Quotes

I have all these computers and keyboards and synthesizers, and I rattle away. For instance, with The Lion King (1994), I wrote over four hours' worth of tunes, and they were really pretty - but totally meaningless. So in the end I came up with material I liked. We worked on The Lion King for four years, but I wasn't toying until the last three-and-a-half weeks properly. On Crimson Tide (1995), on the other hand, I just went in and within seconds I knew what I wanted.

I wake up around noon, light a cigarette, get a cup of coffee, sit in the bathtub for an hour and daydream, and I usually come up with some ideas... It's a very irresponsible life. The only decisions I make are about the notes I'm writing.

I don't drive, so one of my assistants drives me to my writing room, and I have a calendar on the wall telling me how much time I have left, and how far behind I am. I look at it and panic, and decide which scene to work on. And you sit there plonking notes until something makes sense, and you don't think about it any more. Good tunes come when you're not thinking about it.

If something happened where I couldn't write music anymore, it would kill me. It's not just a job. It's not just a hobby. It's why I get up in the morning.

You have to remain flexible, and you must be your own critic at all times.

[on his score for Hannibal (2001)] This is the best love theme I've ever written, I keep telling everyone this is a romantic comedy, but nobody believes me.

[on his score for Batman Begins (2005)] I think this one has more electronics in it than anything else. I didn't want to do straight orchestra because Batman, he's not a straight character. I mean where do you get those wonderful toys from and the technology? So I thought I could embrace a bit more technology in this one... there isn't a straight orchestral note on this score.

[on his previous Batman scores] Nobody ever mentions the Elliot Goldenthal scores. And of course, I'm not mentioning any of that either, because quite honestly I didn't go and look at the old Batman movies again.

I am not saying it is a bad movie or good movie, but it is an odd movie. All of the music was written before Terry would edit a scene. That was just how he wanted to work. It was a very odd way of working for me, because I had to lead the charge up the hill all the time. It gets a little daunting.

[on his score for The Lion King (1994)] I'd never written for talking fuzzy animals before. I knew how to write to human emotions but these were animals. It took me a while to sort of get over that and do what you do which is just treat them like human characters.

[on his score for The Lion King (1994)] I thought how do we deal with in a children's movie the idea that a father dies and make an emotional yet not horrifying experience. And it's very simple. It's my point of view because my dad dropped dead when I was six. I had nobody to talk to about it.

If the secret should be known, which is not much of a secret at all, this is my hobby I love doing this. Anything else feels like work to me.

When you write a theme one of the things you want to do is you want to see how much life it really has. How many possibilities there are. Can it speak to you in joy? Can it speak to you in sorrow? Can it be love? Can it be hate? Can you say all these things with just a few notes? That's the thing when you figure out if a tune is any good or not. Does it have more than one shallow little character? Does it have just one little thing to tell you. Can it get underneath there under your skin? Can it get dark? Can it talk about the death of a father or something like that.

[on his score for The Lion King (1994)] The main emphasis to me was how we were going to get, in a children's movie, to the idea that a father dies and make it an emotional yet not horrifying experience but make it something that children might want to start asking some questions about. It's very simple. It's my point of view because my dad dropped dead when I was six and I had nobody to talk to about it. So, it's a very personal sort of thing.

You have to realize I like doing big movies that appear on a big screen. So the visuals and the audio have to be of a certain quality before I start to get excited about the thing.

The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.

When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.

With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

You come from a conversation with the director, and you're all enthusiastic, because it's all new possibilities, opportunities, great ideas, etc. And then you get into this room, and you sit in front of this [computer], and it's all gone and you just go "oh my god, I have no idea what to do". But you need the courage of starting somewhere.

I write film music. I don't do brain surgery. I don't cure cancer. I just write a little bit of film music.

Nobody beats me up as much as I beat myself up. This is what I love doing and I have one life to do it in. And I better do it right. I better do it well.

In Rain Man, we had one rule - no traveling guitars and no orchestra, because in a way it was yet another road movie. And whenever you see people driving in a car across America you have either guitars or you have a big orchestra soaring away. So we gave ourselves those limitations on purpose, so you have to go and find a different voice.

[on working with director Tony Scott]: Everything had to be dangerous. If it wasn't dangerous, if it wasn't on the edge, if the equipment didn't start burning, we weren't doing it right. If people weren't outraged by what we were doing, we weren't doing it right. If somebody had done it before, it was boring. So he was pushing the envelope all the time.

The love theme from Mission: Impossible [II] was written about 6 weeks before they started shooting. I was on it that early. Then, we had a big meeting in Australia. They had the love theme, and I knew what the story was about, and I always thought it was about these two men being in love with the girl. So I said to the record company guy, "Look, here's one thing I would love you to do, when you find bands for me, make them all female. Make them all about sirens." Of course, what did I get? A bunch of heavy metal bands with guys. I promise you, it would have been a better movie, and it would have been a better score.

