Original subtitles

Ladies and gentlemen, Hans Zimmer!

There's a word I don't use very often, which is "genius."

Hans Zimmer is one of them.

He has the incredible capacity to reinvent himself

without losing his identity.

He's a storyteller.

He tells stories with music.

It's not a job. It's like a calling. It's like a crazy thing.

I can't imagine not writing music.

Hans Zimmer is the world's most sought-after

and prolific movie composer.

He's written music for blockbusters, romcoms, animations,

and even iconic nature documentaries.

This is a dangerous place.

He's fascinated just by sound itself.

He has all kinds of technical ideas and tricks going on at any one time.

Throughout his career, he's broken all the rules

about how you compose music for films.

I don't think anybody's ever won an Oscar for a score

that blatantly is bagpipes, heavy metal guitars,

and a woman screaming at you.

This is great!

He doesn't want to read a script.

He wants me to tell him,

"What is the movie you think you're making?"

It's like being psychoanalysed.

Even if you're not hearing what you want to hear always,

the project gets better every time it gets under Hans's microscope.

He remains a child, in a way.

You have to have that quality in order to, sort of,

be a successful musician for all that time.

I've been doing this for, what, 40 years?

Somebody the other day said, "When are you gonna slow down?"

"What do you mean, 'slow down'?

"I'm just getting going.

"I'm just getting started".

Hans is experimenting with some ideas

for the soundtrack of a new BBC natural history documentary.

I'm just trying to get you something that sounds remotely frozen.

I'm using a bit of noise,

make it a bit more tundra-like.

You know, I mean, I like the idea that there's a wind

rattling across everything.

I'm literally making it as we're talking about things.

Er, let's say...

Let's go and use this tool.

It's relatively chilly, but we can make it chillier.

Bit of frozenness.

The problem is that the wind across a tundra

and bacon frying are very similar.

This is a stronghold

for one of Antarctica's most remarkable inhabitants.

The seriousness and the depth that we bring to this project

comes a lot from me being a kid.

One of my main memories is,

just shortly before my father's death, where he took me to the Rhine,

which was completely covered in foam.

And he was explaining to me,

"You know, look, we're destroying the world.

"We now need to go and do something about that".

And I think it hugely influenced me in our work with Sir David Attenborough.

Hans was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1957,

into a Jewish family.

I knew what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

It would be brought up quite a lot.

The fear was that, you know, "What if you tell the neighbours?"

Your best friend can turn on you within one moment.

While still a child,

Hans's family was torn apart by a bolt from the blue.

The week before my sixth birthday...

My birthday was on a Sunday,

my dad died on either the Friday or the Saturday.

And on Monday, my mother, who was totally overwhelmed,

basically dropped me off for my first day at school.

It was like...

You know, all these kids, terrible teachers of an older generation.

Then came the moment where she said,

"You know, I think you should have piano lessons.

"Do you want piano lessons?"

And as a 6-year-old, 7-year-old,

you think that stuff you hear in your head,

a magical man is going to come

and tell you how to put it under your fingers.

Of course, that's not at all what happens.

Some horrible German comes,

who raps you across the knuckles if you don't play your scales right,

and if you're not, "Read, read, read, read, read!"

And to this day, if you put music in front of me,

it just starts getting wobbly and swimmy, and defocuses.

Despite having only two weeks of formal lessons,

Hans found his home in music.

I play the piano because it put a smile on my mum's face.

It's the only reason.

It's not the only reason. It put a smile on my face too.

Hans kicked against the rules, not just in learning music,

but in everything.

He was thrown out of eight schools in Germany

for not conforming to the strict discipline demanded.

The music teacher threw his chair at me. Erm, I remember that.

He always told stories of his childhood,

and all the shenanigans he got into,

crazy thing in boarding school that got you kicked out, you know.

He got kicked out of boarding school quite a few times.

I know my mum was really worried about me.

I think everybody was really worried about me.

Hans's rebellious streak led to his mother moving them to England.

There they found a progressive school where he could concentrate on his music.

On graduating, he followed his dream and joined a band called Krakatoa,

mainly playing working men's clubs.

♪ Don't apologise It's not your style... ♪

We were the entertainment nobody listened to.

We were so bad, up north,

we would be the support act to the strippers.

