Top movies featuring Hans Zimmer's music
Hans Florian Zimmer (born 12 September 1957) is a German composer and record producer. Since the 1980s, he has composed music for over 150 films. His works include The Lion King, for which he won Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1994, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Thin Red Line, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar.
Zimmer says both he and Nolan wanted to take audiences on a journey on the big screen with Interstellar.
We want it to be bold. We were aiming for the best sound systems,“ said Zimmer. "And, yes, it was really important for me that people wouldn’t hear this music detached from the movie for the first time on their little computer speaker because that’s not what it was designed for.
For Inception, I started off going, “Chris, I think this is an incredibly nostalgic, romantic movie. I think this is a great love story. Let me go write it as a love story.” However, I knew I couldn’t use the vocabulary that we’re used to in films for whatever a love theme is. I wanted to stay in that idea of mathematics and the minimal world. I spent a year playing with what is the world of mathematics, what is the world of dreams and what is the world of time. People keep talking about the movie is if it’s about dreams. I think this movie is about time and our perception of time. I think it’s a great time travel movie, actually.
Although Hans Zimmer is responsible for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises we decided to only list The Dark Knight because of it’s amazing Joker's theme.
The Joker’s theme from The Dark Knight is a stroke of genius, the cello made to sound like a maddening, malign mosquito that you wouldn’t dare to swat.
On the whole they’re harried and urgent and make you want to pop on some leathers, grab the nearest motorbike and ride around the city in a downpour fighting corruption.
Down to earth movie about Formula One rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda which encouraged Hans Zimmer to go “back to the roots” with this soundtrack.
This movie is about two characters and there happens to be racing involved. One of the great things that Peter Morgan does, which is quite tricky for the composer, is he writes balanced characters. You don’t have good guy and you don’t have a bad guy. Give me a Joker any day. You know what I mean? The ambiguity is partly what drives the score.
At the same time, there’s a soulfulness that these characters have. James Hunt is man that is surrounded by everybody, but he’s one of the loneliest characters in the world. There is something nice about being able to go and write a fantasy about real people, but what you want to do is also honorable to their spirit. I hope – I think – the score is stirring that.
Powerful mystical score written by Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard couldn’t be better suited for a movie filled with blood sport.
The thing that became the main theme, Lisa kept calling it the “Earth Theme”. The first time I played it to her, she absolutely got what I was going after, which is actually this very, very beautiful theme. But I can turn it on its head, and before a battle scene hear it down in the basses, and it’s very threatening. And at the same time it becomes the kiss. It becomes the figurines. It becomes the thing about family. But it really is about this personal life of this character. And what was fun was to take this very humble theme and turn it into a thousand different emotions just the way it would be. Really, it’s about danger. At the same time it’s about peace.
From Sci-Fi through drama and action Hans Zimmer (along with Elton John & Tim Rice) manages to set the tone of animation movies as well.
It was very much my idea to bring in Lebo M (to sing the opening of “Circle of Life”). Yes. My whole idea was to go and start the movie off, because up until then I think most of the Walt Disney movies felt like we were basically doing a Broadway musical. And I thought, ‘I want to tell the audience straight away that this isn’t Broadway.’ Of course now I’ve eaten my words because it’s the most successful Broadway musical pretty much of all time. But at the time, I was fighting every Broadway instinct, and I’d said to Lebo, ‘Come and work on The Lion King, it’s going to be great. Will you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, of course I will.’ Then he completely disappeared and I couldn’t find him. And ten minutes before the directors and the producers came to hear the first track, the doorbell rang and it was Lebo. And I said, ‘Get in there!’ and I literally plopped him in front of a microphone, played him a few chords, played him a bit of that tune, and then said, ‘Okay, go.’ You know, talking about the ink not being dry when everybody else came in. It was literally the first and only take. And then an hour later he said, ‘I’ve always been like this.’ Suddenly, he’ll spark up imagination and we’ll be making music together. Something will happen.