Original subtitles

You know, a music library, when I started out, was absolutely the devil.

Actually no, it wasn't the devil, it was the lowest...

Nobody wanted to do library music, and nobody was using library music,

but I don't think it's to do with film, it's to do with television.

Suddenly we have an enormous amount of material and programming

and at the same time, of course,

everybody jumped onto the library album wagon.

But it's still different, writing a piece of music to film

than it is to write a piece of music to some imaginary film or whatever.

It's like anything. Suddenly, everybody is doing library music,

everybody is trying to do television,

everybody is trying to do whatever, you know?

It's basically, musicians are just trying to earn a living.

If libraries can guarantee you a living, great.

If film can guarantee you a living, great.

I mean, I say this time and time again,

you know, Hollywood, it has a gazillion bad things you can say about it,

and they are all true, 100% true.

But I tell you what, here's one thing it does really well:

every day it commissions orchestral music.

So, that makes me happy because it means that there is actually an outlet

for people who want to compose orchestral music.

And secondly, it keeps the orchestras alive.

So, you know, we have just evolved,

it's not the court of Myanmar or whatever that keeps the orchestra alive,

it's now Hollywood; it's commissioning music.

Films... God, I can't say, I mean, it's going in weird directions.

But you know, when we did "Batman Begins," we never thought we would do a sequel,

it never occurred to us to do a sequel, you know?

we thought we would do one movie. Now everything is a sequel.

Do you think that when I got involved with "Pirates" I thought

I would even hear about this

10 years later?

I mean, Batman: "Batman Begins," "Dark Knight," "Dark Knight Rises."

That's 12 years of my life.

Three movies to you, but for me,

12 years of coming back to a motif.

It's not a theme, you know?

It's like, it was two notes and an idea.

And now I'm in the third movie, 10 years or so later,

and this still has to hold true,

I mean, I still have to be able to get something out of it, you know?

I suddenly got interested in all this minimalist stuff,

so I really dug myself a hole there,

it became very complicated.

But there is a weird human condition, which is that we want to tell stories.

That we need to tell each other stories,

and that we make technology that is in the service of telling stories,

and right now, you know, it's film and television.

And television has gotten very interesting,

and you suddenly have people like Amazon and Netflix and...

you know, that are not film studios,

are producing content on a level of a film studio.

So there's a constant evolution

of the possibility of storytelling,

it's like you don't know what to watch anymore.

The reason I always liked film was because it was always aiming

for a very high level of sonic quality and visual quality.

IMAX being really up there.

Because early on in your life as a musician you can make a decision.

Are you going to go and aim for the lowest common denominator,

which when I started was a transistor radio in mono,

or now, you know, is it the speakers on your laptop or whatever,

or do you want to go and aim for the highest thing

which is, you know, a great IMAX sound system

or Dolby Atmos or whatever.

And what I've found over the years is that technology has a way of catching up

and trying to aim for excellence

as opposed to the lowest common denominator.

And it's trying to aim for excellence "at a price," obviously.

The studio that I can have in my laptop now

would have been so unthinkable and unaffordable in the '80s.

Like, every kid can have access in one way or the other

to a Neve console, to a Fairlight,

to something much better than a Fairlight.

My children are editing their own movies on their laptops, you know?

They're making their own movies on their iPhones.

So the technology has advanced brilliantly.

So now the question still is,

who is willing to take the risk to tell a story?

Who is willing to take a risk to tell stories in a provocative and new way?

Who is willing to actually give the audience

an experience that they have never had before?

Because everybody's got the tools to do it,

but it takes a great risk to say,

you know, after all, you go to school and you learn all those normal things

that are still a legacy from the Industrial Revolution somehow, you know?

You have to go and, I don't know, be good at economics,

or be good at whatever it is.

But nobody wants you to be a musician, not really, you know?

I mean, I still get this, if I walk into a room full of people

and they don't know who I am and somebody says to me, "So what do you do?"

And I say, "I'm a musician."

They go, "No, no, no. What do you do for a living?"

So the great shift, I think, is going to be

in more people figuring out

that they need to take the risk to become storytellers,

to become poets, to become painters,

to become musicians, to become composers,

to become DJs, to become crazy software writers,

to do these things to...

You know, we have people here...

I remember speaking to Mark Wherry, who designed my sampler,

who is a very good pianist and a very good clarinetist,

and I said, "Why don't you play more music?"

And he goes... because he thinks of himself

that he will never become as good a musician

as he will become at designing tools for great musicians.

So, I think that's a fantastic ambition that he has,

that he understands that we need more people

who design beautiful tools for musicians.