I'm not sure people realize this, but I've only ever written one patriotic theme, a pure theme, and that's "Backdraft". This is because I've always felt that the police, the military, and the firemen are all in the same kind of league. The firemen or the paramedics, when they come to your rescue, have a single aim; to save you or to make you better. So, I really admire them.

[About working on Days of Thunder with director Tony Scott]: It was complete insanity, but again because it was Tony he'd just keep it recklessly fun.

Hannibal is a completely Viennese, romantic score with some odd overtones. Okay it goes a little left, but it's like Mahler on steroids.

I would describe myself as somebody who's deeply in love with music and deeply in love with movies and playful. I love to play, like as any musician does, as in any language it says you play music.

[About the inspirations behind his score for True Romance]: "All I remember was as a kid being in Germany in music class where we had these xylophones and marimbas and etc. and it was just a horrible noise, but it was a sort of innocent noise... And I thought, 'Okay so Tony, you took away all the money, all you're gonna get is these marimbas and little kids playing it.' But there was a great juxtaposition as well between the violence and this really innocent music, and I thought it went really well with the characters... Part of it was design, part of it was just again Tony pushing the envelope and going, 'It's not strange enough!' He used to say that all the time to me."

The Dune score is very electronic. I think sometimes you don't realize how electronic it is.

The art of being a film composer hasn't changed. The basic idea remains the same and that is to ask a question: 'Why are we having music here?

You can say that the movies I made with John Badham, like Point of No Return or Drop Zone, are not masterpieces, but he never expected us to do art - he expected us to do something entertaining.

In Thelma and Louise, Ridley [Scott] used everything I wrote. In fact, he liked the theme that became "Thunderbird" so much that he tagged an opening with credits onto the film.

You know why I did all those action movies? Because when I was a kid in Europe, all I got to score was art movies. In those days, all I wanted to do was go to Hollywood, compose for action movies and sound like John Williams. But in truth I didn't know how. So Black Rain, my first action movie, was original but only by virtue of my own stupidity. My lack of knowledge made it original.

Drop Zone was written just for fun. I was being reckless--nothing to prove, nothing to lose. The director was just happy I was working with him. Remember, I come from rock n roll. At the same time, I grew up with classical music. So I'm always torn between the two. In Drop Zone, I could do both. And it never hurt! You know, with some scores, you come away with a lot of scars. In Drop Zone there weren't any. It was just a blast.

My taste is weird. It's Beethoven, Manu Chao, it's The Clash - it's a lot of The Clash! It's a lot of Tangerine Dreams. For somebody who had such a poor classical education, my knowledge of classical music stuff is good, but my knowledge of the damn Sex Pistols is probably better.

[About his score for 1996's Broken Arrow]: My intent was just make the film fun, when there's no real story to tell. Well, I guess there was a story about betrayal between two men who've been friends forever. But that's not really what the movie was about. It was about blowing up a lot of things

In Peacemaker, I managed to finish off all the ideas that I didn't quite get right in Crimson Tide. How many sunflowers scenes did Van Gogh paint before he was happy? You know what I mean? Sometimes it's nice to go over old ground just because you learn something. In film scoring, there's revolution and there's evolution.

Ironically, despite all the scores I've written, there are very few I'm proud of. World Apart, Driving Miss Daisy, and a couple of cues in Crimson Tide. Black Rain had somehow set up a new way action movies should be scored. Soon everybody was doing the Black Rain thing. In Crimson Tide, I managed to break out of that trend, push it a bit further. So it was an evolutionary step.

[About the 1996's film The Rock]: "The main theme is mine, as are a few other bits. It's really hard to tell. I do have a huge influence in there. But I never really wanted to write any of it. It was always supposed to be Nick Glennie-Smith's score."

[about his score for the 2024's film 'Blitz'] It's not an easy score on the audience, which was very much on purpose. After seeing the film, I said, "I want to write something dissonant. I want an adult to feel the same confusion and terror that a child would feel.

A film like Broken Arrow was a great challenge because it was a pure action film, but you still had to make it emotionally resonant. I think it's one of the scores from that era that people still remember for its energy and its ability to match the film's intensity.

I write in so many different styles, but I think it's unmistakable that it is me when you hear it. The guy who wrote Thelma and Louise is the guy who wrote Thin Red Line is the guy who wrote Nine Months is the guy who wrote Gladiator is the guy who wrote True Romance. It's all over the place but it's a point of view.

[about his score for The Fan] Nobody went to see the movie, and the score is unflinchingly dissonant. There's a nihilistic poem that I read through a vocoder and you cannot understand the words, but it's really evil. Don't-try-this-at-home type of music. But I sort of love it.

[about The Fan] It was a shitty movie, I know that, but it was a great experience. A producer at DreamWorks listened to my music and after three minutes she ran away screaming. A week later she called me to say that she was having nightmares ever since. I thought, yeah this stuff is really good! And I know no one bought the cd, but it was a great experiment and it is as Zimmer as it gets.

I thought I did something quite original on Rain Man, and by the end of the year, there were a thousand Rain Mans around.