The Hollywood soundtrack king on his fear of performing live
‘Lion King’ and ‘Batman’ composer Hans Zimmer tells Ben Lawrence how he plucked up the courage to tour
The Germans don’t have a word for happiness. Glück comes close but really that means luck. They do, however, have several words for suicide. This fact is not lost on the film composer Hans Zimmer, who is reflecting on turning 60 later this year.
“There was a point in my life when I was The Dark Knight. I bought into that German composer bull---- and around the age of 40 I freaked out. Now, I am sitting down and playing music like I’m a kid. Do I seem unhappy to you?”
Truthfully, he doesn’t. He has just come off stage at the Accors Hotel Arena in Paris and is as bouncy as an India rubber ball. A shocking-pink T-shirt sported for the technical rehearsal has been swapped in favour of a utilitarian black one, with some rather splendid stripy Paul Smith socks now the only flash of flamboyance.
Zimmer is excitable, theatrical and, it seems, lives life with an emotional gusto that, were he a fictional character, would provide any film composer with considerable inspiration. Everyone has heard a Hans Zimmer soundtrack (The Lion King , Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, The Da Vinci Code, Pirates of the Caribbean) and no doubt been caught up in its sweeping grandeur and poignant romanticism. Now, he is turning this life’s work into a series of spectacular concerts on a world tour, which reaches London tonight. Yet it nearly didn’t happen, thanks to crippling stage fright.
It was the unlikely combination of Johnny Marr and Pharrell Williams, both of whom he has collaborated with and made guest appearances on his tour, who persuaded the composer to come out of his shell. “I don’t think I am a showman,” he says. “But [they] ganged up on me and they said ‘Come on Hans, you can’t hide behind a screen for ever’. They said I owed it to the audience to look them in the eye.”
In particular, Marr, former guitarist with The Smiths (whose son Nile has now replaced him on tour) said to him that he could not live his life governed by fear, and had to take control of it instead. And indeed, he has. During the sound check, I witness a man in control of his musical ability but also willing to listen to the opinions of others. Among an eclectic group of musicians are Nile Marr, a deliriously beautiful Chinese cellist called Tina Guo and Pedro Eustache, an excitingly raw flautist from Venezuela. A battered old piano indicates that Zimmer is not interested in grandeur, with a cocktail shaker perched on its lid the only sign of his international glamour.
“Everyone around me will tell you I am a perfectionist, but actually it isn’t true, I just want to try to tell a story so the audience can have an emotional experience. I have a great life as a composer but I am aware how f-----hard it is out there. There is a person in my mind. Her name is Doris and she is of a certain age with two kids. Her husband has left her. She works hard all week and then, at the weekend, puts her hard-earned money on us, and so we owe her.”
These concerts also offer Zimmer the chance to rework some of his best-known compositions. “I am never going to make another Da
Vinci Code movie, but every night I have a new idea about adding a new line to the score. I had lunch with Ron Howard [the director of the franchise] the other day and told him this. I said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you, Ron. As a director, you’ve finished your movie, but I can evolve’.” Zimmer was born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt in the late Fifties. He lost his father when he was a child and, by his own account, was a bit of a handful. His mother banned TV, but, in a wilful act of disobedience, the young Hans sneaked into a cinema to see Once Upon a Time in the West, which ignited something ineffable in him. However, by this time he had fallen foul of the German education system and he was soon sent to Hurtwood House, a vaguely progressive boarding school in Surrey.
“I had a problem with authority, and that doesn’t sit well in Germany,” he says. “In Germany, you walk into a room and everyone treats you like an idiot. The English are a little different. They make you prove you’re an idiot, and that’s a huge difference.
He continues: “[Hurtwood] was the last refuge of kids like me who couldn’t get into any other school. But I am so thankful to the headmaster. He let me just go and play the piano, while reports reached home of how I was excelling in French and maths and Latin. I don’t think I ever met the French teacher.”
The young Zimmer knew he wanted to make a career in music. “I never wanted to be a concert composer. I just like the idea of music and images together. I like being part of something.” Eventually, he began work as a jobbing pub musician – “I know Bradford and Sunderland really well” – and had the odd brush with fame. He can be seen, albeit briefly, in the video for Video Killed the Radio Star,a number one hit for Buggles, and, indeed, Trevor Horn from the band recently made a guest appearance at one of Zimmer’s concerts for a souped-up version of the 1979 hit. He seems nostalgic for those days, and still keeps a flat in Soho.
‘Around the age of 40 I freaked out. Now, I am sitting down and playing music like I’m a kid’
There is an element of rock god manqué about Zimmer, so I wonder how someone with little regard for authority gets on in the very corporate world of movie-making. He says: “They now say, ‘if Hans has a crazy idea, let him do it’.” He cites The Lion King as an example, when he was asked to produce an Out of Africa type soundtrack and instead evolved a full-scale African sound with choirs and percussion that involved “waking up in a tiny township and creating a glorious shambles”. His work on The Lion King took its inspiration from the depths of Zimmer’s past; he brought the death of his own father as a little boy to bear on this story of a young lion cub who is searching for his.
Zimmer has a reputation for re-adjusting quickly to new artistic demands. More recently, he was responsible for two of last year’s biggest small-screen hits – The Crown and Planet Earth 2 with David Attenborough. When it came to the latter, he was left feeling exhausted by its 91-year-old host’s tenacity. “During the promotion, I just felt knackered all the time. I asked him whether he was going to go home and rest and it turned out he was off to do a dinosaur dig. Wouldn’t it be amazing to put him in a room with Donald Trump, the ultimate climate denier? I would say he is one of the few people in this world who could shut Trump up.”
Actually, I think Zimmer might stand a good chance, too.
Hans Zimmer Live on Tour is at SSE Wembley tonight and tomorrow, and then continues in the rest of the UK and Ireland; hanszimmerlive.com