KEEPYOUR COMPOSER

How Dark Phoenix convinced celebrated maestro han Zimmer to come out of superhero retirement

Back in 2016, after scoring the Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel and Batman Vs Superman: Dawn Of

Justice, Hans Zimmer told the BBC, “I have officially retired from the superhero business,” suggesting that BvS “was very hard for me to do, to try to find new language”. So it’s a pleasant surprise to see Zimmer’s name in the credits for Dark Phoenix. How did Kinberg entice him back?

“A few ways. One was by begging – that sometimes works. He’s a hero of mine. I’ve been writing my screenplays to his scores for years now,” says Kinberg. “I just started stalking him via email. Finally he came to Montreal, where Dark

Phoenix was shot, to do a concert and I at least got him to agree to come and meet me and talk about the movie. When he heard the intentions for the movie – more dramatic, more emotional, more human – he got excited because he thought it would be different from some of the superhero movies he’d worked on in the past. Certainly the most recent ones.

“I showed him the script, that got him excited too. He saw it as a new challenge. That’s everything he wants – a new challenge every time.

“I think he composed around 11 or 12 hours of music for this film. Then we whittled it down to the two hours for the movie. He writes these big, sweeping suites, where they aren’t really written for particular scenes. They’re sometimes written for specific characters, or emotions, or ideas. From that you start to carve it into where certain bits fit in with certain scenes, and then he eventually performs them to the actual scenes.”