"This isn't a job," Hans Zimmer says, characterizing his film scoring career. "This is me." And just because he's already won an Oscar for The Lion King doesn't mean he takes his 1999 double-nomination (Original Dramatic Score for Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line; Original Musical or Comedy Score for the animated Prince of Egypt) any less seriously: "Anybody who tells you they don't get excited about this stuff is either or lying!" Zimmer has come a long way since his days as a sideman with prophetic '80s pop wonders the Buggles ("Video ed the Radio Star"). A partnership with English composer Stanley Myers (The Deer Hunter) led to Zimmer's pioneering fusion of synthesized and acoustic sounds and launched one of the most successful careers in modern film composing.

Amazon.com: How did you settle on such an impressionistic musical approach to The Thin Red Line?

Hans Zimmer: I spent almost a year talking to Terry [Malick], long before he started shooting. None of it was direct research, but in a way it was all to do with the human condition. Terry had this crazy idea--or maybe it was mine--that I should write the music before he started shooting. I think we ended up using one phrase from [that early work] in the movie. I kept saying, "Ennio [Morricone] made it work." Sergio Leone apparently used to say to Ennio that it was his job to inspire the director, not the other way around.

Amazon.com: Was there a unique pressure because Malick is something of a legend who hadn't made a film in 20 years?

Zimmer: The reason I agreed to do the film was that we saw a kindred spirit in each other and became like brothers--with all the problems that go with that. We would have tremendous fights trying to make the film and then make up just like brothers. For me, Terry was an interesting man who had something to say. The fact that he'd been away for 20 years just means he had more time to think about it. Our work processes are very similar; we're both incredible procrastinators. His aesthetic criteria of what is good is pretty high, and so is mine. That doesn't make for very fast work. Toward the end, I worked on it for nine months without a day off. Occasionally people would pull me out. In the middle of a crisis Jim Brooks pulled me aside and asked if I'd given Terry the speech yet. I said, "What speech?" He said, "The speech you gave me on the last one [As Good as It Gets]: maybe it's so hard because you haven't worked in a while!" But Terry gave me the greatest gift anybody's given me in a long time--the opportunity to reinvent myself.

Amazon.com: In what way?

Zimmer: The first thing I did was go through everything I knew and threw it all out. There weren't going to be those big astic moments that I know how to write so easily. There's a danger of sounding pretentious, but I wanted to write truthfully and very personally, to show things that I keep private and hidden. Once you get rid of the clichés you're left with a blank page; you're like a toddler learning it all from scratch.

Amazon.com: The Thin Red Line and The Prince of Egypt seem like a jarring artistic segue.

Zimmer: There was one day of not working between them, so it wasn't a huge segue for me! I should have put a comedy in there somewhere. I also did a documentary for Steven Spielberg, the Shoah thing, The Last Days. So that year I only dealt with subjects that, if I got them wrong, could offend people. On Prince of Egypt, I realized you're dealing with people's faith. I can sum it up in one scene, "The Burning Bush," which I had such a hard time doing. Everything I tried was very urally specific; it would either sound Hebraic or like Catholic church music, which took the power out of it. The dialogue is the Bible and you can't edit it. People have a problem with that! So Jeffrey Katzenberg suggested that you see a man confront his god. He knows how I work--by throwing down the impossible challenge. The final conversation went something like, "I will write this piece from a completely personal point of view and therefore you cannot criticize it like another piece. And if you don't like it, you can find somebody else to do it."

Amazon.com: What kind of artistic interplay did you have with songwriter Stephen Schwartz?

Zimmer: I was brought in to figure out how to give the film an overall tone. I'm not a good arranger or orchestrator; I have to make it my own. It took a lot of courage on Stephen's part to let me change his stuff, make it partly mine. Stephen is great with story. He could say one sentence and I would know where to go with the score. Ultimately, I always knew that I was going to write the score and the songs were going to be his. But there wasn't an intellectual division; we would ask each other for help. Put two very strong individuals together who have their own styles and it makes for something good, but the journey to get there is full of landmines. The only way you get it done is by serving the movie; leave your ego outside.

Next is an interview from Lukas Kendall from Film Score Monthly. It has appeared as part one of a Zimmer interview in Vol. 2 No. 7 of September 1997 of FSM.

