All language subtitles for 07 - Sound Palettes - Hans Zimmer Teaches Film Scoring

Okay,

I, I really try.

On each score to find,

to create a palette that that

that I haven't used
before and b as possible.

Nobody else has used before.

So there's a lot of experimenting
going on.

There's a lot of, you know,
what happens if you play the violin

B you know, behind the bridge
and stuff like this.

What would that sound like?

And that's sort of happening, right?

You know, and every day I get a new idea
and that's

I'd like a team of engineers
running around.

Just try to keep up with me.

And some, some of it is it's just quite
frankly, it's just me procrastinating,

trying to avoid having
to write the next note and going,

I can't possibly write this next note
unless I have the gong underwater.

played with, you know, I don't know, three
snorkels or something, guys,

you know, some some hideous thing
I make people go through to do this

and. Then we were working on

the Batman movies.

I mean, Gotham City doesn't exist,

but it was very important that Gotham City
had its own sound, you know?

So working with,

the King, for instance,
the sound designer, and my friend

Mel West, and we really tried
to figure out how the music could.

Seep, dissolve,

it metamorphosis into,

a more abstract sound, into atmospheres
and to room tones

could dissolve into the proper
hard, real sound effects, which could then

at the same time
be reflected in the images that you saw.

And very much you know, the light.

I mean, the stylized lighting

and the sound had to make sense.

You know, I think a very bright city
across Gotham City wouldn't have worked,

you know, and the same time, I mean,
I remember because I, you know, I did

Batman Begins with my friend
Frank James Dean Howard, who's

a far more elegant composer,
I mean, so I kept forever making him

do you know, the the stuff,
the Grand John, the architectural

wonderfulness of, you know, the shiny

glass and steel of of that city while I,

you know, but I became a specialist
at grubby night scenes.

but, you

know, James used a very, very different
sound to describe those colors.

But if you know, and in a funny way,

we never talked about it,
but it was fairly obvious that,

you know, there was a different
instrumentation called for to show,

you know, to, to show the hope of,
you know, that the,

you know, the, the beauty of the city
before it got destroyed.

As soon as you say, a very blue shot.

As soon as you said, I hear a sound.

and and maybe, you know, I mean, look,

I don't think it's a particular talent
I have.

I think it's just. It's just how I.

I hear the world.

Maybe more than I see the world.

I mean,

just like
I think the DP spent a lot of time

figuring out how to look at how to light
something and how to use certain colors.

you know, the set aside,
how to how to create an environment

in which it is possible
that the story can unfold.

I need to know what the DP is starring.

I need to know how
this thing is going to look.

And so

the colors are really important that the,

you know, because music and

music and image, I mean, you know, it's
it's all the same thing.

It's light and frequency, you know,
I mean, light goes into,

you know, when you slow it down enough,
it becomes sound. So

we need to coexist
and we need to complement each other,

you know,
I mean, if you look at, Vittorio Storaro

book, actually called Lucia, you know,

writing with, light,

and he just shows you

the paintings he's looked at
and the, the way he uses light.

I mean, these are all things
that you might think is not

what a composer should study, but
I think a film composer should study that.

I think that's that's that's where you're,

you know, the paraphrasing of the notes
and light is where I get my ideas

from the paraphrasing,
you know, very often.

And I hope Aaron Sorkin will forgive me
for saying this very often.

I just watched a movie
with the sound turned off

because I sort of
know what they're talking about,

but what I want to see
as this is how the shadows fall, how

the movement of the cutting is,
how the editing works, how

the light

falls and the colors fall,
and the thing I mean,

one thing I learned in animation, was

and it seemed so obvious to me,

animators would put up a whole movie,

every scene, just as a color strip,
you know?

Okay, hang on.

This this scene

is going to be sort of a light blue,

and then it's
going to get a little green here,

and then suddenly we're going to go red.

And obviously the motion
is going to be heightened.

And those sort of ways
of looking at things,

actually,
I mean, it's a it's a beautiful shorthand

because you can get a movie down
to, to, to one piece of paper

about this white and

all that during set
designer, costume designer, actor.

writer, composer.

They're trying to give you the illusion

that this world, you know,
we try to create worlds

and we try to give, give these worlds

a totality.

And when I started doing a sampling

these instruments,
the technology wasn't really there.

but because I am a geek and I'm obsessed

and it's not a job, it's my life.

we decided we had to build our own sampler

because the the, you know, the firepower

just didn't exist in those space. So.

But but these days, you know, it's
it's like

samplers to a penny.

But the, the,
the important thing was to sort of

do these sounds myself because then
I could be very specific about them.

And I, and I never understand why

it's so easy to do.

It's learn your computer,
learn your instrument.

and then,

you know, you, you must have some mates
that make interesting noises.

Can't do your own samples because
everything starts telling the same.

Otherwise,
I was asked to judge, competition

once of young composers,

and, I don't know,
they were all gravitating

towards the same sample library.

So the the problem with samples is that,

this note will always be the same.

It's just a moment captured in time,

and it's, it's,
you know, it's a still photograph.

So when I was judging this competition,

people
were writing all this beautiful music.

But after a while,
it all sound at the same

because the emotion, each note
was identical.

It just sounded like gray.

After a while. And,

but my whole point is I need to go on
these sample expeditions before, you know,

it's like, you know, okay, we're going off
to go and create new sounds,

create a new palette
at the beginning of a project

so it doesn't matter
what it you know, what it tastes.

The process is pretty much
the same. You you know, you.

You get something that

is bespoke
and you get something that works

for you.

and then,

so this is,

my favorite cellist.

