Hans Zimmer Scores

Published May 4, 2021, 4:00 AM

Hans Zimmer is one of the most celebrated and successful film composers of all time. He has scored more than 150 movies including Gladiator, Hannibal, Sherlock Holmes, The Last Samurai, the Thin Red Line, and many more. He won an Academy Award for Lion King and has earned 10 other nominations. His long-time collaboration with director Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Inception has become one of the most celebrated partnerships in movie history. Hans tells Alec, whether he’s working on animated films or live-action ones, his scores enrich a film’s emotional journey.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

M I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to hear the thing. The score of a movie has a way of enriching a film's emotional journey from the profound to the playful. It is often an unconscious part of why the feeling of a movie stays with us long after we leave the theater. My guest today is one of the all time masters of film composition, Han Zimmer. He scored more than one d fifty movies, including Gladiator, Hannibal, Sherlock Holmes, The Last Samurai, The Thin Red Line, and many many more. Pond Zimmer's work has earned him an Academy Award for The Lion King, two Golden Globes, and countless more nominations. In two thousand five, han Zimmer began working with director Christopher Nolan. It's become one of the most celebrated partnerships in movie history. For Nolan, Zimmer has scored the Dark Night Trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Inception, which features this song. Time. Hans Zimmer's work spans an eclectic range of feature films, television, and documentaries. I wanted to know whether his scoring process is different when he works on animated films. All directors are different from each other. But once was invited to a dinner party and at the end of the table sat Terrence Malick and Vanna Hartzuk. You know, everybody's talking at the long table, and then suddenly everybody stops talking and it's just the two great artists chatting, and they're arguing about which Q in Lion King is better. You know, these two admirable hoteurs are arguing about Lion King, you know, about a kid's movie. So the weird thing is, you know, I can talk to Terry Malick about animation, and I can talk to Tom mcglass, our director on Boss Baby about Thin Red Line, you know, and in one way or the other, it's sort of the same thing. Other than that, you can get away with a lot more in animation, I find, you know, you and I in a peculiar way, we give life to something that doesn't have life. I mean, it's it's, you know, the whole point about animation, especially now a CG, where things have gotten so refined and they can do such amazing things, but the one thing they can't do, they can't really truly breathe life in. And so ultimately that the only real performances is the actors and the musicians. And for instance, what we did on the Last Line King movie. You know, he did a remake, and I said, what am I going to do a remake? And I thought, everybody knows the tunes. Everybody in the orchestra knows the tunes. All my musicians and know the tunes. I'm going to spend a week pretending I'm recording little cues, and in the last two days, I'm literally going to make it about Okay, we're going to run the movie from the beginning to the end, and you're gonna just hold on for dear life, and we're going to record the whole thing as a performance because I wanted to have that, you know, the thing that you get in a life performance, the thing you get in a theater genius mixed with sphere and catastrophe. Well, we've had people talk to us and they have careers in whatever, editing or what have you. And I'm curious, not in a relationship, let's say with Nolan, where you've made a few films with him, or you made a couple with Nancy and this his two boss babies and so forth, but on your Maiden Voyage with Nolan. Does he send you the script and you start to get in conversation with him the type of score he wants and you start to like riff little things before or do you only really get concretized about it until you see cut footage. Let's talk about Chris and my working method. And I think we start off on the wrong foot right away because he wanted me to do Batman, and I kept saying I don't want to do Batman, and finally he said, why don't you do Batman? I said, I know how to be the dark Knight, but I don't know how to be Bruce Wayne. And he said, that's easy. Get a friend and to be the other character. You don't have to be schizophrenic. So I asked my friend Jameson Howard, who is you know, one of the most elegant composers in the world, to be light and let me be my dramatic darctness. And then I was working on something in Los Angeles Christmas shooting in London, and he has a way of being very persuasive. He's going, well, yes, I got this shot of Batman standing on top of a building, and I don't quite know how to get him there, because I don't want to temper it. But it's there something that you can just I mean, it doesn't have to be good. Just give me something that gets him up there. And so the first time James and I saw the movie, it had all our rotten little demos in it. But if you go to something like inception. I remember Chris phoning me and he's going, hey, do you want to come down to the beach with the kids. Is that how he puts it? Yeah, when he needs some music for his movie, let's go down to the beach with the kids. And I think that's great. I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna call Spielberg and