The ultimate goal is to give people an experience. You said it sounded ok this morning and I’m going: “Yes but wait until you hear these amazing musicians, they’re gonna knock your socks off.” It’s one the reasons I love working in cinema, because you have a huge big screen and you’re not on little speakers.
The world’s a pretty tough place these days and if somebody honours us by spending their hard earned money to come and see our movie it better be as good as we can possibly make it. It gets trickier when you’re dealing with sequels - this is the third one and I’m wearing a t-shirt from the first one and either the dry cleaners have shrunk it or I have grown a little in size since we did that first one - you do try and treat them as an autonomous movie. After all the idea is you’re supposed to invent something new. So it’s much better for you to start with a clean slate. No, no it’s not even that it influences you subconsciously because very often it’s my stuff that they put in! And you just go:”Oh God I’m a bit bored I’ve done this one!” you know?. Would the temp music ever influence you subconsciously?
Because the music does influence things greatly and that’s the sort of habit that filmmakers now have temp music - basically music from other movies that they shove in… The flexibility and the possibility of invention that you have, because everything is so up in the air and everything can change and influence everything else. And so it’s like we’re a band, we’re all on the same page, we’re all playing the same song all the way from start to finish. That’s how Chris Nolan and I work, that’s how I work with Ron Howard and all the other directors I work with, that before they go and shoot the movie we at least talk about the music or every often there will be a piece of music. There certainly always used to be me on the first day when they were talking about what the movie would be about and so you’re very much involved in the creative process right from the beginning. Animation by the nature of the beast, you have the movie basically up on story boards for a couple of years and it’s like you make the movie last. It used to be that they would go away, shoot the film, do their first cut then suddenly realise that they forgot that they need a composer, get a composer, give you 12 weeks to do it and you would slavishly follow whatever was up there on the screen. Is your writing process the same with each film project? Is there a difference when writing the score for animation as opposed to live action? My history is I had two weeks of piano lessons, that’s the formal education but in the 70s I discovered you could go and pervert computers into becoming musical instruments and so we got pretty good at making a big racket with them. Sounded impressive to my untrained ear though. So what you heard were my cheap synthesiser… What was missing was those people behind me, the orchestra. It’s never finished! They yank it away from me and tell me it’s finished. I saw some footage today but it was not the finished score… Hans kindly took time out of his busy schedule to sit down for an intimate interview in the meeting room overlooking the vast live room, while the orchestra played on and took us through working on Kung Fu Panda 3 as well as his take on the importance of Air and Abbey Road Studios. Spine-tingling doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Yep.Īfter a morning attending a special presentation of footage from the film with an incomplete score we made our way to the studios where we got to see the orchestra in action from the impressive control room and got the full live experience from the viewing gallery above the live room.
The Hans Zimmer who composed the score for The Lion King, Inception, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy, Gladiator, 12 Years a Slave and dozens of others. Kung Fu Panda 3 hits UK cinemas this week and a few months ago DIY were lucky enough to attend a scoring session for the film at London’s legendary Air Studios in the presence of none other than composer, Hans Zimmer.