Hans Zimmer On His New Concert Film, Nolan And Villeneuve War Stories & Writing For Doris: The Deadline Interview

“I don’t write for directors, I don’t write for producers, and I certainly don’t write for movie studios,” Hans Zimmer says in his new concert film Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. 

So, for whom does the Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer of more than 150 films including Inception, Dune and The Lion King write his iconic music if not the films and host of reputable directors he’s worked with across the past four decades?  

“I have this fictitious figure in my head,” Zimmer tells Deadline from his Remote Control Productions studio in Santa Monica. “She’s called Doris. She lives in Bradford in the UK. She’s a single mom with two unruly kids and her hands are red from the cold and working really hard. She does an amazing job to keep these children fed and pay the rent and fight the fight. So, come the weekend, she has a choice: She can go to the pub with her mates, or they can go and see a movie. If she goes and sees a movie and puts her hard-earned money down, I want her to have an experience and I don’t want her to waste her money. That’s who I write for and that’s why I write. I write for Doris.” 

It’s a sweet story that is also echoed in the 158-minute concert film, which sees Zimmer deliver live performances of some of his most revered compositions – Interstellar, Gladiator and his Oscar-winning scores for Dune and The Lion King – while also lifting the lid on his creative processes through intimate conversations with collaborators and friends such as Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Billie Eilish, Jerry Bruckheimer, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Pharrell Williams and more. 

What becomes clear throughout the film, which is released globally in cinemas today, is that Zimmer is having fun, and that touring live has been a way for the artist, who was once riddled with stage fright, to connect with audiences and his imagined figure Doris in a way that he hadn’t done before he began performing live nine years ago. 

“Pharrell and Johnny Marr were really the instigators of this,” admits Zimmer. “They sat me down and wouldn’t let me get up until they explained to me why I had to leave this beautiful room and go and look people in the eye in real time and not hide behind a screen.” 

After performances at Coachella and tours in North America and Europe, Zimmer says the show “was getting really good and the band was better than ever, but we found that the bigger we were getting, the less likely it was that we could go to places – smaller places – and do something there.” 

The tour carted around 15 trucks and 13 buses – which came at a notable expense – and Zimmer says he “didn’t want to put ticket prices up” but rather “wanted to do something creative that would give people a chance to see what we were up to whilst also having chats with my friends.”

The result is a celebration of Zimmer’s award-winning repertoire in a hybrid doc-concert film, which Emmy-winning and Grammy-nominated Paul Dugdale directs with Bruckheimer serving as one of the exec producers. 

While the majority of the film sees Zimmer perform with his band at the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai as well as the dunes of the Arabian desert and the heights of the Burj Al Arab, it’s the intimate conversations with his friends and collaborators that give viewers a deeper insight into Zimmer’s musical prowess and how his career of mixing electronic sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements have produced some of the film industry’s most celebrated film scores. 

Settling scores

Zimmer’s list of collaborators would make any Hollywood actor green with envy: Nolan, Villeneuve, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Ron Howard, Michael Bay, Steve McQueen, Penny Marshall, Guy Ritchie and Terence Malick are just some on the long list of directors he has worked with. 

But what becomes quickly apparent when speaking with Zimmer is that he is unaffected by this, has a wicked sense of humor and a swathe of stories that he’s happy to share with you. Nothing feels off limits. 

For instance, he reveals he turned down Nolan a number of times when the British director approached him to write the music to the first instalment of his Batman trilogy Batman Begins. 

“I didn’t want to do a superhero movie,” Zimmer says. “I remember I was sitting in this studio in Santa Monica, and he was cutting the film in London and he called me and said, ‘I’ve got a little problem. There’s a shot that I think is quite important, with Batman standing on the top of the skyscraper overlooking Gotham City and I can’t make it work. Can you write me a bit of music?’ I asked to see the shot and he said ‘no’ and just asked me to send the music. Then I realized it was for the main Batman shot.” 

Nolan is one of Zimmer’s longest collaborators, with the pair working across seven titles together. Although they parted ways when Zimmer took the job for Dune and passed on Nolan’s Tenet, the pair remain “good friends,” with the composer saying he doesn’t rule out a reteam in the future. 

Looking back at their history, Zimmer describes working with Nolan as often feeling like a “life or death situation … our relationship has always been like this.” 

He recalls working on Interstellar and the director asking him to put music to the scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character begins to cry as he watches videos of his children without seeing any footage. 

“I remember telling him that I couldn’t write like this. I couldn’t just write free form, and I needed footage,” says Zimmer. “And then he told me to just give it a go as he felt we had the same sense of timing and that if it didn’t work, he would send me the film.” 

The music ended up working, much like the original theme tune that Zimmer wrote for the blockbuster before Nolan had even finished writing the film’s script. Zimmer recalls being at a party with Nolan – “we’re not good at parties so we stood in a corner talking about films” – when the director proposed writing a fable for Zimmer and asked if he would compose whatever music would come to him for it. 

“I thought it sounded fun,” says Zimmer. “So, sure enough, this letter soon arrived on thick paper, and I could tell it was typed on his father’s typewriter – none of this computer rubbish – and it’s a fable about my son. Chris knows my son really well and it was really about what happens to you as a parent when your first child is born and how you never see yourself through your own eyes again. You will always see yourself through the eyes of your child.” 

