worked out camera moves and
we've worked out how to transform a play into a movie.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Now. One of the junctures in which I intersected with
your movie was a documentary series called Evidence of Revision.
It's considered the Citizen Kane of JFK Conspiracy Films. It's
nine hours long, divided into five parts. I'm listening to
this and this music comes on and I'm going, oh man,
(42:46):
this music is so fucking beautiful, and it's the last Samurai. Now.
He sampled a couple of your pieces for this thing, Hannibal.
He plays to every captive soul, oh yes, and oh
my god, you just the tears start rolling down your face.
Speaker 3 (43:06):
There's a big story involved for a Telly piece. Why
it's worth making movies? To me, Ridley had just come
back from Florence, I think, to finished shooting the movie.
It's Sunday night, eleven o'clock in the evening at Fox
in the cutting room, and it's Ridley, it's Pietro Scalia,
the editor, and me and the picture on the avit
(43:30):
is parked on a tear running down Claric Starling's face.
And I say to him, to both of them, I say, well,
she's crying because she's in love with him and she
has to betray him now, and really goes no, no, no,
it's a tear of disgust. It's disgusted this.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
Monthster when he has her up against the refrigerator.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Yeah, exactly, exactly right. So this goes on, So it
gets more and more heat in this conversation, and finally
we're standing and three grown men at eleven o'clock at
night on a Sunday are shouting at each other about
the meaning of a tear on a woman's face. And
I had one of those we had moments, you know
where the camera pulls back and I see us all
(44:11):
I thought, what a great job we are discussing Julie.
And I'm going, this is the most important thing to
us at this moment. And that's what this piece is about.
Because I said, Okay, Reddy, this is what I'm going
to do. I'm going to write the whole score is
going to be a romantic comedy. And he's going, okay, fine,
(44:35):
all right, if you can pull that off, fine romantic comedy.
So that is my big love theme.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
What's the movie of yours. You watch, will you sit
there when it's screens and you go, you know, it's
not that bad. Actually it's pretty good. It really does work.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Yeah, I know, I'm binary. It's shit. It's not shit.
I think they could all do with a bit of
a do over, an improvement. But I tell you the
opening to The Lion King, I mean, it was really
important to me. I wanted that African voice. My friend Lebo,
who I discovered at a car wash, he was a
political refuge to you, but he was working at a
(45:12):
car wash. I said, come and just come and do
this thing. And you know, like within the first notes,
you know you're now not in Kansas anymore.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
What advice do you have for people who you're working
with who are young people who want to because I'm
assuming that actors can come and go they have their
houseyon period, writers, directors, but it seems like composers, when
you hit it you can stay there for a very
long time. Your career has been a very long time
now and you've stayed at the top of this business
(45:43):
for a very long time. What advice do you have
for people who want to get into that part of
the business, Just say.
Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yes, you know, like when Penny Marshall says, do you
not do a movie about baseball and swing? Go yes,
I know nothing about it. Just be honest, I know
nothing about it. Sounds interesting, right, you know?
Speaker 1 (46:03):
Hold yes.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
I remember being on the phone with Ron, just out
of courtesy. Right at the end. I thought I should say, well,
what are you working on? And he said the Da
Vinci Code. I'm going, oh my god, it's like run
on monologue. It's totally uncinematic. How can you? I mean,
how are you going to do that? And it's a phenomena.
How are you going to deal with the phenomena? And
(46:26):
he goes, yeah, I know. And ten minutes later, my
agent fil to me. He goes, what did you say
to Ron? I'm sorry. I know he's setting off on
this journey and I just probably really, like, you know,
made it even worse for him. He goes, no, no, no,
he wants you to do the film. He wants you
to solve it for him, you know. And it gave
(46:48):
me a year of being able to immerse myself in
art and in literature and to hang out at the
Louver at night.
Speaker 1 (46:58):
You know, this is why people say to me, why
am I on the border the Philharmonic, I said. The
movies often disappoint me, The theater sometimes disappoint me. The
symphony never disappoints me. When now I go see the
New York Philharmonic play, I'm never disappointed.
Speaker 3 (47:14):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Your music. Is there a joint ownership of that movie
and the publishing rights and so forth for the soundtrack,
album and so forth? Do you have some control or
do the studio? Is it a buyout and they own it?
Speaker 3 (47:25):
They own it. But there's a law that says you
are allowed to perform anything you want to perform, all right,
So I think it would be heenous to not be
able to own my life. Wow, you know, because that's
really what it is, isn't it. I mean, you know
that thing Bernardo said to me. You know, as the
(47:47):
seconds of life are taking away, we are creating these things.
You know.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Had an actor turned to me once he said to me,
you're gonna go back to your trailer, I said it.
He goes, Why do you go to your trailer?
Speaker 3 (47:58):
He said?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
The sets where you want to be even when you're
not shooting, he said, pull up a chair, he goes.
Just be a part of it. Absolutely, Just watch them shoot,
And as I've gotten older, when I read a script,
I say to myself, could I stay on the set
during the entire shooting process of this movie and just
be a witness and watch them do this movie? Do?
I love it that much? And that's become a metric
(48:19):
for me. Actually, and I spend far more time on
the set now than I used to. I never go
to my trailer anymore. Is too boring.
Speaker 3 (48:26):
I think my whole career is based on I would
always hang around and be the guy asking the stupid questions.
You know, not be afraid. Why are you doing it
like that? You know, tell me, explain this part to
me or whatever. You know, everything informs everything.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
But you nailed it when you said this is our lives.
We spent our lives doing this.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
It is our lives. And that's what Parrell and Johnny
mob were so right about that I should stop hiding that,
I should do things in real time, be on a stage.
If I'm going to have a pratfall. Yes, if I
go Hello Oslo in Stockholm, they will forgive me.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
Let me just finish by saying this, as you're scoring
the sequel to Boss Baby, please make me look funny,
made me look smart, made me look powerful. Okay, when
you're writing the music, just have that in mind. If
you don't mind made me look.
Speaker 3 (49:17):
Powerful, we have not only have we fulfilled that free
fuck you know you getting away with that line. I
have a beautiful voice. I mean, just start at pausing,
just have your voice, just let it lay there, let
them all be enthralled.
Speaker 1 (49:35):
Well, listen, thank you. You're one of the greats man.
I mean, your movie scores are just I mean, these
people that you work with, they're lucky to have you. Boy,
what a difference you make.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
It's just been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Composer Hans Zimmer. This is from the motion picture The
Last Samurai. I'm Alec Baldwin. And this is here's the
thing from iHeart Video
Speaker 4 (51:06):
U
Host
Alec Baldwin
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.