Hans Zimmer: Hollywood Rebel

Ladies and gentlemen, Hans Zimmer!

There's a word I don't use very often, which is genius.

Hans Zimmer is one of them.

He has the incredible capacity to reinvent himself

without losing his identity.

He's a storyteller.

He tells stories with music.

It's not a job. It's like a calling.

It's like a crazy thing.

I can't imagine not writing music.

Hans Zimmer is the world's most sought after

and prolific movie composer.

He's written music for blockbusters, romcoms,

animations and even iconic nature documentaries.

This is a dangerous place.

He's fascinated just by sound itself.

He has all kinds of technical ideas

and tricks going on at any one time.

Throughout his career, he's broken all the rules

about how you compose music for films.

I don't think anybody's ever won an Oscar for a score

that blatantly is bagpipes, heavy-metal guitars

and a woman screaming at you.

This is great!

He doesn't want to read a script.

He wants me to tell him,

"What is the movie you think you're making?"

It's like being psychoanalysed.

Even if you're not hearing what you want to hear always,

the project gets better every time

it gets under Hans's microscope.

He remains a child, in a way.

And I think you have to have that quality in order

to sort of be a successful musician for all that time.

I've been doing this for, what, 40 years?

Somebody the other day said, "When are you gonna slow down?"

"What do you mean 'slow down'? I'm just getting going!

I'm just getting started."

Hans is experimenting with some ideas

for the soundtrack of a new BBC Natural History documentary.

Just try to get to something that sounds remotely frozen.

I'm using a bit of noise,

make it a bit more tundra-like.

You know, I mean, it's just...

I like the idea that there's, like, a wind

rattling across everything.

I'm literally making it as we're talking about things.

Er... Let's say...

Let's go and use this, too.

It's relatively chilly, but we can make it chillier.

Bit of frozenness.

The problem is that wind across a tundra

and bacon frying are very similar.

This is a stronghold

for one of Antarctica's most remarkable inhabitants.

The seriousness and the depth that we bring to this project

comes a lot from me being a kid.

One of my main memories is just shortly

before my father's death, where he took me to the Rhine,

which was completely covered in foam.

And he was explaining to me,

"You know, look, we're destroying the world.

We now need to go and do something about that."

And I think it hugely influenced me in our work

with Sir David Attenborough.

Hans was born in Frankfurt, Germany,

in 1957 into a Jewish family.

I knew what the Nazis had done to the Jews.

It would be brought up quite a lot.

The fear was that, "You know what?

If you tell the neighbours,

your best friend can turn on you within one moment."

While still a child, Hans's family was torn apart

by a bolt from the blue.

The week before my 6th birthday --

my birthday was on a Sunday --

my dad died on either the Friday or the Saturday.

And on Monday, my mother, who was totally overwhelmed,

basically dropped me off for my first day at school.

It was like, you know, all these kids,

terrible teachers of an older generation.

Then came the moment where she said,

"You know, I think you should have piano lessons.

Do you want piano lessons?"

And as a 6-year-old, 7-year-old,

you think that stuff you hear in your head,

a magical man is going to come

and tell you how to put it under your fingers.

And, of course, that's not at all what happens.

Some horrible German comes who raps you across the knuckles

if you don't play your scales right.

You know, "Read, read, read, read, read!"

And to this day, if you put music in front of me,

it just starts getting wobbly and swimmy and...

and defocuses.

Despite having only two weeks of formal lessons,

Hans found his home in music.

I play the piano because it put a smile on my mum's face.

It's the only reason.

It's not the only reason -- it put a smile on my face, too.

Hans kicked against the rules, not just in learning music

but in everything.

He was thrown out of eight schools in Germany

for not conforming to the strict discipline demanded.

The music teacher threw a chair at me.

I remember that.

He always told stories of his childhood,

all the shenanigans he got into --

crazy thing in boarding school that got you kicked out.

He got kicked out of boarding school quite a few times.

I know my mum was really worried about me.

I think everybody was really worried about me.

Hans's rebellious streak

led to his mother moving them to England.

There they found a progressive school

where he could concentrate on his music.

On graduating, he followed his dream

and joined a band called Krakatoa,

mainly playing working men's clubs.

We were the entertainment nobody listened to.

We were so bad, up north,

we would be the support act to the strippers.

And it was interesting because it was the '80s

and it was Margaret Thatcher and it was...

coal miners' strike.

Whoa, it was rough up north.

People were so frustrated.

You know, you left London and you entered another world,

you entered another country.

And this country was a country that was desperate

and it was poor and it was everything

that you could only imagine of the left behind

and left for forgotten.

And to this day...

I have this person I write my music for.

And she's fictitious.

She's called Doris and she lives in Bradford.

She has a grey coat and, you know...

is of uncertain age.

She's got two terrible boys.

I mean, they're so ill-behaved.

And her hair-dye job isn't very good, you know?

And she works really hard throughout the week.

And come the weekend, she has a choice.

She has a choice of going to the pub, having a drink,

or she has a choice of coming and seeing one of our movies.

And she's a hero to me because she works hard.

And so when she comes and sees one of my -- our -- movies,

I want to make sure that she gets her money's worth and...

I promise you. I mean, every movie,

I sit there and I go, "What would Doris think?"

It's so easy to think about the past in a nostalgic way.

Yeah, I loved it. I loved it.

My friend Warren Cann, drummer from Ultravox,

we decided to do an album together,

which, absolutely, we couldn't give away.

To this day, we couldn't give it away.

Oh, and then we had this crazy idea.

We did a concert at the London Planetarium,

you know, basically, people looking up at the stars

and us playing weird, cosmic music to them

and scaring the children in the process of it.

The 1980s saw a revolution in music,

video and film production.

Computers and synthesisers were changing how music

was made and recorded.

Hans saw the potential in all this new technology

and made himself the master of it.

I was seriously into synthesisers

and I was a lot skinnier then as well.

But I still have this, of course,

and I still make music with it.

And, you know that sound that basically pins you

into your seat when you watch "Dark Knight"?

That's that beast.

It was a time where

you suddenly could have access to computers,

so the whole idea about doing things on stage

was far less exciting than the idea

of "How far could I push this technology?"

Using his know-how of studio technology?"

It was in this unassuming yard

that Hans began to hone his writing and production skills.

Together with his friend and mentor,

composer Stanley Myers,

he set up his first recording studio.

I mean, you can tell from the glamorous nature of this door

that this is the door that leads directly to Hollywood,

fame and Oscars.

This used to be my studio. Actually, it wasn't my studio.

It was Stanley Myers' and my studio.

Absolutely extraordinary composer.

I mean, everybody owes a lot of things to everybody in life.

My film language, for instance,

I very much learned from Stanley.

It's really simple.

If you don't have a tune,

you've got nothing to hang on to.

So, this sort of somewhat decrepit building

actually turned out to be a haven for us.