♪ Treat your mama good ♪

And it was interesting, because it was the '80s,

and it was Margaret Thatcher,

and it was coal miners' strike.

Whoa, it was rough up north.

People were so frustrated.

You know, you left London and you entered another world,

you entered another country.

And this country was a country that was desperate,

and it was poor, and it was everything

that you could only imagine of the left-behind and left-for-forgotten.

And to this day,

I have this person I write my music for.

And she's fictitious.

She's called Doris, and she lives in Bradford.

She has a grey coat, and, you know, is of uncertain age.

She's got two terrible boys. I mean, they're so ill-behaved.

And her hair-dye job isn't very good, you know?

And she works really hard throughout the week.

And come the weekend, she has a choice.

She has a choice of going to the pub, having a drink,

or she has a choice of coming and seeing one of our movies.

And she's a hero to me because she works hard.

And so when she comes and sees one of our movies,

I want to make sure that she gets her money's worth, and...

I promise you. I mean, every movie,

I sit there and I go, "What would Doris think?"

It's so easy to think about the past in a nostalgic way.

Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.

My friend Warren Cann, drummer from Ultravox,

we decided to do an album together, which, absolutely, we couldn't give away.

To this day, we couldn't give it away.

Oh, and then we had this crazy idea.

We did a concert at the London Planetarium.

You know, basically, people looking up at the stars

and us playing weird, cosmic music to them

and scaring the children in the process of it.

The 1980s saw a revolution in music, video, and film production.

Computers and synthesisers were changing how music was made and recorded.

Hans saw the potential in all this new technology

and made himself the master of it.

I was seriously into synthesisers,

and I was a lot skinnier then as well.

But I still have this, of course, and I still make music with it.

And you know that sound that basically pins you

into your seat when you watch The Dark Knight?

That's that beast.

It was a time where you suddenly could have access to computers,

so the whole idea about doing things on stage

was far less exciting than the idea of "How far could I push this technology?"

It was in this unassuming yard

that Hans began to hone his writing and production skills.

Together with his friend and mentor, composer Stanley Myers,

he set up his first recording studio.

I mean, you can tell from the glamorous nature of this door,

that this is the door that leads directly to Hollywood, fame, and Oscars.

This used to be my studio.

Actually, it wasn't my studio, it was Stanley Myers's and my studio.

Absolutely extraordinary composer.

I mean, everybody owes a lot of things to everybody in life.

My film language, for instance, I very much learned from Stanley.

It's really simple.

If you don't have a tune, you've got nothing to hang on to.

So, this sort of somewhat decrepit building

actually turned out to be a haven for us.

I don't think many people had this sort of idea

that you could go and do film scores

with a little keyboard and not an orchestra, but you could.

I want to be manager of this place. I think I can do it. Please let me.

Of course, My Beautiful Laundrette,

I think, was pretty much the first thing we did here.

Stanley Myers was doing the music for My Beautiful Laundrette,

and Hans was always in the other room.

So, for some reason, that was where you ended up.

Stanley was always in the front room reading the racing news,

and there was clearly a rather clever chap in the back

doing all the work.

A skinny, lanky guy who was German,

with a little computer thing,

and everyone thought, "What the hell's that?" basically,

and ja...

Because I guess it was electronic,

so Hans was doing it

because he knew how to work all those machines.

And he knew how to make the eccentric sounds.

Between them, they thought up what the film should sound like.

And it was pretty obvious when it was a Stanley piece,

because it was elegant and beautiful,

and when it was a Hans piece, which was a bit like lead boots.

And then it was all rewrites for me.

And Stanley would very gently

steer me in the right direction.

He's an incredibly charming man.

And he was just absolutely brilliant,

because he had this new form of, in a funny way, '80s music,

but he also had the wit and the ability to charm

and to be the whole package, as it were.

Without that character, he'd still be a great composer,

but he wouldn't have been the successful composer he is. No way.

It was this weird thing,

because, in England, you were always an equal.

You were totally involved in the storytelling,

and that was the thing that I thought was really exciting,

these conversations you are having with film directors,

which were far more up my street than just playing in a band.

I know that he's the most successful composer in the world,

but to me, he's the boy in the back room.

Makes me laugh.