let's go down to the beach with the kids. Got it worked. He realized that this idea of the different times and the different dreams, it was very complicated to an audience. And I said, you look to a musician. It's the easiest thing, because that's what we do all the time. You know, you have a bar and you're divided into four quarter notes, and you can divide that time of the four quarter notes into eight notes, etcetera. And you just keep dividing down and and and play. You're always playing with time. So I think at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if the audience never gets the intellectual conceit of the movie. But just think of me like a river and the audience is on a little boat, and I take you downstream with the story. And sometimes it's going to get a little rocky, and sometimes it's gonna get a little boring, but you sort of know you can trust the river to take you on this journey and take you to the end. So Chris loved that, and we do think very similarly. I mean, I remember him phoning me from Iceland, so I hadn't seen any footage, right, I just about read the script he phoned me from. So he's explaining the scene, which is and then you have to hit this shot, and then this is this, and this is the most important scene in the movie. Our lead character is basically seeing his whole family through the years, and he's starting to cry at a certain moment. You know, I had to be pointing, and I finally said to Chris, Chris, I don't think I can just do this. I don't think I can wing it without some footage. And I remember all these cuts in my head, and he says, our sense of time, our sense of aesthetics seems to be very similar. Just write it, send it to me. If it doesn't work, i'll send you the picture. Well, unfortunately it works, I said. I found him. I said, how how is it? He goes, well, it's within two frames, but I can go and adjust that. So then he finished the shooting and I'm going, okay, show me the movie. He's going, you know, it's going really rather well. You know, you imagining my movie and writing freely. At which point I started to just say, in term pieces of music, without telling him what they were for, I wouldn't write anything on them. I just send the music. But I very strongly, having read the script, knew what they were for. And I was praying and hoping. There's a shot in there where Mario Kotia is on a on a ledge and her shoe drops just so, and I was so hoping that this piece I sent for him was going to end up in that spot. And then months down the road, when I first saw it, there it was, and he absolutely got it. So we have this language without words, because I think what is really important with music is that to me it's an autonomous language. I am speaking to you in English, which obviously is not my mother tongue, as you might detect from the horrible accent. But if I were to speak to you in a couple of cords, I feel unsafer ground and I feel more articulate. So that's how Chris and I kept working. We kept coming up with crazy you know. We did a list, for instance, for interstella, of what other things we haven't done, you know, and we would cross off big drums, I did that one, big halls. Oh, we did that one. And then Chris said, what about pipe organ? And that became that, you know, because, as he said it, this is a movie about space and rockets and all that stuff. I mean, I saw the shape of the pipe organ, and at the same time I saw the afterburner of rockets, and I thought both are fabulous pieces of technology. Now with Nolan, do you feel that your task is to help them understand and help yourself understand what they want? Have you ever had conflicts with director where you said, I don't agree. How much truth would you like? Well, I mean, when my rule on this show was I don't want to ruin my career, your your Your career can't be ruined. What I'm asking is are you there to perform what they want or do you consult with them? The director has to trust composer, and ultimately the composer needs to go and buy into the director's vision. But music is indefensible. I can write you something and play it to you and I think it is the greatest fucking thing. And I just answered every question you ever had about your character, whatever, and you don't get it and it doesn't resonate. So there's no way I can sit there and explain to you why you should like it, and other resonates or doesn't. That's someone. The other thing is I like working with directors who spend a minimum of time talking to me about what music they want, because as soon as they start talking to me about what music they want, my mind goes off into that thing of going My job is to do something that they can't even imagine. My job is to knock their socks off. My job is to do something that is so beyond anything that they could do because otherwise said to it themselves. And you know, and it makes me rather done. It makes me a musical secretary. Do you think that someone to use a you know, a more celebrated example, because everyone knows the story about Alex north composition for Space Hotessey. Do you think that someone like Kubrick lunged in the direction of the classical repertoire because he knew what the music was, He didn't have to wait for somebody to write it. There it is extant, it's real, I know, I want, you know, fun Carreon with the with the vienna and this and that, just play the Blue Danube and he doesn't have to rely on anybody. Do you find that there were some directors who they just don't want to give that control? Well, well, it's such a sad you know. I mean, first of all, I should let