Tony, please, I know specifically
because I do all my own samples

because I love these players.

it's a Stradivarius.

so it's not a bad ax, you know?

and when I write,

when I play, when I.

I actually see him in front of my.

You know, I know how he plays.

I know him so well.

So I write for him.

I specifically write for him. And,

I know
he will play much better than I can.

but but the huge advantage is

it's him. It's he's right there.

He reminds me of his musicality
all the time.

Even though this is just,
you know, some dodgy samples.

and that's that,

you know, and I started doing this
this year, years and years and years ago

to actually sample these players,
not to replace them,

but to quite the opposite to,

make directors

and studio executives interested in

what an orchestra can do,
because there was a period of time where

everybody thought that if you do not
Castle score, it'll sound like Star Wars.

And they would go,
oh no, we don't want orchestral score.

And they didn't realize that there was
there was so much more to be done with it.

So I went to the players that I adored

and loved and said to them,

you know,
this was the beginning of sampling

when they were all freaking out
that they would get replaced.

I said, look, let me sample
you and I promise you

I won't replace you of anything.

It'll create more work.

And I think there are many, many

horrible things you can say about
Hollywood, and they're all true. But,

amazing thing about

film is
we're sort of the last place on Earth

that on a daily basis,
commissions orchestral music.

And I think that's something important
about that.

You know, not because I write particularly
well for orchestras, but the idea,

you know, an orchestra
is a very expensive hobby.

so you can't have it as a hobby.

And this, you know,
but I want the possibility to

I want the tradition
to be maintained, that

we can have orchestras,
that we can have orchestral players.

And if this thing, if, you know, weirdly,

that this computer now suddenly can,

help maintain that tradition and make sure
that if my kids want to learn

the violin, it's not that they could
actually make a living out of it.

And, and and it actually is an,

a viable career to have,

you know, I'm all for it.

Sherlock is as still that the title itself

already has some inherent baggage
that comes with it.

That's been

so many actors have portrayed
Sherlock Holmes, so many

Sherlock Holmes movies exist.

So it's sort of, you know, so how do you
find yourself out of the maze of cliches?

So it really was very much about

figuring out
who this character is, in this case

played by Robert Downey Jr.

I thought this is where they've always
gone wrong.

This is my conceit.

They have all gone wrong.

There's some beautiful Sherlock scores

that have nothing to do with what I did.

but for me,

I wanted, you know,
I want to widen my gaze,

which is sort of a line, actually,
from from the movie.

And I thought,
well, we we are in Victorian England.

We're dealing with a man

who is extraordinarily inquisitive

and we know he plays the violin.

And every Sherlock movie you've ever seen,
he plays,

or he plays,
you know, he plays classical violin.

And I thought, but hang on a second.

We are at a junction time,
you know, the British Empire.

Yeah. You know,
people were going all over the world.

The exotic was suddenly, you know,

something interesting for people.

Different culture
suddenly started to seep into England.

And I thought, what if he.

Didn't play the classical violin?

But if he played gypsy violin, because,

I mean, I grew up in Europe and,
you know, the true virtuoso player

where all these, you know,
gypsies are actually the derogatory term.

It's really Roma,
you know, these great Roma musicians

that play passionately and it's different
and it's,

it's more interesting
than if you played Einstein.

You know, Einstein played Bach,
Einstein played.

But he's not Einstein. He's

he's this,

you know,
he's a slightly more dangerous character.

And so on the one hand, I had the violin
and that he was going to play it

differently, but he wasn't going to play
classical music.

On the other hand, I would just
I just thought about Victorian.

I mean, I when I'm not here,
I live in London,

I live bang in the middle of Soho
and it's one after the other.

I was thinking in Victorian times
it must have been

just this jangle of noise
as you walk down the street.

You heard the bad piano out of one place.

He called you out of the next door,
banjo playing in another thing.

So why don't we make you know what again?

What's the world we can create?

One of the things,

I try to do

straight away is that you set up.

Right at the very beginning of the movie.

An unusual sound, you know, a sound

that you didn't associate necessarily with

the polished expectation of a

well behaved Sherlock Holmes movie.

I wasn't going to go and do a well behaved
score, and Guy wasn't going to do a

well behaved Sherlock Holmes movie. and.

There's an inherent problem
with that sort of thinking,

which is your audience comes up to you
into a movie with certain expectations.

They come with certain baggage,

especially if you're dealing
with a subject like Sherlock Holmes,

which they know and they expect,

you know, a, you know, a certain behavior.

So and I and I really think
this goes for every movie,

right

at the very beginning,
the first thing you do, you know, and,

and in this and Sherlock,
I mean, I, I fought for this set.

I, you know, the, you know, that
I could take the real estate of the logos

and actually start telling story
that actually start setting up a sound.

You know, actually, the most extreme
example I can give you just.

But at least until it's, it's
the same thinking as

Lion King, Lion King.

I didn't really want to do Lion King
because I,

I kept saying, number one,
I don't like Broadway musicals,

and you guys just make these fairytale
movies, and that's not really my thing.

and they kept saying, no, no, no,
we don't want you to do that.

We want you to do your thing.

And I realized the audience
was probably thinking, like me,

that they were going to go
and see another princess movie,

but it wasn't going
to be a princess movie. So

by finding my friend level

and putting that African voice
right at the beginning over the black,

it just said to the audience, hang
on, it's not going to be

that sort of a Disney movie,
just like in Sherlock.

It's not going to be
that sort of a Sherlock movie. But

it might be interesting

and I'm inviting you on this adventure.

Come along on this journey,

which might not be quite
the way you expect it to be,

but that's the good thing,
and that's what might be fun.