Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer is a composer and keyboard synthesizer player who made popular music history then became one of the most successful film score composers.

Raised and educated mainly in England, he has no formal musical education; he says the most he ever got was about “two weeks of piano lessons.” Nevertheless, he took an early interest in electronic musical synthesizers in the 1970s, when these were large, bulky analog devices programmed usually by means of patch cords and individual oscillator settings.

He found work writing tunes and electronically scoring music for television commercials and, still in his early twenties, joined two British musicians named Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes to form a rock group called The Buggles.

After writing scores for a few more movies, including Wonderland, Paperhouse, and Burning Secret, he was commissioned to compose for the low-budget film on South African racial problems A World Apart in 1986. This work led Barry Levinson to hire Zimmer to write the score for the Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman drama Rain Man, a score nominated for an Oscar. The financial and critical success of this film led to such prestige films as Driving Miss Daisy, then made a sharp turn into action movie scoring, beginning with Black Rain and continuing with Days of Thunder, Backdraft, Thelma and Louise, Peacemaker, and Crimson Tide (which won a Grammy Award). He says he developed a new action music style in Black Rain because he was trying to sound like John Williams and didn’t know how to.

Zimmer’s best known work is the score to The Lion King, Disney’s most popular animated film, which won the Academy Award and, at twelve million copies sold, became the best-selling record in the history of Walt Disney Records.

Rain Man (1989)
Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
Green Card (1991)
The Lion King (1994)
The Rock (1996)
As Good as it gets (1998)
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
The Gladiator (2000)
Mission Impossible (2000)
Hannibal (2001)
The Pearl Harbor (2001)
Black Hawk Down (2002)
The Last Samurai (2003)
The King Arthur (2004)
Batman Begins (2005)
The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Pirates of the Carribean – The Dead Man’s Chest (2006)
Pirates of the Carribean – At World’s End (2007)
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Angels and Demons (2009)
Sherlock Holmes (2010)
Inception  (2010)
Kung Fu Panda (2011)
12 Years a Slave (2012)
Man of Steel (2013)
Rush (2013)
Interstellar (2014)
The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014)
Woman in Gold (2015)
Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)