Lukas Kendall: Can you tell us something about Peacemaker?

Hans Zimmer: I wouldn't mind talking about why the magazine keeps slagging my stuff off.

Lukas: Yeah, well, we were dreading this moment but we knew it would come. You go first.

Hans: Okay, well, why am I given hell for things I am not even guilty of? Like The Rock, which your magazine called another horrible Hans Zimmer score. Why doesn't Nick Glennie-Smith get the heat? It was sort of his score.

Lukas: I think on that one specifically, word had gone out that it was a Hans Zimmer score for whatever reason, and it was producers you had worked with before. Just from the experience of having this magazine and this website, I know how people repeat information that gets spread around, and it's interpreted as accurate.

Hans: Yeah, but you print it.

Lukas: Yeah, and I get shit for it.

Hans: All right, good. But that's the whole thing I was referring to, that it came out of here [Media Ventures]. What does that mean?

Lukas: Well, what you've done has never really existed in film music for any length of time, as far as writers collaborating-

Hans: Ghostwriters have existed.

Lukas: Ghostwriters have definitely existed and you're unusual in that you say, "He did write that." Whereas people over the years have gone, "Well, so-and-so never added a note..." We have different generations of film score nerds. The oldest generation thinks Alfred Newman is the greatest composer ever, then you have the people who think Jerry Goldsmith is the greatest, John Williams is the greatest. To these fans, film scoring is a tradition of people working on a piano in their homes, alone.

Hans: But Jerry is starting to credit people who have written for him.

Lukas: But I don't know of any instance where he had uncredited ghostwriters.

Hans: Didn't he do that on Star Trek?

Jeff Bond: Yes, Fred Steiner [on Star Trek: The Motion Picture].

Lukas: And on Outland Morton Stevens wrote the ending fight.

Hans: Yeah, but the new Star Trek, didn't Joel McNeely...?

Lukas: Well, Joel Goldsmith, his son contributed to that [First Contract]. He [Jerry G.] has always done scores in ten days or three weeks; this is the first time he's actually said, well, this guy will write 20 minutes or whatever and receive credit for it.

Hans: Because I ran into Jerry in London while we were doing Peacemaker, and he's already finishing one thing or another, and then by the next week he's finished with Star Trek.

Lukas: Ghost and the Darkness. The story was that he was going to do Star Trek, something happened on Ghost and the Darkness, so he had to go back and kill another week on Ghost and the Darkness, and didn't have enough time for Star Trek. Why people give you shit is that you are something new: more than one person is writing a film score, which is something that hasn't really been done since the days of Universal, where you have like Henry Mancini and someone else writing a horror score.

Hans: If you look at the credits on Alien, it's like composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman.

Lukas: But Lionel didn't write anything.

Hans: Still, there's that mark there, "Jerry wasn't allowed to conduct his own score."

Jeff: Lionel conducted a lot of the Fox scores.

Lukas: There are several stories with that: one that he [Goldsmith] was exhausted, another that it was union issues dealing with London. The other is that he wanted to sit in the booth and hear the balance of electronics. On Star Trek: The Motion Picture [which Newman also conducted part of, in Los Angeles] it was the first time he was piping in the blaster beam.

Hans: The thing that keeps creeping into the magazine about this place [Media Ventures] is that it's a "factory." That's the word used.

Jeff: I think I'm guilty of that. I think part of it for me is a style thing, in that I'm more of an old-school person, and you represent more of what contemporary scoring is becoming. Part of me is reacting against that. I don't know how much of The Rock was yours-

Hans: I just want to say, categorically, the CD of The Rock stinks.

Jeff: Actually, I was going to say I enjoyed the music more after hearing it apart from the film. A lot of the stuff that is done musically I like, it's something I have to get used to stylistically.

Lukas: We're the ones saying, "What's this rock and roll shit?"

Hans: Yeah, but why a factory? Why are we described like that?

Lukas: It just seems that these movies are pumped out in a factory-like manner, with 30 guys who have machine guns in them-

Hans: Yeah, but if you look at my career, that's probably the minority of the stuff I've done.

Jeff: Don't you think that you have really defined the style for contemporary action pictures?