By the late 1980s, Hans was gaining a reputation

as a film composer of British films and TV.

He is developing fast.

Yes.

A knock on the door at Lillie Yard, late one night,

was going to change his life forever.

11:00 at night, musicians' hours, of course we were working.

I open the door and there's a guy there,

and he's going, "Hi. My name's Barry Levinson".

Pause.

"I'm a Hollywood director".

From the first time I met him, I thought that he was extremely talented.

And that's before he had worked on any of the music.

I just got... Sometimes you get a feeling with people that you connect.

And he came in, and I mean, basically, the bottom line of the story is,

he went, "Do you want to do this film, Rain Man, that I'm working on?"

And I said, "Yes".

Hans's ideas for Rain Man were unusual

for a traditional American road movie.

There's a tendency to use, sort of, guitar music,

that type of, you know, travelling across country.

And I didn't think it was appropriate for the piece.

And he came up with that sound,

which was very unique and very distinctive...

...and very different than a normal travelling movie.

You know, I'm sure the studio wasn't thrilled,

because it's like, "Oh, I got somebody, Hans Zimmer,"

and they're going, "Who?

"For this film? We got Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.

"And who is this composer?"

For his first Hollywood movie, Hans received an Oscar nomination.

I went for that lunch that they have, the Oscar lunch,

and I picked up, I don't know, five, six, seven...

I mean, I didn't stand up and say, "Anybody got a movie?"

I just sat there and people would come up to me and say,

"Hey, do you wanna do my movie?"

The following year, he composed the music

for yet another Oscar-winning film,

Driving Miss Daisy.

And then, in 1994...

The first notes that you hear, you're in.

And it's magic.

And the vocal that you hear with it...

...poetry.

Musical poetry.

The studio had given Hans a strict brief about the opening.

It was supposed to be 20 seconds of Elton's song,

and then it was going to be a dialogue scene,

and dah, dah, dah, right?

And I forgot about the 20 seconds.

I just got excited about doing the chant with Lebo.

Then I did an arrangement of Elton's tune.

And so I played it to them, and as I'm playing it to them,

I'm going, "Oh, God, I forgot. It's supposed to be 20 seconds long,

"and then it's supposed to become a dialogue piece".

And they sort of shuffled off into a corner,

and they're talking, and I know what they're talking about.

They're talking about who are they gonna get to replace me.

I'm going over there, and I'm saying, "I'm really sorry.

"I can do this thing in 20 seconds."

They're going, "No, that's not what we're talking about.

"We're thinking we're gonna go and reanimate the whole opening.

"Take all that dialogue out, and dah, dah, dah".

It was an experiment,

and what's in the movie is my original demo.

The African sounds...

...the unique instruments...

it's beyond profound.

♪ The circle of life ♪

And the Oscar goes to Hans Zimmer for The Lion King!

So full of life and wonder and beauty.

I wrote a speech, but I realised it's so boring, so I'm not gonna do it.

I'd like to thank my wife because she's my best friend.

I'd like to thank my daughter because she thinks I'm cool

because I did The Lion King.

I'm incredibly nervous. Tell you what, writing a score is much easier than this.

Thank you. Just let me go, okay?

♪ In the circle... ♪

Listen to how many songs of how many scores end on...

...exclamation point that is...

amazing, and a signature of his.

The directors and the producers were coming in

and I hadn't finished it,

so that's why that big drum, the "boing!" is there...

...to distract them from the fact that I hadn't finished the track.

Hans used his mastery of digital technology, especially sampling,

to change the way movie directors collaborated with their composers.

The standard way of working with a director, before Hans,

is that there was no way to present the music

other than to play it on the piano, "Here's your theme,

"the brass comes in down here, and the strings are playing this".

You know, I wasn't as good a piano player.

But one of the things I figured out really, really quickly,

that the best way to communicate with a filmmaker

was to play them, like, a fake version of the score,

a synthesised version of the score.

So basically what you have is,

you have all the different instruments, the horns, you know, and trumpets.

In those days, nobody did it like this other than Hans, nobody demoed things.

Nobody, you know, mocked everything up so you could hear it beforehand.

Hans was quite unique that way, and I liked that method.

I love technology. I loved his way of doing it.