you know that Sally Kubrick was the first director that ever fired me. What the full metal Jacket, and Vivian has started took over, but but it became this weird, strange thing. So I was really I mean I was maybe eighteen nineteen and us but as soon as I was fired in other words, because I didn't know how to do what he wanted me to do. Because Stanny koper knew everything. He had studied drumming with Jeane Kruper. He just wanted me to be his musical secretary, and I'm not very good at that. Take dictation, absolutely, take dictation. I mean I would get these tape sent drumming with ten fingers on his tabletop and go, well, get a drummer to do exactly that, and you know, so that didn't work. But then once I was officially fired, I would get these phone calls where he would go, I think Vivian's in a bit of trouble. Can you go up there and see if she's all right? Oh, he'd go, what do you think of Dolby Stereo? I'm eighteen years old, you know, I have no idea. I'm talking to Stanley Cooper. How did you end up in? I mean, you're eighteen years old. How does an eighteen year old Hans Zimmer wind up within fifty miles of Stanley Cooper? How did that happen? Anton first, his designer, who knew me. They were shooting for Metal Jacket in the docklands of London, and I knew Vivian, who then took over, and so I was really helping Vivian, and soon and then years later I ran into Vivian and I was just on my way to London. She said, oh, we really should go and see that. I'm going. Why would I see if he goes no, no, no. He's always talking about you. Whenever movie comes on television that you did, He's always saying I found him. I was the first one who gets. He forgets the other part. But you know, it's really busy and I had to go down to Australia from London, so I didn't go and see him because I thought that Stanley Kubrick is beyond He's immortal, you know, because he was Stanley Kubrid. Sure. And I get to Australia, I get to Sydney and the guy who's picking me up from the airport coincidentally was a chap who who had met on Full Metal Tracket and he's got a really sad face. And I realized that, you know, Stanley had died, which was inconceivable to nature. And I learned, don't say no. If somebody says, hey, come on over, interesting, you come over. And I learned a lot from him. I learned vast thanks for that. You know, this is music from the film Chappie. Han Zimmer discovered his musical talent very early in life. Another one of our guests who took music seriously at a very young age is classical pianist Long Long. He was a musical prodigy, winning his first competition when he was five. Long Long and I spoke before a live audience in New York City in two thousand nineteen. He talked about his father's skepticism of playing in competitions. He discouraged me to do competitions and I was like, wow, did he say why? Yeah? He said, then you're too crazy about being number one and you're not really focus on what you should be, you know, learning the repertoire and too. He said, do you want to become a great musician or you want to just win? And I said, oh, I said, is that not the same? I said, well, what was the difference? I said, If I don't win a prize, how I'm going to become a great musician. Here the rest of my conversation with celebrated pianist Long Long that here's the thing dot org. After the break, Hans Zimmer talks about how he went from playing dingy clubs around England and making coffee for composer Stanley Myers to realizing what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. This piece is from the film Twelve Years a Slave. Hans Zimmer was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He's largely self taught, and even as a child, understood a strong connection between music and mood. But my father died when I was six and I already played the piano. I enjoyed playing the piano, but my father died and I realized the only thing that made my mother happy, that put a smile on her face was when I played the piano. So I sort of took on that burden, which then, of course backfired because at school I was appalling and everything other than playing music. I got thrown out of nine schools. Ultimately I ended up in school in England, fabulous school called Heartwood House. You know, it was a choice to go back to Germany or hang out in Swinging London. So by the time of eighteen, I was in the back of a Ford transit van going up and down the end one playing every working men's club and every citty pub. That's the eighties. It was crazy, it was amazing. There was a company called Working Title that they were making music videos and one day channel for new television station came about and Working Title decided, since we don't know how to make movies, that's okay, they don't really know that, but we'll do something called My Beautiful Laundrette, which was a young Daniel day Lewis, and it was an extra honory anti Thatcher right, gay Cross everything, you know, amazingly sort of just mind blowing when nobody saw it coming. And Daniel kisses this Indian boy and you could feel the jaws of the audience hitting the floor. And I loved it. So Kubrick and that introduction through full Metal. When you're eighteen years old, had you worked on any films who you've been close to any film sets or studios before that? Yes? Yeah, no, no, absolutely. I had a mentor Stanley Meyers that the man who wrote the music for The Deer Hunter a brilliant man. And so Stanley had this coffee machine. He loved his Italian espresso. He had bought an unbelievably complicated coffee machine, and so my job was to work the coffee machine and