Hans: For better or worse, yes.

Lukas: With Black Rain and Backdraft.

Hans: But Backdraft isn't rock and roll.

Lukas: But it has the same sort of muscularity to it.

Hans: Well, there was a girl in it occasionally [laughs]. I mean, Crimson Tide...

Lukas: You're the first person ever to say publicly, I don't have time to write this score, so this other guy is going to write some of it and I'll supervise.

Hans: But that's actually the wrong perception. You know what it is? I got a break because a film composer [the late Stanley Myers] gave me a break, and when I came here nobody gave anybody a break. So Jay [Rifkin] and I set this place up not as a factory, but as, okay, this week you're my assistant and next week you're doing your own movie. I gave a class at UCLA and left at the end knowing that nothing I said mattered, whatever anybody said doesn't mean anything: you have to do it to learn it. And I do think you should get credit for what you have written.

Lukas: I agree.

Adam Smalley: There's a lot of non-credited ghostwriting going on. I grew up in L.A., I'm Jack Smalley's son, I'm from a musical family; my brother is an orchestrator, Scott Smalley. And Hans said something years ago: why is it just these four composers doing all these movies? And it's true. Those four composers hire ghostwriters. I saw what happened on The Rock; Hans came in and he saved it.

Hans: It wasn't supposed to be my movie. It was Nick [Glennie-Smith]'s movie and Jerry [Bruckheimer] didn't like the tunes. It had nothing to do with Nick's sense of writing or his caliber as a composer, it's just Jerry didn't like it. I came in and wrote-I was the ghostwriter! I wrote some tunes for it which kind of became the main themes. And I said I don't want a credit on this, this has nothing to do with me, this is not my movie. And then Nick phoned his agent and said he couldn't have his name over opening credits, over a piece of music that I had written, so would Sam [Schwartz] please insist that I take this credit. But the point was, I was happy to get Nick started in his career. My whole joy is, if Mark Mancina does Speed, I get to go to the premiere without having to work on the fucker, and it's fun because here's another composer, for better or worse, suddenly doing big movies. So okay, Mark's stuck a little in the action stuff. [laughs]

Lukas: Do you like action movies?

Hans: I liked Crimson Tide. I think Broken Arrow was a disaster.

Lukas: I hated that, I couldn't believe it.

Hans: And that, by the way, was not a typical action score. I was poking fun at it, with that main theme! Nobody could take it seriously.

Adam: What a great thing, though, working with John Woo.

Lukas: But that's what amazed me; it was even worse than Hard Target.

Hans: I didn't see that. John asked me not to see it. I hear it was just horrible. You know why I did Broken Arrow? It sounds so stupid, but I did it because every action movie started to sound like what I had been doing. So after a while, this is not against Mark Mancina or anyone else, but everything started to sound like Black Rain. I wanted to do Broken Arrow so I could reinvent the form; I did it once before, so I thought I could do it again.

Lukas: Do you think you did it?

Hans: No. No, it didn't work.

Lukas: I think you've created something that will be around, if not indefinitely, then for the foreseeable future.

Hans: Black Rain was a disaster for me, because the score I had written was the score I wanted to write, and the producer hated it, because to him it wasn't an action score. He wanted whatever action scores had sounded like before that. So I got very, very close to getting fired. There was one moment in fact that it got so bad, people at Paramount were shouting at me so much that I fainted.

Adam: You were physically exhausted, too.

Hans: Yeah, but Black Rain was difficult because no one had done that kind of thing before.

Jeff: So did you win out and get what you wanted?

Hans: Yes, I stuck to my guns. There was a little I had to change at the end; there was a famous moment where I was told that the end just wasn't enough like the fight in Rocky. Well I got the video out for Rocky and listened to it and there's no bloody music in the fight in Rocky! Jeff: I know people were disappointed because the villain wasn't impaled.

Hans: We used to have that in the movie.

Lukas: By the way, these movies, they're two hours long and they have an hour and fifty minutes of music.

Hans: At least. John [Powell] had two hours in Face/Off.

Lukas: We were watching Black Sunday, from 1977. There's a long chase, a guy's chasing a terrorist in the streets, and there's no music. It goes on for like ten minutes. We're being assaulted by music now.