And that's why things changed in film music,

you know, when he came on the scene.

Part of it was the technique he was using, to do it with these "demos".

Hans didn't just change the way composers use technology,

he developed a sound that influenced

a whole generation of movie composers and directors.

I'm fascinated by the idea of time.

The ticking happens a lot in my stuff.

Rather than going for a groovy rhythm,

it's ticking without accents.

It doesn't give the game away,

where the next pass or where the next cut is.

It's just like a river flowing.

And it sort of takes you on a journey.

In his score for the film The Thin Red Line,

he developed a technique of building an incredible tension

over very long scenes.

What it got was this incredible feeling of fate and dread.

It really was unique at the time.

There's not really anything that quite does that.

He's very influential.

It's part of the language of filmmaking now.

I completely ripped him off on that. I've ripped him off on other times.

And then other times,

there's probably a few little moments where he's ripped me off back.

It was everything that music school tells you you can't do.

So there was the...

You're not supposed to do parallel things.

And they're all minors.

And it's asymmetrical.

You know, music school will teach you

you're not supposed to do things in these sort of parallels.

They're not chords.

A chord needs three notes. This is two notes, always.

And it just sort of meanders in this...

And while this note always stays...

So you get these really interesting clashes.

And became a sort of, a new language in film.

By the 2000s,

Hans had established himself as one of the top composers in Hollywood.

He was always looking for a new way of doing things.

Along with his business partner, Steve Kofsky,

he built a studio complex in Santa Monica,

expanding it over several decades,

where teams of composers and sound technicians

work on movies, TV shows, and documentaries.

Hello, boys. Hi.

What you guys working on at the moment?

Erm, His Dark Materials, Wheel of Time.

People here get the opportunity to rub shoulders

with the right kind of directors.

I mean, guys actually sit in meetings. Hans brings in...

Whoever's working on the project with Hans will be in a meeting.

This was your big idea,

so I just want to make sure I don't destroy it.

The beauty of the old show was it was full...

He wasn't afraid to bring in his team into a meeting.

Don't break it.

There's always been ghostwriters in films,

but Hans opened up the door to all of his assistants...

...who were able to experience the meeting

and take that for their own careers, moving forward.

At the centre of the complex lies Hans's studio,

an extension of his own personality.

I, as a European working in America,

I miss a Europe that doesn't actually exist any more.

And I myself had these doubts about staying here, you know,

and I wanted to go back to Europe.

And I thought, "Hang on. This is Hollywood.

"You can be and build whatever you want to do".

So I was very precise about my thinking about this room,

even though it just looks like some crazed German tossed it together,

because I knew I was going to spend 90%, probably, of my life in this room.

I thought I might as well have some fun with it,

and do something which lets people speak their mind, you know?

A room that is safe.

Hans works in a space that removes you from the world.

You've never been in a space like it.

It's always been fun to hang out there,

sometimes watch him suffer,

have a glass of wine while he suffers.

The environment inside his studio

is so alive with exploration and discovery that it's a blast.

A sort of samurai thing, and it's really kind of, you know...

This room is like an old Buddhist temple or something like that.

What else going on there with the keyboard and whatnot?

And you just sit on a nice couch and you just feel it,

you talk about it, you feel it, you talk about it, feel it, talk about it.

And he's on the keys, he's feeling it.

He's having the conversation with the keys as you talk about it.

And then you find, "What's that? What's that? What's that note?

"Do that again. Is this written down?

"Okay, it's being recorded. Okay, it's being recorded. Okay".

He doesn't want to read a script, so he...

You know, it's like being psychoanalysed.

He wants to, you know...

He wants me to tell him the story.

- Right. - Because we talked about that...

Not only tell him the story but, like, "Why must I tell the story?"

It's about getting the big picture.

It's about figuring out what moves somebody,

what doesn't move somebody.

It's about playfulness.

Right.

That's why I don't take notes.

Why take notes?

We'll just record it. We'll just listen to it afterwards.

Okay, this part of our meeting...

There's nothing that stops playfulness more than seeing somebody taking notes.

You know.

Suddenly, it's a job.

And he asks all kinds of questions.

I think he's searching for an angle.

And then he'll be like, "That's it."

Womp, womp, womp.

Instead of...