I mean, the main synthesizer I use is the Zebra2,

built by Urs Heckmann in Berlin, and I remember saying to him,

"Why don't you put a sample engine into this thing?"

And he goes, "Well, I've got one lying around

but I'm not really interested in that."

And I thought that was a really good answer.

He wasn't interested in building a sampler.

Let somebody else build a sampler.

He's interested in building a great synthesizer.

And, you know, people who are constantly striving to build tools

so that you can tell your stories better, that's what interests me.

And I think that's what Hollywood is. At its best, that's what it does.

At its worst, we sit there and we're not entirely sure

how to go and make the sequel interesting.

Learn the technology, but learn about stories.

You know, it's not music school that got me here.

Trust me! I had two weeks of piano lessons.

It's being interested in storytelling.

It's being interested in the human condition.

It's being interested in figuring out how to push boundaries.

That you go into a project with a crazy idea, it always starts off like this.

Somebody in the room is going to say,

"I have this crazy idea, I'm not sure if it's going to work,"

and usually when they first present it, it's shit.

But then everybody... but we take that and we,

"Ooh, yeah!" but there's something there, and we just need to figure it out.

Collaboration. I mean, what you need to do

to be a good film composer is like what all good musicians learn to do:

they learn how to listen.

You know? It's like...

Listen to the subtext, listen to...

See beyond the words.

I don't know, it's...

And it's not a career.

It's not a job.

You can't get into it because you want to make a lot of money.

I mean, yeah, I think there are more people now earning a decent living

at making music because of library and television and all that stuff.

But it's not Wall Street banking. If you want to make money,

go into Wall Street banking.

If you have a burning desire to go and tell a story, to write a piece of music,

to jam with other people, that's the only reason.

I mean, so, what do you need to make great film music?

You need a f*cking laptop, you know? That's it!

And imagination, and inspiration, and a little bit of courage.

It is more difficult, and it's time that we men got out of the way.

It's as simple as that.

I used to work with this amazing composer, Shirley Walker.

She could write the toughest action cues.

The most testosterone-sounding action cues I knew.

And for years she was my orchestrator.

And because nobody would hire her as a composer, and finally I said to her,

"Shirley, I'm firing you because you will never become a composer

if you always can fall back on being my orchestrator."

She was Danny Elfman's orchestrator as well.

And lo and behold, she started to have a career.

And, I mean, you know, she's a far superior composer than I will ever be.

She really had to fight for this.

And it's not just film,

it's not just the music business, it's... you know, if anything,

the music business is relatively harmless

insofar that it seems to be relatively un-racist, you know?

You can be from Africa, and you can be from England,

and you can be from France, and Germany and whatever,

and you can be in the same band.

But we just need to get rid of these stupid ideas

that "a composer" is supposed to be a guy or something like that.

If we want to hear more interesting music, we need to let more people in.

It's as simple as that. And it's about people.

And I don't care about gender or culture, you know?

As long as they have a voice and they have something to say.

And everybody has a voice, and everybody has something to say,

and there are really interesting female composers out there.

I always had a problem with this thing, "rights in perpetuity."

You know, in eternity?

That always felt like a really long time,

so my contracts are always "in perpetuity minus one day."

It just makes me feel better.

And it really pisses off the lawyers.

It organizes itself. It's...

No, I mean, I have Steve Kofsky, I have really brilliant people running it,

but the whole point is,

I didn't want to have this thing where technology,

which was much more expensive then than it is now,

would disenfranchise people from having the opportunity to do a movie,

so I wanted to create a place

where everybody had access to really good technology.

But it very quickly turned into this other thing as well,

which was that it was interesting to have other musicians around

that could talk to each other, or could help each other out.

It's probably the worst business model you can ever imagine,

but that's sort of not the point.

I don't know, just to me it's interesting to hear other people's music,

and to be surrounded by other musicians.

Part of it is, I suppose, a psychological problem

because we musicians are weird, and we're sort of isolated,

and when you're a composer you sit there by yourself,

and I just recently, for the first time in my life,

went out and did a tour and started playing the stuff live.

And part of it was the convincing argument that my friends had made, which was,

"Hans, you got to get out of your windowless room."

I've spent 40 years in a room.

I'd go home, I'd go to the studio, and I'd go back home, you know?

Let me tell you about my Hollywood.

I don't go to parties.

In fact, today is, I think, the Oscar nomination lunch, right?

Which is what everybody wants to go to.

I'm sitting here with you guys, instead.

I'd much rather sit here with you guys

than go and get dressed up and go to an Oscar lunch, you know?

If I want to have a proper conversation with any of these people,

I'd much rather do it with a few of them in my room

in the middle of the night with a good glass of wine.