Hans: I think people don't have the courage to let things play in silence. I used to have a rule: I would never work with the director who did Willow. [Jeff and Lukas laugh] But I forgot who the director was, so I got on Backdraft and was talking to Ron [Howard], and I said I always said I will never work with the director who did Willow, because the music starts at the beginning and stops way past bedtime, you know.

Lukas: See, you've created something that is able to give directors what they want even though they shouldn't have it.

Hans: I fight about it, too.

Lukas: You've created this environment where you've got synthesizers and you've created this music that's very pulsating, that hits you almost more than you hear it. It's something that maybe it never used to be an option, where they couldn't say, "Jerry, we want you to do this movie from beginning to end and do it 14 different ways." He'd say, "No, I'm going to work on this for six weeks and then you'll hear it and I'll make changes if needed." Now you can preview it with these synths; you've given them an inch and they've taken a mile.

Hans: Well, I'll give you two scenarios. One is Peacemaker, where I changed maybe five bars. I wrote exactly what I wanted to. So, even though it was previewed by Mimi [Leder, director] and Steven Spielberg, there weren't any changes because I was pretty vocal about what I wanted to do. The other scenario is Crimson Tide, where we spend seven days arguing about the choir, actually just one section of the movie. Jerry and I going back and fourth, occasionally Tony [Scott], and there were fierce arguments. They got so bad that at one point Jerry's wife said, "Can you guys just calm down, because Jerry's not getting any sleep." The point is, it wasn't just Jerry telling me what to do, it was all of us trying to find a solution. Jerry might be the producer but he hires me because I have an opinion. I'm not a musical secretary; I don't know how to do that.

Lukas: Is Peacemaker as heavily scored as these other movies?

Hans: Yes.

Adam: We actually looked for spots to have silence. We did a bridge scene, a chase with a whole lot of action, and it was temped with Crimson Tide-it was temped with everything that was a legacy of what had come before this. That's the problem with doing these recruited audience tests.

Hans: Have you seen G.I. Jane?

Lukas: Apparently it sounds like you.

Hans: You know, I haven't seen it, I haven't heard it, and Justin, my assistant, came in the other day and said it sounds exactly like you, and I thought, "Oh my God, I hope people don't think I stole Peacemaker from G.I. Jane." And then I had to stop myself and say, "Hold on, I did Crimson Tide, and that's what everyone is copying." It used to be Black Rain, now it's Crimson Tide. I really did try to draw that thing at least; Crimson Tide isn't an action score because it's not really an action movie, it's two people shouting at each other.

Lukas: Is that influenced at all by Hunt for Red October?

Hans: No, other than that we both used choirs. It was a quick short cut to Russia, and I can't even remember Hunt for Red October. I remember there was a choir at the beginning, and I don't know if it appeared again, but I remember thinking this is great, the choir, the Russians, the Russians, and then we cut to the Americans and the choir is still going, and I thought, "Wait a minute guys, you just like this music. This has nothing to do with film making." In Crimson Tide I used it in exactly the opposite way: we never see the Russians, I just wanted it to be in their heads the whole time.

Lukas: Do you feel you reinvented yourself with Crimson Tide?

Hans: Have I reinvented? You know, describing it is sort of impossible. I mean, Jeff doesn't think I score in a traditional way, and I think I DO score in a traditional way.

Lukas: Well, you score in a more European way.

Hans: Probably. And part of my problem is the Max Steiners don't mean anything to me. I'm not familiar with that approach.

Lukas: I think the unusual thing is, Max Steiner will do a traditional score with more than an hour of music. Ennio Morricone will write like 20 minutes of themes and record them so the director can use them any way he wants. Jerry Goldsmith will write like a 40 minute score for a two hour movie.

Hans: I hate short cues, I hate the music coming in and out. I'm always thinking how can I sneak the music in, so I can make the entrance invisible.

Lukas: I think that's part of your success with filmmakers.

Hans: I think my success with filmmakers is because I try to understand film. I'm first and foremost interested in film. People always say, "Why don't you do a concert piece, why don't you make a record?" I'm not interested in making records, I'm interested in making films. And I just happen to be doing that part of the filmmaking process. The other part of it is, like the old-fashioned guys, I try to write a tune. I think you've got nothing if you don't have a tune. You can write the most marvelous textures in the world and if you don't have a tune it won't go anywhere.