Stanley would showed me how to write for orchestra. And the first day was Stanley Meyers and Nicholas Rogue sitting there looking at a scene. In the morning, I was making coffee and they're both going, we have no idea what to do. And by the evening they had come up with a mind blowing, beautiful solution, musical solution. And I realized that this idea of that you have nothing and that you make something out of nothing, and that it's just a conversation and you just you just breathed the picture in and turn it into notes. That was a fantastic adventure. And then Standing I had a little studio, and Standing was very good friends with the producer Jeremy Thomas, who phoned me up one day and said, would I mind coming in on Saturday because he had a Reti Sakamotive and Bernardo better Lucci coming in to have a look at what we act had done on the Last Emperor, and would I just go and round the tape machines for them. So they piled into my little studio, and it turned out that there was a found lack of communication and Bato Lucci had re cut the Last Emperor as in a flashback, while Sakamoto had scored the previous version, which was all in chronological order. And the other thing was Sako Moto's idea was that he was going to play Bernardo the stuff half his friend could recorded at Abbey Road, and he was gone because he had him tour starting the following day, and so nothing fit. So David Byrne from the Talking Heads was the other composer, and Kong Su, who was a Chinese composer but had studied in Berlin, was another composer on it. So the Chinese composer could only speak German, so I was useful in this case. And Jeremy said, can you just go up to Appy Roden just sort of sort this out, you know, we called the orchestra, and I had no idea what four m you know, fifty one whatever something. There was a real four was not a real too, but I never heard and I didn't even know what scene it was supposed to go. And Bernardo would go, why is it getting quiet in the middle of a shot, and I'm like, tap down things, furiously coming up with excuses to sort of not put the blame on reality Sacermoto. It really wasn't his fault. So that was really my other introduction. Yeah, and it was like these people are crazy, these people are genuinely crazy and that. And there was one day where Bernar I was working out at Pinewood and there was something had gotten and things kept getting lost, are things kept not happening or whatever? And he felt me up with most of you because where are the Chinese death belts. I didn't know that we're going to be Chinese less belt, nor did I even know that there is such a thing as Chinese death bells. So I said, well, okay, I'm really sorry. I'll come right over with that Chinese death bells. So I made up something on the synthesizer because I thought if I don't know what they sound like, he won't know what they sound like. And I came over and as I got to Pinewood, Bernado's walking up and down at the gates to the studio and he's like he's got his hands behind his back, and I get out of the column saying, look, I'm really sorry. It wasn't my fault, by the way, It really wasn't, you know. But I wasn't gonna blame anybody. It just went it. I'll do it, and Bernano went, look, I'm really sorry. I shouted at you, and he handed me a box of chocolates and he said, look, even though I'm the director and I'm paying you, I realized that the seconds of your life are going by and I should be more gracious. That taught me something. I mean, the more I worked within the film business at these early days, and mostly it was in Soho and mostly like Working Title, all our cutting rooms were either above a strip club or a pawn shop, and you know, and I would run up the stairs with my little piece of music and singer up to the picture and hold my breath because if the director didn't like it. But at the same time I realized it was all entertainment, and should it go wrong upstairs, maybe I could get a job downstairs at the pond, you know, or the strip club for that matter, all the strip club for that matter. Absolutely. And then Working Title offered me, like the twentie movie or something like this, that it was about the anti apartheit movement in South Africa called a world apart beauty Beautiful film, Beautiful film. Chris Mingers. So We're sitting at the Groucho Club and I'm I'm getting so what's the budget? And Tim Bevan says, we're not telling you what the budget is. Your wife is pregnant, and we know what you do. You take all the money that you're supposed to go and take home with you and you just spend it on making the movie sound good. So we're not telling you what the budget is this time. So you go and do the movie and it's going to be all right. So I did the movie and it turned out my daughter was born on the first day of working in the film, and they opened an account in her name and put the money in there. So, you know, whatever you say about the death things about filmmaking, the you know, how synature do you want to be? There are people who are genuinely have a hard gentleman, gentlemen. You know. The other thing which I think is so vital is Hollywood, with all its cheapness and vulgarity, what have you. It's the last place on earth that commissions orchestral music on a daily basis. And if we don't have that, the orchestras will just die. At what point were you immerged in the classic Bernard Herman era of film scoring. Did you listen to a lot of film scores? And no, no, not at all. I come from one of those snobby European families where we went to the opera once a week and we had no television because