Zimmer won’t reveal any more details of the letter “because it’s a wonderfully personal letter” but says he sat down to write the piece late on a Sunday night. He then phoned Nolan’s house and spoke to Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producer. “I said that I thought I had something and that I would send it over, but Emma said, ‘He’s curiously antsy – I think maybe he should come over to you.’

“So, he came over and sat on this couch that you see behind me, and I played him this fragile, heartfelt love letter to my son and by the end of it I asked him what he thought, and he said, ‘I suppose I had better go and make the movie now.’” 

It was then that Zimmer realized that Nolan hadn’t quite finished writing the script for Interstellar and when the composer asked him what the movie was about – expecting it to be small and intimate – he was flabbergasted when Nolan started talking about space and time travel. 

“I remember asking him how this music would fit it, and he told me that he now knew what the heart of the movie would be.” 

Zimmer says that Nolan would ultimately end up listing to Zimmer’s composition on loop while he finished writing. That Interstellar theme tune would become one of Zimmer’s most revered, intimate and romantic pieces that has since been hailed for its complexity and ability to convey time and space in music.

It’s an incredible story and one that solidifies just how much music can inform storytelling. It also highlights the significance of great collaborations, the shorthand that can exist between two talents and how specific creative processes can be. 

‘Dune’ & the Oscars

But Zimmer notes that the process is always different. Take, for example, Dune, which the composer went on to score for Villeneuve. Zimmer won his second Oscar for his score of the first instalment of the franchise but was disqualified for Oscars consideration for Dune: Part Two after an Academy independent review found that Zimmer’s inclusion of thematic elements from Dune: Part One violated eligibility requirements.

“When we did Dune: Part One, I didn’t stop writing and the second movie wasn’t greenlit,” says Zimmer. “I actually got an email from Denis telling me to stop writing when the film was in theaters, but I kept writing because I felt it was important that I did. I was on a roll. I was going to finish the arc, and I knew where the story had to go. I knew the story and I knew there was no way that I was going to accept in my little mind that we wouldn’t be greenlit and that, as you know, is the whole reason I was disqualified by the Oscars.

“But who cares? I did the right thing because now I had all this music that could inspire Denis when he was writing. That music ultimately ended up being the love theme which held the second movie together.” 

When he reflects on these storied collaborations, Zimmer clearly isn’t short of fond memories. “These were all adventures, which were just great for me.” He cites Tony Scott as a “hard taskmaster but you couldn’t help but love him,” Marshall as “the most knowledgeable director I’ve ever worked with” and recalls once recording six hours of music for Malick but it was “infuriatingly worth it.” 

Meanwhile, the theme tune for Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was the quickest piece he’s ever written, while his most challenging piece was “Journey to the Line” from The Thin Red Line. “It’s so simple but it just took a long time to get there,” he says, adding that Malick rejected the tune at first. 

“A few weeks later he called me up and started whistling the tune to me and asked me what it was,” says Zimmer. “I told him that was the tune you said no one would remember and then he said it was rather good and that we should put it in the movie. That’s when I realized that you have to give people a bit of time. People need to listen to the music a few times and walk away and come back to it. The new is not always palatable.” 

From beginnings to next steps

Frankfurt-born Zimmer was largely self-taught. “I had two weeks of piano lessons and I’ve just been busking around and making things up ever since,” he quips. He moved from Germany to the UK as a teenager and instead of going to college, opted to play keyboards and synthesizers for an unsigned rock band dubbed Krakatoa. It was during this time when he was “touring every working men’s club up and down the M1” that he first came up with his fictious figure Doris. 

Later, he would begin to work with prolific film composer Stanley Myers, who wrote The Deer Hunter theme and would have an enormous impact on Zimmer’s life. 

“He was my mentor,” recalls Zimmer. “We had a deal. Stanley loved espressos and he bought himself one of those complicated Italian espresso machines with all the chrome and steam and all of that but didn’t know how to work it. So, my job was to make the espressos, and he would show me how the orchestra worked. I thought it was quite a good deal actually.” 

The two composers co-founded the southwest London-based Lillie Yard studio together, where they worked across projects such as Moonlighting, Success Is the Best Revenge and My Beautiful Laundrette, the latter for Working Title. 

That Working Title relationship has come full circle for Zimmer as he and Working Title co-heads Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner have joined forces and purchased the BBC’s historic Maida Vale Studios in London, which has hosted live sessions ranging from the Beatles to Adele to Led Zeppelin to Radiohead. It has also been home to the BBC Symphony Orchestra, but with the pubcaster moving its music studios to east London, Zimmer, Bevan and Fellner were keen to revive the iconic building. 

“We want to go and save the orchestras and make it a really cool place for artists,” says Zimmer, who adds that his studio in Santa Monica has always felt like a “hub of creativity” with “people helping each other out and throwing ideas at each other.” 

“It’s this idea of having a collective of somewhat radical thinkers, which I always liked, and I had always imagined the BBC was,” he says. “It seemed crazy that this could be a block of flats. I think we need culture more than ever right now.” 

The architects are currently working on plans for the new, “state-of-the-art” studios, which will span 42,000 square feet of creative workspace and high-tech facilities. And there is a plan to keep space for an orchestra, something hugely important for Zimmer. 

“I love when an audience sees an orchestra all playing together and finding the same emotion on a note,” he says. “Suddenly, there’s this sense of togetherness and joy that you can’t get anywhere else and if we lose that – and you know we’re on the edge of losing it – I think we lose a huge chunk of what makes us human or what makes humanity special.” 

For tickets to Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert go to hanszimmerfilm.com