Lukas: We like textural scores.

Hans: I like some of them, but I don't know how to say what I'm trying to describe without a melody. I mean, Thelma and Louise I don't think you can say has a tune, it's just a fragment of a tune with all the songs in there. There's no big motif or theme. But I need to have at least four good notes that I can hang onto-not necessarily a character, but the movie. Crimson Tide, there is a tune.

Lukas: We've heard it a lot in many movie trailers.

Hans: So why is that? Backdraft is a perfect example of that trailer shit, where Ron Howard got inspired by a bit from Black Rain. He just shot some fires and put some Black Rain behind it, then he knew what he wanted to do with the movie. And the whole trailer for Backdraft was always going to be based around this thing from Black Rain. What happened was, Ghost and Presumed Innocent, both those movies used Black Rain in their trailers, so suddenly I had re-copies in the Backdraft trailer. So I literally wrote the trailer in like under five minutes, and that became the main theme for Backdraft. I kept saying, don't get used to it, don't get married to it. What they did was, they made this teaser with no dialogue, just music, just me plonking around on the piano. And it was pretty embarrassing but that became the main theme, the brothers theme. Every time I get a movie it's inevitably got Crimson Tide or Backdraft up the wazoo, temped on to it. So first of all you have to go, "Well, I did that one, let's do something else." What do you think happened after I did Rain Man? That's what Ridley wanted in Black Rain, for me to do that Rain Man thing. I said, they're completely different, they just have the word "rain" in the title! So it's a battle all the time.

Lukas: Richard Kraft said in Listening to Movies [by Fred Karlin, Schirmer Books] that Rain Man is good because it doesn't sound like the ten scores that came before it-it sounds like the ten scores that came after it.

Hans: That's the problem. Black Rain sounded like the hundred scores that came after it.

Lukas: People respond to it because it can have a visceral impact.

Hans: Yeah, but it's my aesthetic, and when people rip it off, I think it sounds horrible.

Lukas: We do too. And we feel like you're sponsoring the Hans Zimmer sound produced by other composers.

Hans: No. And I'd like them to write things that I would never write. Jeff Rona doesn't write anything like me.

Lukas: It can be confusing to people who are not familiar with current, synthetically created music because you confuse the method by which the music is created with the style. It's like when two people use a piano, if you've never heard piano music you'd think they're the same. [With Media Ventures composers], the second people hear a certain synth patch they recognize it.

Hans: That's the other thing; my patches! But you don't give Jerry Goldsmith a hard time for using the same orchestra as John Williams.

Lukas: You use the same gear.

Hans: Exactly, the same sounds travel. Okay, I'll mention a really horrible movie: The Fan. That has nothing to do with anything that I've written before.

Lukas: I listened to that 20-minute suite [on the TVT CD] and I actually thought it was pretty interesting.

Hans: I started getting this stuff from people saying it sounded like Nine Inch Nails. And I was like, sorry guys, I was doing this long before Nine Inch Nails was doing it!

Lukas: Did Jeff [Rona] write cues for that?

Hans: He did do one, but that was my own personal joke. If Jeff writes anything for the Scott brothers, it has to be something with water and people drowning. He did one for Ridley [White Squall] where everyone drowns. I brought him in because there was water and the Scott brothers.

Lukas: It's hard to tell who does what because of how the credits read.

Hans: The tunes are mine. I would leave The Rock out of it. That should have been Nick's credit, he wrote the score.

Jeff: That's a lot of what we react to because it's such a visible movie.

Hans: Well, I wrote two tunes for it, and they happened to play them a lot.

Lukas: When people complain about stuff like The Rock, this is what they're talking about: it's not a Hans score, it's not a Nick score, it's just this thing that comes together somehow. It's very indiscriminately paced, the album's a mess, and people think well, this is a movie that Jerry Goldsmith could have done himself without these other people.