television was considered the end of culture as we know it. And I remember I snuck into the little local cinema where they were playing Once upon a Time in the West, and it was just like Ennio Morriconi, Sergio Leone those shots, and I'm going, that's it, that's it, That's what I want to do, and there was nothing that could stop me from doing this. Did you feel at any point that you needed to study film itself in order to do your job better. No. I felt I needed to study mythology. I needed to study fairy tales. I needed to study psychology. I needed to read like crazy, and I needed to sit down and talk to as many d piece as I possibly could, because if I was the years, they were the eyes. I was the guy who would never go home. I was always the kid who was still hanging around in the cutting room, you know, just badgering the editor, going well, why why are you doing that? Why are you doing this cut? And why? And how does this work? And you know, talking to the DP what colors are you going to use? What the tone of this film? Tell me what the color palette is going to be? Like knowing as we do now that you know, I might watch The Crown in bed on my computer and my wife is asleep next to me, and then if it's Gladiator, you think, let's just blow the fucking roof off the theater and let's just blow it out. You know, that's forty ft why twenty ft high? Is there a difference between scoring for TV and for film? Not? That should be? That should be, But I don't make a difference. I just I just feel there's a right path if somebody has a compelling story. If Peter Martin comes to me and he goes, I've given up on doing movies. I want to do The Crown. You take that very serious. And Peter's vision as vast and what a juggernaut that's been. Oh my god, absolutely, I love Peter. I've known him, I've known Peter. I want to say, I've known Peter all my life. Peter and I speak to German. He speaks better German than I do. You know, we come from that working title camp European cinema. It's really different. I mean I came to Hollywood expecting it to be technologically far more advanced than Europe, and I expected it to be far more collaborative. And it wasn't. The composer worked alone, and he had a ghost writer who would never get a credit. You know, It's like an army of ghostwriters who never saw their names up in light. And I thought, how that's poor bus is going to get their career. You know. Stanley Myers my mentor. I mean he gave me credits straight away. I mean it wasn't a big deal and we would all be in the room together. So I learned from Stephen Fierce, I learned from Nick Work, I learned from John's Lessenger. I learned from Terry Mallock. You did Pacific Heights. We did Pacific Heights. I have auditioned for that movie. I remember I was involved. And he did a movie The Believers, Yes that Marty Sheen did, and I was I was going to do that movie Allen Barkin and I think we're pretty close to getting those jobs, and then the casting director cut our throats and get rid of us because they felt we were too young. I remember, I was just overwhelmed with a passion to work with Sleshinger. What was he like? Same with me? Any director who in the middle of scoring says, I'm so sorry, but I have to take a few days off because I'm directing an opera and sales books. Okay with me? Do you know what I mean? It's like at the end of all the scoring sessions he made a list of all the quotes of classical music I'd used, which was it was great, it was a game. But again, knowing that writing music and performing music, what happened when you go and record it and you here and you go it's not right. Well, one of the things is to be absolutely clear we are making a recording. We're not doing a concert. You don't have the free say of a life performance going on. So I I try to have a bit of that going on. For instance, I tell directors before I start working with them, and they all get it. I will not make a change during the scoring session in front of the orchestra. We'll take it off the stands, I'll go home. I'll rewrite it whatever you want, but I will not do it in front of the orchestra, because when the orchestra is playing, it's about a performance, and we don't want to stop, and we don't want to bore them, and we certainly don't want to show any insecurity. The lion taming and film composing seem to have a close link. You know, both can kill you. I mean, the director will eat your life. And if it's not the directors, there's there's a whole bunch of guys in the brass section who are just looking at you, going, okay, kid, let's see what happens. Let's see you had some of that early on. Yeah, absolutely, and now we're fine. Now. I actually had one of the greatest compliments recently. There's a percussionist in London who's played on everything from you know, Star Wars plus all the classics, and I saw him the other day and he goes hamps. We were worried about you when you went to Hollywood because we thought you're just going to become one of those prats. But you know something, you came back You're still one of us. You're still a complete music bastard, and we love you for that. So I thought that was like the best compliment I could have, and it meant whatever we were doing was going to be okay because I was still part of them. Now, when you see footage, does a performance every motivate you? Really? What's an example of our performance by an actor in a film you did? They really helped lift you to the level you wanted to go In terms of your score, Jack Nicholson in as good as it gets. Really, I didn't know what to do. I was really