When you first play somebody a piece of music, you just don't want to look at them.
Because just in case there's a slight twitch of disgust crosses their face or something.
You know, you're just so vulnerable.
The Lion King theme.
I was always making a noise on the piano, and then one day my mum said, do you want to have a piano teacher?
And when you're a little kid, you sort of misunderstand what that means, or I certainly did.
I thought that a piano teacher was somebody who was going to teach you
all that crazy noise I was hearing in my head, how to make that come out of my fingers.
But that's not what piano teachers do.
They teach you how to play other people's music.
I didn't want to play other people's music!
Because your mum was a piano player?
Yeah, exactly right.
If you could change anything about the way we teach music, what would you change?
Really interesting question.
First of all, I would make sure everybody understood that it's about playfulness.
My mum, you know, she used to do this game with me where she'd put on a record and say, okay.
What century? What composer, etc.
After a while you go, oh an orchestra is about this size, so you figure it out.
What's the biggest change in movie music you've seen since you started?
Everything is shifting all the time: like in the 90s everybody wanted to have an end title song.
Now, whenever anybody says, should we have an end title song? I'm just thinking...
That's so last century.
Do you think the end title song is going to come back?
Celine Dion just waiting in the wings for her moment to return?
There has to be a reason, I mean look I'll give you a really good example.
You know that hideous sound we made in Inception?
Okay, it was a story point in the script, it's all about what happens if you slow time down?
So it's a story point: but it ended up in all of these people's trailers.
Where it's not a story point, but they just like using it to be able to cut from one non sequitur to the other.
And that's a bit like those songs.
They often - the song has nothing to do with the movie, and it's a marketing thing.
And the world has shifted.
It's really interesting that you say that because of the comparison I was thinking of the other day.
I was listening to your soundtracks to the Man of Steel and also the Dark Knight Trilogy
and then I went back and I was listening to what Danny Elfman did for Batman and what John Williams did for Superman.
The audio language is so different.
Did you have conversations about whether you were transposing that audio language into this new world?
Well yeah, absolutely. The whole conversation we had was to be inside of the movie.
For instance, one of my favourite, favourite scores is John Williams' in Superman.
But it's very much objective in a way.
It sort of sits above the character.
Heralding everything.
And it goes, Superman!
So you know everything about it, as opposed to the way I like working which is to give you a glimpse at something.
I'm not even going to tell you what it is, and I'm just going to invite you in and let you discover it.
I'm going to let you be part of this world. Sometimes I'm going to mislead you a little bit, and I'm going to make it all a little scary.
I wanted to ask you about one of your most iconic recent scores, which is Interstellar.
Because, when we talk about Interstellar, we visualise big, larger than life space epic.
But that's not what was pitched to you at the beginning, was it?
Well, you know the story.
I do.
Ok, I'll tell you the story.
I see Chris, and I can tell he's making the idea up as he goes.
But he's saying, what if I were to send you one page, just describing something.
But I won't tell you what the movie is about.
Will you give me one day and write whatever you get from that page?
So I get this beautiful, type-written letter which describes what it meant to be a father.
So, I sat down Sunday morning and I, in turn, in a funny way wrote a love letter to my son. What it meant to me.
I've done a lot of movies, but every time I sit down, it's like blank page, oh my god, I have no idea what to do.
I finished at around 10:30pm with this really fragile, personal piece and I phoned Chris' house and his wife answered.
He comes over and I play him the thing, finish it and turn around to him and I go,
So what do you think?
And he pauses for a second and goes, suppose I better make the movie now!
Then he starts talking to me about space, he talks to me about all of these things.
And I'm like: hang on a second. I've just given you the tiniest, fragile, discreet, little piece of music.
What has that got to do with all this 'epicness'?
He goes, well now I know where the heart of the movie is.
All I knew was ultimately there was this moment of, you're leaving. You're leaving your child behind.
Your father passed away when you were very young, when you were six years old.
I read that music was a key way in which you worked through that. Is that true?
I didn't work through it, I just took refuge in it.
Which I didn't realise.
I mean, I wouldn't be in music if this hadn't happened, because it was two things.
It was a complete refuge, to just lose yourself in playing.
And the other thing was, you know everybody is trying to keep a brave face when tragedy hits.
The only thing that would put a smile on my mum's face was when she heard me play the piano.
So I knew that I was being a good boy when I played the piano, and that I could make her day a little brighter.
In a funny way, it was sort of helpful to me, because I realised that it wasn't until The Lion King -
And you had a kid by then.
Yeah, my daughter was six-years-old.
So weirdly it was around the same age.
It's a story about fathers and sons.
And you know, the father dying...
The advantage of not having a musical education is that I always have to invent, and I have to write from the heart.
I don't know where else to write from.
In music I have to be completely honest.
I don't know how not to be, and I have to bare it all.
It's a bit...
complicated.
You know, because you have to make up your mind, how much do you really want people to see you?
Hans Zimmer, thank you for all the music.
It was an absolute pleasure talking to you.