In the case of Pirates, he was technically unavailable,

but I really think he just thought it was a failed endeavour from the outset.

Just the genre, a pirate movie,

was like, "What are you doing?" Like, "Pass!"

You know, but in a "nice" way.

Like, "I'm doing Mission: Impossible. I can't do your pirate movie".

Erm, so when we were done editing, I brought it to him and played it to him,

and I think he sort of shifted,

and he started playing at that little...

They had fired the original composer.

That's very interesting.

And we had three weeks to finish the score.

So, Hans went home and started writing.

And he wrote all the themes overnight.

And then we talked, you know, at length about,

like, the drunken waltz.

Like, why is Jack like that with his sea legs?

What is that?

It's not just a waltz, it's a kind of slurred waltz.

Keep a sharp eye.

So, the character of Jack Sparrow is...

The notes go up, positive.

Sort of, you know, the innocence.

There's like an innocence, hope, in there.

You know, it's like, "Oh, I can go and do anything, right?"

Now...

this bit...

It's a bit naughty, right?

That's the wrong chord.

So, you go from naughty to, you know, he's doing something.

It's still benign, but it's definitely the wrong chord.

Here we are.

We're back on the safety of the optimism, but...

The devil's fifth

to a minor chord.

So, that's part of his character. He is definitely naughty.

And then he does something unexpected.

He changes key right in the middle of the phrase,

but only for one second.

And it resolves in a sort of classical way,

which is really a lie,

because he goes to something even naughtier,

et cetera, et cetera.

So each phrase is part of his...

I'm describing his character.

It kind of rolls like you're on the deck of a boat.

Boat and rum make for unsteady rhythms.

It's not clever. It's just fun.

I think Hans has an approach, which I wouldn't call unifying,

but I do recognise it over and over again.

It's this great ability to build a theme.

In The Da Vinci Code,

Hans refined the technique he pioneered in The Thin Red Line,

of using a small number of notes to create complex, driving themes.

I mean, this is so simple.

The simpler these things are,

the more I fear I'm going to get found out.

I mean, look, I can't think of any artist who doesn't think,

"They're gonna catch me at it. They're gonna find out".

You get some very simple notes

that inspire other simple notes that go with it,

and you can go and play with these rounds.

It's not easy, but it's incredibly powerful and stirring.

That's one of his patterns that you will see,

and with different kinds of themes, different sorts of tunes.

Some of them are just one or two notes.

Some are very melodic, like this one.

But getting that music, through repetition,

to sort of evolve into something,

go from one place to another,

well, that's what every movie wants to be, is a journey.

And, you know, his cues often convey that.

It's a journey. It takes you on a journey,

and you add experiences every time round.

I mean, you've heard it,

so now you need to add another layer of experience,

a layer of time, layer of something to it.

This technique of creating longer themes that build and build,

found their ultimate expression

in the films of one of Hans's key collaborators.

I've never liked music that feels layered onto the movie,

like sauce going onto a piece of meat.

You know, to me,

good film music really should be baked into the DNA of what the actual film is,

and woven into the fabric of the film itself.

And Hans was very on board with that process.

There's certain things which I know they're good ideas,

but I'm not good enough to do them yet,

so I use the next movie to actually go and get a little bit better at them.

Hans's work with Nolan

would result in some of his most memorable scores,

involving war movies,

dream stealers,

and superheroes.

It's not who I am underneath,

but what I do that defines me.

What he was doing on Batman Begins is,

he was distilling the essence of this great icon,

not into a complex melody,

into an idea of almost the sound effects approach of these bat flaps,

these kind of big whooshes of noise.

Literally two notes,

but the recording process that went into that,

the layering process,

the hundreds and hundreds of tracks of sound that is supporting that

musically and harmonically, and all the rest,

and the different combinations that allowed from us is extraordinary.

At times, the music is very, very minimal,

but the production methodology is always extremely expansive

and full of design ideas and imagination.

I mean, that's nothing, right?

And then the theme is...

It's two notes, right?

That's it.

And only at the end does it break, and it goes...

Still the same two notes.

And it becomes triumphant for one moment...

before it recedes back into darkness.

You know, just for one moment, you can see...

You know, quite monoptical.