struggling, and finally I said to Jim Brook's, Jim, what are you doing at the weekend? Do you mind sitting on my couch and let me just look at Jack. Look at what he's doing. I mean, there's a history. Before Jack started filming the movie, I was at his how going over like he's going to play the piano. He didn't want to play the piano. I'm going it's easy. I can go and replace anything that's wrong. No, Jack didn't want to play the piano, didn't more to play the piano. I think he just wanted to talk to him a bit. But so Jim sitting there and we just started to work out together what this character would be like. It's the way his legs moved. It's just just a little something in the shoulder. It's never something he says. It's body language. It's a ballet, and literally it was. It was two days of just experimenting. Jim sitting there and we worked the whole thing out. And so you know, I totally understood what Jack was trying to do. Helen Hunt. She wanted to ask you for I love that film. He did too. He did too, He did too. And what I love is there's an almost pugilistic quality too when he says his lines the woman that the legendary line when he's at the elevator and the woman says, how do you write those female? You write those women so well? I I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability right, one of the greatest lines in Hollywood history. There's another bit in it at the end when he doesn't know how to go and see the Hell and Hunt character, and Greg Canea says to him, but you already have an advantage, You already prepared to humiliate yourself and in a funny way. I've made that sort of my litmotif of how I'm going to go and play a piece of music to a director or anybody for that matter. I'm sure, I'm sure that these examples have been There might be none or certainly few and far between. But if you ever just pushed out your best effort and you thought I can't save this movie, yes, and and being wrong at the same time, thinking this is terrible, and then the audience loved it, you know, don't try to predict anything. That's a very good point, you know, to their own self. Be true. I mean, look, you and I we did a movie. There's a line and girl and boy met forty five minutes ago in the story and they're sitting next to each other and she says to him, if I have one more night to live, I want to spend it with you. And I said to Michael. By Michael, you gotta get rid of that line. I learned from Bridley Scott. Bridley Scott always would say sentimentality, that's unearned emotion. And he said, yeah, yeah, don't worry, I'll get rid of it. He never got rid of it. It's the favorite line in the movie by teenage girls. God, Hans Zimmer, this is to every captive soul from the motion picture Hannibal m Yeah, when we return. Hans Zimmer talks about how an invitation from musician Pharrell Williams helped him overcome stage fright. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. In two thousand sixteen, Hans Zimmer did something he hadn't done in decades, played in front of an audience. The result was Hans Zimmer Live and arena style concert series, which wouldn't have happened with encouragement from his friends. There was like a cabal ganging up on me. There was Farrell Williams, Jolly mar and my friend Anne Marie Simpson, great violinist, and they're all sitting here and they're going you know, and you can't hide behind the screen for the rest of your life. Sometimes it is your duty to look an audience in the eye, especially after you've done so much. I'm gonna a terrible idea. I think I should just stay in this room. I mean, And so this goes on and I keep saying no, and they get up and they're walking out of my room, and right at the end, Farrell turns around and he says, Hey, I'm going to play the Grammys. Do you want to play guitar for me? And I thought only an idiot would say no. So it was his show. The Grammys were his show. I'm playing guitar. Through the whole performance, he kept his eyes on me. He just to make sure that I was okay, that was safe, which was such an act of kindness, and I was going, Oh, it's not so bad. This is actually good fun. So I phoned. I thought, my friend Harvey Goldsmith, who promoted the original Live Aid and everything else. I mean, he brought Springsteen to to England, etcetera. And I was saying, how if I did a concert, I mean, do you think anybody would come? Yeah? I think so. So in fourteen we did two nights in London and a rock and roll venue, and I thought it was important. Number one, it was important to be a rock and roll venue, and it would be fun to pon orchestra into it, or we can go more extreme, because then we went and did Cotella and I thought, oh, we have to do Cotella because we've got to have an orchestra in the middle of the desert and acquire. And secondly, I want to change the way people perceive orchestras and choirs because I can understand that going to a classical concert, unless it's an amazing conductor, seeing a guy with his back to you all night while there's a whole bunch of guys and girls reading the paper is like a bad marriage on a Sunday morning. So I said to the orchestra, if I get rid of the conductor, I mean, we have enough technology, we can go and show things up on the conducting, up on the screen. You know, it doesn't have to be in the sideline. You will have an autonomous sideline to the audience. Will that work? And they said, yeah, absolutely, we'll have We'll have a go at it, and that basically became the basis of that tour and the idea of being surrounded by not only great orchestral players, but great rock and roll