Hans Zimmer - The Virus TI in Batman Begins

Imagine becoming a pirate, a prince, a king, a weatherman, a gladiator, a spy, a superhero, a samurai, a cannibal, and a simpson, among other things…. Not just all in one lifetime, but all in under ten years! Pretty extraordinary one would say? Now imagine, on top of this exciting life full of adventure and intrigue, being a pop-sensation, winning Academy, Golden Globe, Satellite and Grammy Awards, traveling the world, selling tens of millions of records AND running a company. Impossible? Few people could say they have done all of these things in their lifetime. Very few. In fact, probably only one: Hans Zimmer.

All of us at Access are absolutely thrilled to welcome legendary film composer, Hans Zimmer to the Access Spotlight.

Do you remember your first exposure to electronic music? Was there something about music produced with synthesizers that sparked your interest more than traditional pop or rock records?

Yes, at school someone had brought in Switched on Bach and I thought it was cool. I come from a technical family, my father was an inventor, and although I was only 12 at the time, or something, I thought this was definitely a step forward in the development of instruments.

Do you remember the first synthesizer you ever owned?

Yes! An EMS VCS3.

Awesome. The Putney!

The Putney! Without an instruction manual or keyboard, so I really learned the hard way. I think it took me a year to get the first noise out of it, and of course it was the sound of someone squeezing a gerbil a little bit passionately.

In the 70s and 80s, some of the synthesizers that were coming out that everyone had to have cost more than, say, a Volkswagen Rabbit, such as the Jupiter 8…

A lot more! You know, my dictum always was, “a synthesizer can buy you a house, but a house cannot buy you a synthesizer”, so I always rented.

The Fairlight cost more than a three-bedroom home at the time!

Absolutely! But, let me tell you this: I got more good ideas working with the Fairlight than working with anything else. I made a living having a Prophet 5 and a Fairlight doing sessions for other people. When I started working with Trevor Horn, I remember that Trevor thought it was really weird that this German guy wanted to put down time-code and clicks.

Do you think musicians getting into production now have easier access to “the cutting edge” than when you were starting out?

I don’t think so. Companies fill their synths with up with sounds (and everyone does this), so now you've got thousands of presets! I never use any of the presets, I have my sort of stock templates to start a sound from, and I will just putz about until I find something I like. I never get anything done if I go and look for the preset. I am actually developing a piece of music if I make a sound.

Presets are almost like playing someone else’s thought or idea?

It’s not even that it is someone else’s idea, It’s just I listen to it, and it takes me away from my focus. It’s like sitting at a huge buffet and going “well, should I have the shrimp, or no, I’ll go for the red currant jelly, or no I will go for the meat”, you know? And while your eating the shrimp you always looking over and seeing the other things, so you are not really enjoying anything, and you’re never really tasting anything.

My thing is always about meeting a deadline (my life is probably a bit different than other people you are interviewing) and writing a piece of music that fits a certain need, so most of the really crazy wacky presets are sort of “not applicable”, they don’t take me to the new idea.

The Virus TI in Batman Begins

You got your start doing jingle work, and had a great deal of success in the pop/rock scene before your film career.

Well, not a lot, just enough for everyone to be bugging me at the moment because it seems to be the 25 years birthday for MTV and everyone wants to know about “Video Kill the Radio Star”.

What was it about scoring that led you to want to work in the film industry and get away from the pop/rock scene?

First of all, I loved movies, and secondly, there is nothing more boring than being on the road all the time, or in a room all the time with musicians, because inevitably the conversations are dull, and all you’re doing is talking about the latest piece of gear, and maybe why the drummer did not get laid.

The film world, in a peculiar way, is far more adventurous. I didn’t have to go write “verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge” or whatever, I did not have to write that formula. If you have heard the stuff I have done, it’s all over the place. Thelma and Louise sounds nothing like Gladiator, sounds nothing like Blackhawk Down, sounds nothing like Driving Miss Daisy.

What I think happens in rock and roll is actually really, really conservative.

You produced and recorded with everyone from The Buggles (Video Killed the Radio Star), Whitney Houston, Ultravox, The Damned and Shriekback – do you ever get the urge to take a break from film work and work with or produce bands again?

Absolutely. You know I work with a lot of musicians, and I have sort of a band that I work with all the time: my guitarist friend Heitor Pereira, the electric cellist Martin Tillman, and so on. So we thought, maybe 2008 would be a good year to go and do a bit of a tour, if we are allowed to take our instruments on aeroplanes, that is...

Well, you could always bring a Sitar or something that looks non-threatening…

Right, exactly. But I was literally thinking of skipping a year doing film music. My friend Harry Gregson Williams just did a concert in Madrid, and I was very envious. I went to it, and just loved every second of it, and have a sort of gleeful envy.

You did a concert in 2001 didn’t you?

