'He Was An Integral Part Of Everything': Hans Zimmer Tells Us About His Famous Music Themes

The Lion King

"I’m old enough that I actually got to work on the original and the remake of The Lion King. It was originally written for my, at the time, six-year-old daughter. It was a really hot ticket for the premiere this time around, and Disney had sent me all these tickets and I sent them all back except for two, and I just took my daughter on a daddy-daughter date. Disney was quite astonished that somebody would actually send those tickets [back] – people were actually killing each other over those tickets."

The Dark Knight

"Oh, you’re going down in box office numbers, I can tell. I loved the Joker; I loved Heath [Ledger]. One of the things that have been really important for me on these tours is, in a way, wherever I go, to keep Heath’s memory alive. He was such an integral part of everything at that moment in time, and it was such a tragedy."

Inception

"When Chris [Nolan] talked to me about it, we went and sat down on a beach and he was telling me about his new idea for a movie. I thought it was actually really simple; it was a time travel movie with dreams, and I thought, ‘Oh that’s really clever – he’s figured out how to do time travel because you do it in dreams all the time.’ And I like this idea of shared dreaming which happens in the cinema.

"I just sat down and started writing away and had a lot of fun. Chris had written in this crazy lowbrow stuff that was a story point in the movie and then it got appropriated by every trailer house in the world and they just started shoving that stuff as a sort of segue between shots and it became a little annoying after that. Especially because, you go, ‘Don’t you guys realise, for us, it a story point; for you, it’s just a special effect.’"

Gladiator

"There wasn’t even a first cut yet, and I kept saying to Ridley [Scott], 'You’re a poet, you’re an artist, and right now it’s just titled Gladiator, straight into battle, and there’s no female soul in this movie'.

"Pietro [Scalia], our editor, had a Dead Can Dance CD, and said, ‘What about Lisa Gerrard?’ And Ridley and I sort of looked at each other and said, ‘That sounds good.’ I’d never met her, so I phoned her up, and she was very polite, and I said, ‘Would you be interested in working with us on this Gladiator movie?’ And she said, ‘Who’s in it?’ And I said, ‘Russell Crowe.’ And she said, ‘I can’t possibly do that, I can’t.’ I went back to Ridley and said, ‘She just turned us down.’ He said, ‘Rubbish, send her the film.’ So we sent her the film – you just don’t do that sort of thing. We sent the film to Melbourne and she phoned us back and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’

"I forgot all about her turning us down, and then a few years later I said to her, ‘Why did you turn us down?’ And she goes, ‘Do you know that film The Insider?’ She just thought that it was inappropriate that every time you saw Russell Crowe on the screen that year, you heard Lisa Gerrard sing, and she was just trying to protect Russell. She’s just got such a soul and is such a sweetheart."

Mission: Impossible 2

"Walking across the Fox lot [in Sydney] at 6 o’clock in the morning with a fully formed tune in my head going, ‘I am going to get this tune done by the time any office opens’, and I suddenly remembered that I knew the guys at Trackdown Studios and I phoned them and said, ‘Quick, I’ve got to record something!’ By the time I got to the meeting with Tom Cruise and John Woo, I had a rough theme. I always find it really inspiring being down in Australia – it’s a place where you can get ideas."