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Hans Zimmer talks score for Nolan’s new Batman

Hans Zimmer’s movie credentials speak for themselves. He has composed music for over 100 films and has earned himself a reputation of being inventive and unafraid of breaking convention. I had planned to list a few movies that he has worked on that you may recognize but that list is far too long and accomplished to stream down, so I’ll just add that he has most recently gained acclaim for Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”.

With Nolan getting his newest Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises”, underway questions began to rise concerning Zimmer’s involvement. “He was going to come over next week,” chuckled Zimmer. “We start early. I know he’s puttering around with ideas, and we sort of sneak up on things.”

When asked about working with Nolan by Popcorn Biz Zimmer said,

“Working with Chris, he gives me all the freedom in the world and encourages me to go and be daring and unusual and crazy and all those sorts of things and be able to be the sort of emotional center of the film. It’s very give and take. I’ll start long before he starts shooting. Our conversations start there and it goes both ways: we just have conversations about the movie and less about what the music has to do, and it really comes out of that, whereby I felt that there was a real emotional core to be had and that that was something that the music had to do and I hung on that for dear life.”

It seems that whenever a question is answered about Nolan’s “Batman” people are yearning for an answer about his upcoming “Superman” project as well.

In the case of Zimmer, Popcorn Biz was also curious about how he would handle, if it was he who handled, composing the score for a hero that already has such an iconic one by John Williams.

“It’s a hard one,” mused Zimmer, “but I followed one of the most iconic things on ‘Batman’ with Chris as well, and it’s the same thing. You are allowed to reinvent, but you have to try to be as good or at least as iconic and it has to resonate and it has to become a part of the zeitgeist. That’s the job. On ‘Gladiator’ I remember people always talking about ‘Spartacus’ and I kept telling them, ‘When you saw “Spartacus” and how it affected it you, that’s how I want a modern audience to be affected by what we do now.’ So I think ultimately you’re supposed to reinvent.”

[wpchatai]