Hans: Well I actually doubt they could have done it. Let me give you a history of The Rock. I think that writing action music is an easy thing to do. I assume that anybody can do it. I didn't want to do The Rock, I had no time at all. Nick was going to do it, and with the way they were cutting, there was no way one person could do it. So they got in all these other people who shall remain nameless. There was one person who came in who had worked with Spielberg on television or something, who said he could write eight minutes of music a day. After eight days, he hadn't written three minutes. They would be working on one little stretch of film, a couple of minutes, and they just couldn't write the cue!

Jeff: Everything in that movie, though-I think it's one of the first real AVID nightmares where it's edited like a machine gun.

Hans: It wasn't even about that. Stylistically people couldn't fit into the movie because they didn't have the balls to fit into it. I kept hearing cues that were like this little thing that was too scared to be heard.

Jeff: It's like the dial that goes to "eleven." Everything is turned up to eleven.

Hans: But what's amazing is that I thought anyone could do this. It turns out very few people can, because very few people have the balls to go and make a decent noise against all those sound effects and cuts. You need to know what to hit and what not to hit because you have a thousand cuts going. Jerry Goldsmith has done his share. Total Recall, for instance. Loads of percussion, loads of things going on, loads of synths. Is it a bad score? I don't think so. I think it's a great score.

Lukas and Jeff: So do we.

Hans: And he's basically using the same devices I'm using.

Lukas: But he doesn't.

Hans: He is using an orchestra, synth and drums.

Lukas: In Total Recall in particular, which was prior to Air Force One, his last big action score, it's so intricate, and even when you have things that are primarily color-based, it was very structured so even when there are things exploding there are internal things working.

Hans: And you don't think I do that?

Lukas: Not all the time.

Hans: Oh yeah. I do.

Lukas: We're not accustomed to hearing it, then.

Hans: There's not a note or an idea that doesn't have a subtext.

Jeff: The way I perceive Goldsmith, his action cues are in most cases very linear. He starts something and keeps building so there's a sense of direction, and he keeps adding layers. Do you feel like you're doing that or hitting things more individually in the scene?

Hans: I don't do it in a linear way because for me the whole thing is about subtext. The only way you can do an action movie is to ignore the action as much as possible. Or give the action to something on the side, the percussion. What goes on musically... The Lion King stampede, for example, where I'm setting up the idea that this is an action piece at the beginning with the rhythms, and it turns into a requiem. It's set up at the beginning with the Ligeti-type voices and then the drums.

Jeff: I really liked The Lion King; I hate the Disney animation bandwagon, but that struck me as different.

Hans: But if you take Broken Arrow, there wasn't a chance to write something as good as that.

Lukas: You're talking about your style playing to the subtext, and we're saying we appreciate certain movies where the subtext is deliberately avoided, like Capricorn One or Total Recall. For me Total Recall is playing memories or something, but it's never really playing the emotions of what Schwarzenegger is going through.

Hans: Broken Arrow does exactly that; it never plays the emotion of a character. Subtext is not necessarily playing the emotion for me. Mythologizing a scene is subtext, too, for instance.

Lukas: Your subtext was making fun of the character.

Hans: Not exactly that. The subtext was to make the guy cool in a way.

Lukas: I actually did the liner notes to that album, and when I saw the movie I was horrified, because what you did worked. It made that guy cool, and then he shoots four people in the chest. I got nauseous while these college kids were going yeah, fuck him!

Hans: But then I never saw myself as someone who has to judge the character; I hate that. You'll probably hate Peacemaker, because the villain has the most sympathetic theme. Crimson Tide is a hard job because you can't make anyone the villain; there is no villain, other than maybe war is the villain. That wasn't the point. It was sort of, the faulted hero is more interesting. If you really want to talk about subtext in Broken Arrow, what I did by making him cool was making him juvenile. Not grown up.

Jeff: I think that goes over the heads of the audience in most cases. Hans: The audience isn't going to understand it until they grow up and they don't go see that kind of movie anymore. It's no more than little kids playing with guns. They grow out of it.

Jeff: I see that as part of the aesthetic of the style you've created, which is part of the style of current actions films where the heroes are photographed and scored as the coolest people in the world, and the audience is supposed to really buy into that. And they do. We're just annoyed at the movies and the way the music plays into that.

Thank you to Amazon.com and Lukas Kendall for their review.