Yeah, but it was very big and maybe too much. I would do a guerilla version of it: get the band together, go out, make a lot of noise, have a lot of fun, drink good wine, go home!

Can you tell us what has been getting a lot of play on your iPod lately? Do you find yourself listening to more classical music, film scores, or artists or bands when you have free time to listen to music casually?

I’m all over the place. I like Imogen Heap right now after Harry sort of turned me on to her in a big way.

She is fantastic!

I love what she does. At the moment I am completely addicted to youtube.com, you can find all sorts of treasures on there that have never been released, you know. I found this Jeff Beck/Jools Holland thing the other day, which is absolutely incredible. Then, you can suddenly go look at an old Pink Floyd concert or something like that.

I always listen to stuff to try to get in a certain mood for a certain project, and right now I am still a Pirate. We just finished Pirates II, and for the last two weeks I have been trying to sit and write a love scene, but it hasn’t quite happened yet. So I am listening to more orchestral stuff at the moment, big pompous stuff.

You’re known for always using the latest, cutting edge technology. But when you start composing for a film, are you sitting down in front of your sequencer, or with a guitar or piano?

I am not trying to do that anymore with technology, I’m trying to let someone else be the beta-tester and let them get hurt! I’m now waiting for some bugs to be ironed out.

I always sit in front of a computer, though, and when I start composing a film, I do it in my head, or in the shower, or in the car on the way to work, that sort of thing. But it translates into the computer.

I usually start of my figuring out a palette of sounds, and you have to limit the palette because otherwise you’ll spend all your time playing around with synths and sounds and never getting any work done.

On Da Vinci Code, I said, “other than the orchestral stuff, I am only going to use one thing”, which of course was the new Virus Polar because it had just shown up. Then it was sort of fun to go “ok, now what am I going to get out of this one machine” and it was a fun way to sort of figure out hot to push it all the way to the wall. But then I could ruin your day and mention that I did end-up putting another synth into it, because the Virus could not do one thing. Do you know what that synth was?

The Minimoog.

Fair enough.

Right! I had to do that bass thing. At the premier, at the Cannes Film Festival, when that little Minimoog came in, and it was not even vary loud, all the ceiling tiles began rattling and I was very happy!

The Virus TI in Batman Begins

If there has to be one other synth, it might as well be a Minimoog! When scoring a film set in a specific culture, say feudal Japan (The Last Samurai) or war-torn Somalia (Black Hawk Down), for example, what is your process for researching and preparing to recreate the feeling and vibe of these cultures?

Well, I drove myself completely nuts on The Last Samurai. I listened to a lot of Japanese music, I read a lot about it, and every piece I listened to, and everything I read, just got me further and further away from figuring out how to do it, because I realized it was such an alien culture, and such a vast field. And I got pretty desperate, actually the director got pretty desperate as well because I was not writing anything, because I was still doing research, and I was not getting any closer. So finally, I was sitting there told myself, “Hang on a second, they did not give you this job to become a musicologist, or an interpreter of cultures, they gave you this job to invent! So shut up, sit down and invent!”

I always write as a European, because that’s me, that’s my culture, that’s my background. But I try not to do a sort of cultural imperialism and steal the best riff of a nation, and just reuse them. I am trying to find an aesthetic sense that will work with that culture. For instance with Black Hawn Down, having Baaba Maal, who is not from Somalia, what I was trying to achieve was, I was not trying to say “Somalia”, I was trying to say “hang on, great African story-teller”, and even though you do not understand the words he is singing, you know just from his performance, and who he is, that something important is being said to you. I was trying to give the continent some sort of a voice.

The beginning of that movie, with the camera panning over the sand and bodies, along with the music, gives me goose bumps every time I watch it – so powerful.

Exactly, it turned out pretty good. That was Baaba Maal and Martin on his electric cello, and, in a way, it turned out be our strongest theme.

How has technology, and the rise of computers and software instruments changed the way you score films?

It just made things a lot easier. It’s a lot easier not having to deal with tape and things like that, and stuff chasing each other badly. Communication has gotten a lot better, everything we do here, we have big servers and everybody has access to it. For us, it is a huge advantage that Digidesign and Avid are sort of one company, because certainly with what I am involved in, the two worlds, visuals and sound, somehow occasionally actually meet.

Anyone who has seen your studio, knows about your glorious collection of synthesizers, the Moog, the wall of System 100M, the Polyfusion to name a few – do hardware synths still play a big role in your work?

Yeah, absolutely. They make you think about things differently, you don’t ‘sit there with just a keyboard, just pottering about. I suppose it is the difference between doing a painting or a doing sculpture. The old analog stuff, plugging things in, is a much more sort of sculptural approach to things. Because literally to sit there all the time, and be disciplined, and play the keyboard, figuring out your lines in a completely sort of classical way gets really boring, and sometimes it is just nice to go see what surprises you.

