Zimmer — from film to live show
The life of a film composer is largely lived in shadow. For Hans Zimmer — the talent behind the music for films like “Rain Man,” “The Lion King” and “Gladiator” — he credits a familiar name with finally getting him to confront his stage fright and embark on the first North American tour of his career.
“I really have to thank Pharrell (Williams), more than anybody else, for getting me into this,” says Zimmer by phone from Los Angeles. “He casually asked me a couple of years ago if I wanted to come and play guitar at the Grammys. That’s one of those questions which you can only answer with ‘yes.’ ”
Though Zimmer has more than 150 film scores to his name, his 2017 tour, “Hans Zimmer Revealed,” will mark the first time he’s played many of his most famous works live for North American audiences. Last summer, he “testdrove” the show with a tour in Europe, but this month he will really step out of his comfort zone by performing at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio (Riverside County).
“I was surprised by the response,” Zimmer says of the fan reaction to his name appearing on a lineup alongside rapper Kendrick Lamar and pop star Lady Gaga. “I think they think it’s weird that a film composer is playing Coachella, but I never make big divisions between musicians or composers. We’re all there to entertain you.”
The German-born Zimmer believes that there is an important crossover under way in which the line between film composers and rock musicians is becoming more blurred. As an example, he points to another of this year’s Coachella headliners.
“If you look at somebody like Jonny Greenwood, who is such an amazing film composer, I think of him more as a film composer, of course, than as the guy who is in that Radiohead band,” he says. “Let’s stop with the walls.”
Zimmer finds the arbitrary distinctions between composer and rock bands goes back even further. “I always had a deep suspicion that Stravinsky and Vysotsky were really into heavy metal before it existed because they wrote great riffs,” he reckons. “If you listen to anything Vivaldi has written, there’s a bit of shredding going on in those violin parts.”
For his “Hans Zimmer Revealed” show, each performance will consist of two sets. While not strictly in chronological order, the first half will cover material from earlier in Zimmer’s career, while the latter segment focuses on reimagined pieces from his scores for director Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy and Nolan’s film “Inception.”
Zimmer is once again working with Nolan, on the upcoming World War II film “Dunkirk.” Like past Nolan projects, the film is shrouded in secrecy, but Zimmer says that he’s thrilled to be working with the “Interstellar” director once more.
“As always, we have thrown all caution to the wind, and we’ve come up with a new impossible idea,” he says. “That’s why I’m still working on it — I’ve been on it for seven months solid now. Chris Nolan and I getting together is basically the enemy of getting any time off for sleep.”
Zimmer soon will add a tour that spans Australia, New Zealand, Europe and other parts of the United States to his already busy schedule, but fans of his work should not arrive expecting to hear the music just as they remember it. Zimmer says even choosing the set list required a lot of input from the many trusted members of his band.
“I didn’t want to do ‘Gladiator,’ ” he recalls. “I love being wrong, and I love relying on people who are bright to tell me that I am wrong. So yes,
we’re doing ‘Gladiator,’ except somebody figured out a really fun way for me to do it, and that was the important thing.”
Zimmer also expresses immense excitement about bringing on board Lebohang “Lebo M” Morake, the man who sings the memorable opening chant at the start of the film “The Lion King.”
“‘The Lion King’ is this weird beast, because it was incredibly personal when I wrote it, which sounds strange when somebody says they wrote something very personal about a cartoon with fuzzy animals. But for me it was all about the loss of a father,” he says. “The other thing is that everybody knows that opening chant. If you get into a cab in New York, the first thing you hear is that voice, because they’re advertising for the musical, and it’s become completely iconic. However, nobody’s ever really seen the guy who did it originally. I just feel really great having my friend Lebo be onstage.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the real Lion King!”
But mostly Zimmer just wants to share the experience of his music with fans, music that he truly believes is a universal language.
“I worked with Djivan Gasparyan on ‘Gladiator,’ and he’s from Armenia. For two weeks, our words were ‘hello,’ ‘great’ and ‘goodnight,’ but we played all day long. We never needed any words, and when that sort of thing can happen, it’s fantastic, especially in a world which is becoming more and more isolated, and cruel,” he says. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll beat certain people’s tweets with a good piece of music any day.”
Zack Ruskin is a Bay Area freelance writer.