He's fascinated just by sound itself,

beyond the emotional qualities of music.

He has the best samples, for example, of anyone in the world,

but he continually strives to improve them.

When it came to "The Joker Suite,"

he was like, "I'm convinced that the Joker should be a piece of music

"constructed from one note."

I was like, "Oh, God, here we go."

But if anyone could do it, it would be...

That's more the thought of an inventor, you know?

Come on, come on. I want you to do it.

Come on, hit me. Come on, hit me!

There's something anarchic about the Joker.

Hit me!

I bumped into him, he was like,

"I think I have to concede. It has to be two notes."

So he spent ages on this,

and it became the iconic, distorted violin thing

that's just the two notes going...

I thought the Joker was the most interesting character in that movie.

He was always in control of the situation,

and was the only one who always spoke the truth.

And then this idea of these endless rises

that start in one pitch and just climb and climb and climb.

Come on!

This idea of just one note

metamorphosising in this absolute, incredible...

And very quietly as well.

I wanted you to lean in a little bit, you know.

I wanted you to lean into the darkness.

Could you please just give me a minute?

That, to me, is something no one had really ever done.

You had people who wrote extremely note-y symphonic music,

and you had, like, rock guys who just about crossed over enough

to be able to scramble together a film score.

But to have someone sort of right in the middle

who could steal the underlying structural techniques

of modern, popular music,

and then understand enough of all the vocabulary

of all sorts of different kinds of, and often, symphonic music,

and sort of put that together.

People don't need to think about this when watching a movie,

but it's one of the reasons that he's able to deliver

so much of the feeling you need in the storytelling

without being invasive and fussy and pompous.

The more I worked with Hans, the more I realised

the value of his creative contributions

to the conceptual underpinnings of what the films could be.

With prompting from Nolan,

Hans developed radical new ways of scoring a movie.

With Interstellar, I actually got him to do his first demo

on the basis of a short letter that I wrote him,

explaining the feelings,

the sort of fable at the heart of what the film was going to be,

without even telling him the genre.

And I did that while I was writing the script.

I gave him one day to give me his first impression

of the emotions I was talking about.

And what he did for me in that one day became the basis of the entire score.

Chris made me write this whole score away from picture.

It was a good experiment.

I was writing freely.

I wasn't a slave to the edit, as it were.

He stopped writing pieces of music

that are integral to the structure of the film,

and he started just writing music and not watching the picture.

So he would create a 35-minute piece that he would try against picture,

and it would inform then the process.

By writing these big, long pieces of music,

it gives you more of a sense of what the picture is

and how the music can help it.

Some months ago, I was rewatching the movie with friends,

and we're all sobbing.

And I realised that the way that my friends were experiencing the movie

was completely different from how I was,

because I was able to hear how my father loves,

you know, because that movie is about a father and a daughter.

And to be able to hear how my father loves

and how he sees his children,

I think, is probably the greatest privilege of my life.

He worked really, really hard.

You'd catch him in the mornings, catch him at night.

But throughout the day, every single day, he was working.

Yeah, I'm glad that he takes more breaks now,

not just for us to be able to spend time with him,

but also for himself.

Because he hasn't been around in my life and the life of his children all too much,

he's tried to really make up for it.

I think every parent comes with flaws,

but he's really tried to show us how he can love.

He doesn't always say it, but he shows us with his gestures.

He tells you with his eyes, "I understand.

"I'm here.

"I'm sorry I wasn't earlier, but I'm here now".

Having conquered the world of superheroes and science-fiction epics,

Hans was on the lookout for new collaborators and new projects.

He sought one out.

It was a world away from Hollywood blockbusters.

I made a film called Shame.

There was a lot of temp music we were using from Hans Zimmer.

It was close to him, but not exactly.

So we were just playing with it. I thought it was okay.

It's not that piece of music, obviously,

but yeah, it is obviously hugely inspired by it.

So I was in New Orleans, in a hotel room,

and I get this call early in the morning, and it's Hans Zimmer.

And I said, "Oh, shit, this geezer's gonna sue me. What's going on?"

Maybe he thought...

He goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no.

"But why didn't you ask me to work with you?"

I thought, "I never thought I could."

He was like, "You should ask me.

"I'm interested in working with great filmmakers like yourself."

