Hans Zimmer

Hans Florian Zimmer (; born 12 September 1957) is a German film score composer and music producer. He has won two Oscars and four Grammys, and has been nominated for two Emmys and a Tony. Zimmer was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by ''The Daily Telegraph''.

His works are notable for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements. Since the 1980s, Zimmer has composed music for over 150 films. His works include ''The Lion King'' (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1995), ''Gladiator'', ''The Last Samurai'', the '' Pirates of the Caribbean'' series, ''The Dark Knight'' trilogy, ''Inception'', '' Interstellar'' and ''Dunkirk'' in 2022.

Zimmer spent the early part of his career in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. He is the head of the film music division at DreamWorks Pictures and DreamWorks Animation studios and works with other composers through the company that he founded, Remote Control Productions, formerly known as Media Ventures. His studio in Santa Monica, California has an extensive range of computer equipment and keyboards, allowing demo versions of film scores to be created quickly.

Early life

Zimmer was born on 12 September 1957 in Frankfurt, West Germany. As a young child, he lived in Königstein-Falkenstein, where he played the piano at home but had piano lessons only briefly, as he disliked the discipline of formal lessons. In one of his Reddit AMAs, he said: "My formal training was two weeks of piano lessons. I was thrown out of eight schools. But I joined a band. I am self-taught. But I've always heard music in my head. And I'm a child of the 20th century; computers came in very handy." Zimmer attended the Ecole D'Humanité, an international boarding school in Canton Bern, Switzerland. He moved to London as a teenager, where he attended Hurtwood House school. During his childhood, he was strongly influenced by the film scores of Ennio Morricone and has cited ''Once Upon a Time in the West'' as the score that inspired him to become a film composer.

In a speech at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, Zimmer stated that he is Jewish, and talked about his mother surviving World War II thanks to her escape from Germany to England in 1939. In an interview in May 2014, Zimmer revealed that it was difficult growing up in post-War Germany being Jewish and said, "I think my parents were always wary of me telling the neighbors" that they were Jewish. In an interview with Mashable in February 2013, he said of his parents: "My mother was very musical, basically a musician and my father was an engineer and an inventor. So I grew up modifying the piano, shall we say, which made my mother gasp in horror, and my father would think it was fantastic when I would attach chainsaws and stuff like that to the piano because he thought it was an evolution in technology." In an interview with the German television station ZDF in 2006, he commented: "My father died when I was just a child, and I escaped somehow into the music and music has been my best friend."

Career

1977–1988

Zimmer began his career playing keyboards and synthesizers in the 1970s, with the band Krakatoa. He worked with the Buggles, a new wave band formed in London in 1977 with Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley. Zimmer can be seen briefly in the Buggles' music video for the 1979 song "Video Killed the Radio Star". After working with the Buggles, he started to work for the Italian group Krisma, a new wave band formed in 1976 with Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser. He was a featured synthesist for Krisma's third album, ''Cathode Mamma''. He has also worked with the band Helden (with Warren Cann from Ultravox). Both Zimmer (on keyboards) and Cann (on drums), were invited to be part of the Spanish group Mecano for a live performance in Segovia (Spain) in 1984. Two songs from this concert were included in the '' Mecano: En Concierto'' album released in 1985 only in Spain. In 1985, he contributed to the Shriekback album '' Oil & Gold''. In 1980, Zimmer co-produced a single, " History of the World, Part 1," with, and for, UK punk band The Damned, which was also included on their 1980 LP release, '' The Black Album'', and carried the description of his efforts as "Over-Produced by Hans Zimmer."

While living in London, Zimmer wrote advertising jingles for Air-Edel Associates. In the 1980s, Zimmer partnered with Stanley Myers, a prolific film composer who wrote the scores for over sixty films. Zimmer and Myers co–founded the London–based Lillie Yard recording studio. Together, Myers and Zimmer worked on fusing the traditional orchestral sound with electronic instruments. Some of the films on which Zimmer and Myers worked are ''Moonlighting'' (1982), '' Success Is the Best Revenge'' (1984), '' Insignificance'' (1985), and ''My Beautiful Laundrette'' (1985). Zimmer's first solo score was ''Terminal Exposure'' for director Nico Mastorakis in 1987, for which he also wrote the songs. Zimmer acted as score producer for the 1987 film ''The Last Emperor'', which won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

One of Zimmer's most durable works from his time in the United Kingdom was the theme song for the television game show '' Going for Gold'', which he composed with Sandy McClelland in 1987. In an interview with the BBC
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