Hans Zimmer

Born: September 12, 1957 in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, West Germany

When you write a theme one of the things you want to do is you want to see how much life it really has. How many possibilities there are. Can it speak to you in joy? Can it speak to you in sorrow? Can it be love? Can it be hate? Can you say all these things with just a few notes? That’s the thing when you figure out if a tune is any good or not. Does it have more than one shallow little character? Does it have just one little thing to tell you. Can it get underneath there under your skin? Can it get dark? Can it talk about the death of a father or something like that.

[on his score for The Lion King (1994)] The main emphasis to me was how we were going to get, in a children’s movie, to the idea that a father dies and make it an emotional yet not horrifying experience but make it something that children might want to start asking some questions about. It’s very simple. It’s my point of view because my dad dropped dead when I was six and I had nobody to talk to about it. So, it’s a very personal sort of thing.