I said, "I'm working on this film, 12 Years a Slave. Are you interested?"

He goes, "Yeah, of course!"

"But you're expensive."

"Don't worry about that. I would love to work with you."

That was the start of our relationship.

Hans is lavish with what he brings you.

12 Years a Slave is the really good example.

We were there with empty pockets,

and he was getting people on planes, and first-class musicians,

to come over from Germany and start working with us and developing...

We wanted a kind of slightly homemade feel

about some of the score in 12 Years a Slave,

particularly in that area where he's trying to write using juice.

I loved working on this so much. I thought it was important.

Nobody believed in it.

We had no budget.

It's very few of us,

but I remember Steve being in the room, and it's like,

the intimacy was vital.

It was a very low budget film,

and it was really Hans's generosity at bringing the right ingredient over

and getting him to work with us.

I'm a short-order cook.

You know, I go out, I find...

I go shopping.

"Oh, good ingredients, you know,

"fresh tomatoes, special...

"Oh, look at those carrots! They look really good," you know?

And then I spend forever peeling and chopping, et cetera.

And because the ingredients are fresh and the ingredients are delicious,

I'm hoping it's gonna be okay.

He's a kid who doesn't want to do homework,

and he's like, "What the fuck?"

But at the same time, he's working.

It's working, he's working.

Shit takes time. You know, anything takes time. You know?

This desire never to be pigeonholed

even led him to score natural history films.

Hans brought all his feature-film experience to these projects.

The iguana and the snake scene.

The best car chase nobody ever filmed.

I know every director is just immensely envious of it.

He's always changed. He changes and changes.

Yeah, he uses a sound for a while

as he kind of perfects it,

and then there's this era of that sound on films,

and then he'll change again. He gets bored with his own sound.

Hans's most recent work not only earned him his second Oscar,

but it might be the most radical reinvention of his sound ever.

His brief was to create what the director, Denis Villeneuve,

described as an "alien score."

The idea for Dune that it should be a score

that will use unknown instruments...

that the sound will be something that would come from another time,

from another place.

It was also very important that the score would have

some kind of spiritual quality.

It's one of the main themes of Dune, that exploration of religion,

and the danger of mixing religion and politics together.

It was really important for me to find a great female voice...

...and then frame her

with all these instruments which we built, which we synthesised,

which we drove people crazy that write software, you know.

"Can you build me a resonator that will turn Tina Guo's cello

"into a Tibetan war horn?"

"What does a Tibetan war horn sound like?"

"I have no idea."

As much as he has designed all those alien instruments,

he decided that the instrument that will have survived

10,000 years in the future will be the bagpipes.

He started to compose with the bagpipes,

which was very fresh, surprising, and interesting.

And the Oscar goes to Hans Zimmer, Dune.

I don't think anybody's ever won an Oscar for a score

that blatantly is bagpipes, heavy metal guitars,

and a woman screaming at you.

"What's going on here?

"Where are the strings?

"Where are the nice things?"

It was just a provocative thing.

Hans began his musical career in a band touring working men's clubs.

His life has turned full circle as he takes his scores on the road.

But these days, the venues have changed.

His enthusiasm has increased.

I think it's going out on tour that's responsible for that.

He loves the people he works with. He loves touring.

It feeds him. It nurtures him.

When he's on a stage,

there's nobody who quite has that relationship with the audience.

They come in to see a maestro

and they end up seeing somebody who feels like a friend by the end.

I used to be so afraid of being on stage,

but nowadays, it's just like a dinner party with 12,000 people,

just having a chat.

He's had a midlife crisis, and become a rock star.

I'm still learning something.

I just want to use all those things I've learned.

I want to go and play with these synthesisers,

and I want to go tell all these stories,

and I want to go and work with all these directors.

He is not the norm, that's why he has the career he does.

He doesn't want to do things the way other people have done it,

and he thrives on it, he loves it.

Things moved really fast.

Life isn't as long as you think it is.

You have a choice. You can go and try to live a playful life,

or you can go and live a life which excludes playfulness.

And it doesn't get you anywhere.

Playfulness gets you somewhere.

It's fun, it's inspiring, just making a racket,

and hopefully, have a bit of a laugh.

It's wonderful.