Plus it looks cool! People walk into your studio and see that 100M lining the wall.


Yeah it does – it is really good. We are just now building another little analog room, which is just sort of like a little lab, with some cool things in there.

The VCS3!

Yeah, exactly. The VCS3 actually got a lot of use last year. I didn’t do it, but my friend Mel Wesson, there is a lot of VCS3 in Batman Begins.

When did you first start using the Virus?

Oh god, I don’t know. Whenever it first came out, whatever the first one was. I liked it then. I actually had one of the horrible Access Microwave Programmers before that. I thought they were a bunch of losers. But then, they came out with the Virus, and it was really good. It was just a surprisingly flexible instrument and it always sounded good. And of course, what always surprises me about the Virus, that basically, after 10 years, you’re rehashing the same idea, you’re painting it slightly differently, and we are still totally excited about getting a new one! That is the sign of a fundamentally sound design.

You have owned every Virus since the Virus A. As the Virus changed fairly substantial over time; from the Virus A, to the B, then the Virus C, and now the TI, has the way you work with the Virus also changed?

I own all of them. We have every one. I just push them harder, because they let me, and I have to say, the whole TI idea, which by the way, we did not have problems with, I know lots of people had some problems with integrating it into their computers, we had a few small silly things, but when Christoph [Kemper, CEO Access Music GmbH] was over, we showed him and they got fixed quickly. But the whole TI idea is why I think it is a great machine. I really have to say, on Da Vinci, it worked flawlessly. Absolutely flawlessly. My system is a very stable system, and my music computers are just that, there is nothing else there – no you cannot go and get porno off the Internet on my sequencer, which is a bit of a drawback!

You use Cubase right?

Yeah.

And you run on a PC?

Yeah. In fact, my tech team a couple of years back, just took my Mac away and put a PC there and kept the Mac keyboard and told me to just change one command, and I never noticed the difference really, other than it was running better. The other thing I liked about the PC was, and I have just as many Macs here as PC’s, so I am not coming down on any side other than, I like that there are a lot of far more wacky plug-ins in be had in the PC world than there is in the Mac world. And you never know, somebody will come up with something interesting in sideways.

What types of sounds do you normally utilize the Virus for?

I don’t know. How do you describe them? I am just sticking with Da Vinci Code, because that was really a Virus movie, a lot of atmospheric stuff, obviously I don’t need to create anything acoustic or orchestral, I don’t need to go and do fake strings, so it is more of these sort of glassy-dreamscapes, it is great for that sort of stuff. Plus, I like the arpeggiator, instant german-school sequencer stuff.

Have you found the new oscillator types (Wavetables and Hypersaw) on the Virus useful for making new sounds?

Yes. They are great. The hyper-saw is sort of my bread and butter building block for every time I need to get really ostentatious, and a little too big, and scare the children a little too much, and the wavetables…. I think they are really good wavetables.

Are you using the surface of the Virus for manipulating sounds, or are you using Virus Control to operate the TI remotely?

Actually I got two. One that is right next to me that is not integrated into my system with Virus Control, and I can go and fiddle its knobs, and I have another, which is in the machine room, and I just use Virus Control. I really like using Virus Control, and it works just fine.

How do you think studios like yours will look 10 years from now?

Here is an interesting thing. My very big machine room is getting emptier and emptier, because things are getting more powerful, and we can chuck things out. But what we found was, these 19 inch racks that hold bottles of wine! So my studio will probably look more like a wine cellar, with one little computer shoved off in the corner. And see, the other reason you want to use your machine room is because it has the right temperature, and the environment is controlled, so it is really much better for wine than equipment. That is really where we are heading.

Wine makes everything better anyway.

Yes!

Is there any advice you would give someone who is looking to start doing music for film?

Don’t touch your keyboard until you know what you are writing about, in other words, have a point of view. Don’t try to sound like anybody else. Don’t try to sound like John Williams. If someone wants John Williams, they are going to phone John Williams. They are not going to phone you because you sound like John Williams. Find your own voice. Don’t go through the presets!

What are the next film scores you have coming out that we can look forward to hearing in theaters?

Pirates of the Caribbean III, a thing called The Holiday, which funnily enough, is sort of about film composers, with Jack Black, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. I think it will put anyone off of film composing forever. And I think I will be playing around on The Simpsons a bit.

So your advice to anyone wanting to get into film scoring would be don’t see The Holiday!

Nah, but you know, why would you want to be a film composer? You have to be 100% dedicated, you don’t have a social life, you never get to go home, and you are forever sweating because it is one of the few jobs that does not get better. The more I write, the more I come under scrutiny, and the harder it is to come up with the next great tune that I haven’t written. After 100 movies or so, and you think 44 pieces of music in each, you do the math. It can get tricky.

That is all they questions we have, so we want to thank you Hans for taking the time to talk with us, we really appreciate it.

Thanks Matt.