players, because great musicians are great musicians. You either move me or you don't move me. You know, it's interesting how when you write music. I want to tee this up with the story which was I was haunted by the sequence in Cold Blood where Robert Blake is watching Scott Wilson have sex with the prostitute, and he's sitting on the bed, and then that transforms into his mother with a job on, and the father comes in, and it's this horribly painful, traumatic thing for the Robert Blake character. And he's sitting there with tears running down his eyes and the rain behind him in the window, running down the window, and they played this Mexican ballot and I drove myself to the brink of insanity trying to find out what the name of the song was, who the singer was, and of course who wrote it. And I couldn't take it anymore. So you know, when you're with C A A as an agency, they can get you on the phone with anybody. So the next thing you know, I'm on the phone with Quincy. I said, now this song in this thing? He said, yeah, yeah, Man, Nina the song of Nina Baby. That's the name is sell Nina. And and and I go who wrote the song? And suppose he goes, I wrote a baby. I wrote it. What you're talking about? Man? I wrote the song like I write all the songs. Did you feel that there were parts of your career we want to learn to write music? You thought you couldn't write whether you know, from the culture, Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean I had to from Penny Marshall. When she comes to me and she goes, forties girls baseball leader. Though I'm going I know nothing about being a girl. I know nothing about the forties. I don't know anything about jazz, you know, And she goes, don't worry about it, just do it, and oh yeah, And I say I know nothing about baseball. She goes, when they hit it, that's good. You know. That was basically my brief. It took me a while to figure out how I could solve this because I really don't know anything about jazz. You felt, you didn't know anything about jazz. You want a jazz fan, yes, But I didn't know how to do it, you know. And I thought, well, hang on, everybody's got like some crazy uncle that when drunk will play boogie boogie on the piano. So I thought, well, I can be that guy playing boogie boogie and the piano and just orchestrated and shove it in front of a bunch of very good players. So that's how that score came about. Here's the thing. Penny was a huge influence because she loved having a chat, especially between the hours of three am and seven and the more I had some chats with Penny. Okay, so so since I was one of the few Parsan session, therefore I was up and I would use those charts. I remember one Penny, how do you make a good movie? Because that's easy. All you have to do is protect your star. And by that I don't mean the actor, I mean your main character. Don't let him say anything that's out of character coming off his mask, don't let him wear anything that's not in character, don't have his hair be stupid. Because when you know what your main character is, then the rest of the story will group around it. And I thought that makes perfect sense. Now, what about with ron Howard? You mean, the Frost Nixon thing is obviously a very dry, very powdery kind of a drama, you know, I mean, oh man, that was a tough I mean, o'shean and Frank, I mean, Frank is just such a wonderful malvolio esque, you know, kind of presence and everything he does it just drips with a kind of danger. You know, what did Ronnie tell you he wanted for that film? We all loved the play and you know that's back to Peter Martin in the Crown. I mean, that's a Peter Martin thing. So ostensibly we had a meeting every day for two weeks before he went outituding to talk about the songs, to make the songs to be the right thing for the era. And I don't think we actually got any songs in it. You know, I would go, well, if you give me this close up, I can give you this piece of music, I can do something like this, and la la la la. You know. So for two weeks we we sort of worked out camera moves and we worked out how to transform a play into a movie. Now. One of the junctures in which I intersected with your movie was a documentary series called Evidence of Revision. It's considered the citizen pane of JFK conspiracy films. It's nine hours long, divided into five parts. I'm listening to this and this music comes on and I'm going, oh man, this music is so fucking beautiful and it's the last Samurai. Now, he sampled a couple of your pieces for this thing, Hannibal. He plays to every captive soul, oh yes, and oh my god, you just the tears start rolling down your face. There's a big story involved for piece why it's worth making movies. To me, Ridley had just come back from Florence, I think, to finished shooting the movie at Sunday night, eleven o'clock in the evening at Fox in the cutting room, and it's Ridley, it's Pietro Scarlia, the editor, and me and the picture on the abbott is parked on a tear running down Clary Style Link's face and I say to him, to both of them, I say, well, she's crying because she's in love with him and she has to betray him now, and really goes no, no, no no, it's a tear of disgust. It's disgusted at this monster when he has her up against the refrigerator. Yeah, exactly, exactly right. So this goes on, so so it gets more and more heated at this conversation, and finally we're standing and three grown men at eleven o'clock at nine on a Sunday are shouting at each other about the meaning of a tear on a woman's face. And I had one of those we had moments, you know, where the camera