Hans Zimmer has composed incredible music for some incredible movies: The Lion King, Pirates of the Caribbean, Driving Miss Daisy, Gladiator, The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Inception … the list goes on and on.
But you don’t have to limit yourself to just hearing this music at a movie theater, on a soundtrack CD or in your high-tech home entertainment room. Zimmer, plus a band, a full orchestra and a full choir, will be bringing it to the Santa Barbara Bowl on Aug. 13. Tickets are available online by clicking here.
Zimmer took time out of his busy schedule for a group interview, in which Noozhawk took part.
When asked about the tour, he self-deprecated: “I’ve actually managed to, over the last 40 years, figure out enough music that can fill an evening without boring everybody.” He went on: “The only reason for me to go out on stage was to actually go and give people an experience that they couldn’t get anywhere else.” How so? “I know I can never get this group back together, because they’ve all got individual careers. If you come and see us, great. If you don’t come and see us, you will have missed out maybe on something that’ll never happen again.”
Not surprisingly, Zimmer feels strongly about the importance of orchestral music.
“When I as a musician think about the orchestra, it’s not just that I wish my fellow musicians well and that they can earn a living, and that it’s interesting for children to learn how to play the violin, etc. I’m thinking of it more as a form of art that has been with us for a long time, and I think if we lost it it would create an enormous sort of vacuum in the human condition, in human culture. I think we need to be careful that we don’t lose these things, because if we lose it we lose some of our humanity.”
And he noted the importance of movies for the continued health of orchestral music.
“I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. Whatever dastardly things you can accuse Hollywood of, they’re all absolutely and completely true. But don’t forget it’s the last place on Earth that on a daily basis commissions orchestral music. And very often these are long-form pieces. I mean, some of the things we’re playing on this tour, like the Pirates Suite, it’s 14 minutes long. But that’s literally the way it popped out of my head when I was writing the movie. I didn’t have to make any changes. I wrote a 14-minute piece, and it seems to stand on its own two feet. Or Dark Knight, pulling from three movies makes for a pretty good long-form piece as well.”
One gathers that every movie score Zimmer works on has an interesting story behind it. When asked about The Lion King, for which he won an Academy Award, he revealed, “I didn’t actually realize until I started working on it how incredibly profound it was. The story is really about a son losing his father, or at least that is the center for me. And my father died when I was at a really young age, and I never dealt with it. You know, kids have a great way of blanking these things out. So suddenly there I was doing what I thought was going to be this trivial cartoon about fuzzy animals, and actually noticing that I had to go and write something pretty serious.”
And regarding his most recent movie score for Dunkirk, which currently is in theaters, he said, “Honestly, Dunkirk is the most radical thing I’ve ever done, without a shadow of a doubt.” In what way? “Because [director] Chris [Nolan’s] brief to me, which I think is a very good brief, was to make the music objective. It’s easy to write emotional music. It’s very difficult to keep objective music interesting. If you look at, for instance, Saving Private Ryan, there is very little music in it, while in Dunkirk the music never stops. Just the amount of having to invent to not become redundant, and having to invent to not become irrelevant, was quite a task.”
Zimmer’s show at the Santa Barbara Bowl promises to be quite an event, and a unique opportunity to focus on the music that has helped to make a number of movies as great as they are.
Click here for more of the interview with Hans Zimmer, including a bit about his rock-‘n’-roll past.
— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.