pulls back and I see us all. I thought, what a great ful job we are discussing Julia, and I'm going, this is the most important thing to us at this moment. And that's what this piece is about. Because I said, Okay, Retty, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm going to write the whole score is going to be a romantic comedy. And he's okay, fine, all right if you can pull that off. Five romantic comedy. So that is my big love theme. What's the movie of yours? You watch when you sit there when it's screens and you go, you know, it's not that bad. Actually it's pretty good. It really does work. Yeah, I know I'm Buyingary. It's ship. It's not ship. I think they could all do with a bit of a do over and implease, But I tell you the opening to the Lion King, I mean it was really important to me. I wanted that African voice. My friend Lebo, who had discovered at a car wash he was a political refugee, he was working at a car wash. I said, come and just come and do this thing. And you know, like that, like within the first notes, you know you're now not in Kansas anymore. What advice do you have for people who you're working with who are young people who want to because I'm assuming that actors can come and go. They have their healthy on period, writers, directors, But it seems like compos users, when you hit it, you can stay there for a very long time. Your career has been a very long time now and you've stayed at the top of this business for a very long time. What advice do you have for people who want to get into that part of the business? Just say yes, you know, like when Penny Marshall says, do you not do a movie about baseball and swing? Yes? I know nothing about it. Just be honest, I know nothing about it, but sounds interesting, right, you know, old Yes. I remember being on the phone with Ron just out of courtesy right at the end. I thought I should say, well, what are you working on? And he said the Da Vinci Code, and I'm going, oh my god, it's like run on monologue. It's totally uncinematic. How can you, I mean, how are you gonna do that? And it's a phenomena. How are you going to deal with the phenomena? And he goes, yeah, I know, And ten minutes later my agent goes, what did you say to Ron always, I'm sorry. I know he's setting off on this journey and I just probably really, like, you know, made it even worse for him. He goes, O, no, no, he wants you to do the film. He wants you to solve it for him, you know. And it gave me a year of being able to immerse myself in art and in literature and to hang out at the Louver at night. This is why people say to me, why am I on the board of the Philharmonic? I said, the movies often disappoint me, The theater sometimes disappoint me. The symphony never disappoints me. Right when now I go see the New York Philharmonic play, I'm never disappointed. Absolutely your music. Is there a joint ownership of that movie and the publishing rights and so forth for the soundtrack, album and so forth. Do you have some control or did the studio? Is it a buy out and they own it? They own it. But there's a law that says you are allowed to perform anything you want to perform, right, so I think it would be keenous to not be able to own my life. Wow, you know, because that's really what it is. Isn't it. I mean, you know that thing Bernardo said to me. You know, as the seconds of life are taking away, we are creating these things. You know. Manon an actor turned to me once. He said to me, you're gonna go back to your trailer, I said, He goes, Why do you go to your trailer? He said, the sets where you want to be even when you're not shooting, he said, pull up a chair, he goes. Just be a part of it, absolutely, just watch them shoot. And as I've gotten older, when I read a script, I say to myself, could I stay on the set during the entire shooting process of this movie and just be a witness and watch them do this movie? Is do? I love it that much? And that's become a metric for me. Actually, and I spend far more time on the set now than I used to. I never go to my trailer anymore. It's too boring. I think my whole career is based on I would always hang around and be the guy asking the stupid questions. You know, not be afraid. Why are you doing it like that? You know, tell me explain this part to me or whatever. You know, everything informs everything, but you nailed it when you said this is our lives. We spent our lives doing this. It is our lives. And that's what Farrell and Johnny Mark were so right about that I should stop hiding and then I should do things in real time, be on a stage. If I'm going to have a platfall, Yes, if I go hello Oslo in Stockholm, they will forgive me. Let me just finish by saying this as you're scoring the sequel to Boce Baby, please make me look funny, made me look smart, made me look powerful. Okay, when you're writing the music, just have that in mind. If you don't mind made me look powerful. We have not only have we fulfilled that brief but you know you getting away with that line, Um, I have a beautiful voice. I mean just that, and pausing just to have your voice just let it lay there and let them all be and thrilled. Well, listen, thank you. You're one of the greats man. I mean, your movie scores are just I mean, these people that you work with, they're lucky to have you. Boy, what a difference you make. It has been a pleasure. Composer Hans Zimmer. This is from the motion picture The Last Samurai. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing from my Heart Radio M

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 421 clip(s)