I Was UP for 72 HOURS Making THIS! | Hans Zimmer | Top 10 Rules

Never thought about a career. Never written a note of music for money. We're experimenting. Mighty big.

Sounds awesome.

Black Hawk Down, I remember being up for 72 hours. Nobody asked me to be up for 72 hours. Nobody was throwing anything, you know? It was fine. Thank you to the people of Ghent for not killing me. There's something very human about it because it can only make a sound with air and it needs to breathe.

He's a German composer and record producer. He's the head of the film music division at DreamWorks. He's composed the music for over 150 films including Lion King, Gladiator, and Pirates of the Caribbean. He's Hans Zimmer, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 8 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for some special bonus clips. Also, as Hans is talking, if he says something that really, really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below. Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. Enjoy!

Guy from Germany who stubbornly just wanted to play music.

Hans Zimmer. He is a crazy genius.

He's just one of the nicest people I've ever met and a great film composer. Never thought about a career. Never written a note of music for money. There— I don't think there are a few words to define Hans the way I know him. Hans is a genius. Somebody who's concerned with making sure that we will have orchestras forever and try to support my musician friends and try to discover new people and— never growing up.

A lot of the producers go, Oh my God, no, Hans, can you not write the thing that you did so that you get an Oscar and this and that? And he said, no, I'm gonna do it all differently. And everybody's scared. And in the end, it's a hit. And in the end, everybody copies Hans' music.

He's this guy that I met 37 years ago that's come up, that's written some unbelievable music and had an incredible career. I play music. That's what I do. After finishing my adventures on Dark Knight, I decided we need to go into a completely different direction. When I think of the notes for the tune, I try to think of what's the sonic world we're going to pour this tune into. And that's what we're doing. Bassist, can you make your accents a bit more French? We're experimenting. Mighty big. You sound awesome. Awesome. That's what you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to stand still. You don't really want to be observed at your greatest failures. And you have to invite failure if you want to go and experiment and if you want to try to do something original. We have to have a certain amount of privacy to have the courage to fail. Black Hawk Down or any of those films we worked on, nobody asked us to. Black Hawk Down, I remember being up for 72 hours. Nobody asked me to be up for 72 hours. It was trying to do something extraordinary, trying to tell a story in an extraordinary way, trying to, you know, be a band of brothers, you know, not let anybody else down. That was on your team.

Be superhuman.

It's not superhuman, it's human. The unfortunate thing is that you have to put the word "super" in front of it when it's the ambition, it's what we should all strive for. You know, that commitment to the gesture, to the love, to the— how we approach the day, how we approach each other, how we approach humanity, how we approach art and beauty and ultimately, in Martin's case, how we approach our instrument. You know, there needs to be respect. At the end of the day, I don't think the issue really is about the recording medium, but it is about the players and the whole team. And I think You're not going to get quite the same results by having your mate in the flat next door go and bang on a biscuit tin, even though it might be interesting, than if you get some, if you get the best players in the world to go and know where to hit it. You know what I mean? A drum is sort of this interesting, archaic thing, but you know, there are like sweet spots when you hit it just right and You know, and I mean, these guys have been doing it forever. So it's really about the human beings that go and create the sound that ultimately will tell you if it's any good. The Lion King was, of course, you know, it was huge. Especially because I did it for all the wrong reasons. I mean, I did it for my daughter because I wanted to show off as dad. And, you know, I was doing all these grown-up movies where people were getting killed, and I couldn't take her to a premiere. I wanted to do something to take my kid to a premiere. And it was, you know, it was surprisingly emotional doing that movie. You know, it deals with a father's death, so, you know, it's got a lot more depth than the surface let me believe. And it shocked me, my own response, you know, once I started writing on it, because I was thinking, oh, you know, this is going to be easy that it, you know, and it wasn't like it was hard, but the emotional involvement suddenly became, you know, profound as opposed to hard, you know. And really it was Lion King that got Terry Malick interested in me, for instance. You know, Terry loved Lion King and wanted me to do Thin Red Line, so, you know, all these things are, you know, working with Ridley Scott, I mean, We've done some really good movies together and they're stylistically so different. I mean, Black Rain is so different from Thelma and Louise, is so different from Gladiator, is so different from Hannibal, is so different from Black Hawk Down, is so different from Matchstick Men. I'm sure I'm leaving some out. So, you know, working with people who are like me that, you know, they get a little bored doing the same thing you know, off they go to try to do something completely different. I mean, that's— you know, that's a big part of it. When I started, people were cutting on Steenbecks and Kems, and now— and then they got the Avid. And the interesting thing about us sound guys is, because sound is slightly more easy to handle in large quantities of data than images, we've always been ahead of the image guys. I mean, of the film guys. So we've made all those mistakes with digital, and we didn't know, you know, the original, the old digital recordings sound bad, and it wasn't just the technology, we didn't know how to use it, you know, and part of that is just you have to put your hours in, you know, I'm a real believer in that thing, you know, it's 10,000 hours to get good at something.

Is that the big difference between, because I see you in your basement like a Batman with all machines and stuff, it's really precise, I guess, and What you put, you know what you put, and then you go live. What's the difference? The risk?

The risk, you know, and the risk— and I have stage fright, you know, and I never confronted the risk. Or when I did confront— I mean, Belgium, you know, year 2000. That was— you have no idea what it took them to get me to do it. No, no, no, no. I had a thousand excuses why not to do it. And then finally I did it and it was exquisitely horrifying. That's the only way I can put it.

Complex.

Yes, it was very, very, very complex. And what was really good was right at the beginning, within like 2 seconds, I played just the worst wrong note. and I could either stop and cry or I could laugh. Right? And it didn't kill me. And nobody else out there— nobody was throwing anything, you know? It was fine. Thank you to the people of Ghent for not killing me and giving me the courage and the absurdity. You know, you have to be able to laugh at yourself. And you have to learn how to laugh at yourself. The greatest compliment I think I've ever gotten, better than Oscar, better than Grammy, et cetera, was towards the end of the last Dark Knight Rises. You know, working with those percussionists that we've just sampled, these guys have played on everything. They're the guys, you know, and there's nothing they haven't played. So my great ambition has always been to go and do just one thing where they go, 'Wow, never done that before.' I actually figured something. I'm not going to go into the details, but, you know, number one, I got the compliment of going, 'Wow, we've never done this before, and it sounds really good.' I was terrible at school. I never managed to go to university, but I started working for another film composer. And what happened, literally on day one, I am in the room, you know, my job is to make coffee. But I'm in a room with Nick Roeg, who I adore as a director, and Stanley Myers, who I adored as a composer, and they're talking about the scene, and there's a real-life problem. How are we going to score the scene? As opposed to what I experienced at school, which is somebody tells you some historical incident that then got solved. So, so The most important part of the mentorship was not only was I in the room with a problem that had not been solved, and I was witnessing how this problem in front of my eyes got solved by Stanley going, "Oh, what about those notes?" And Nick going, "That's exactly it." But just being in a room with people who were the best at what they did. And in a funny way, I thought everybody should have the right to this. It's like, So I try to make this place very, you know, this is a big room. I mean, when it's not full of Dark Knight sins, there's actually a lot of room in here. And I think something really good happens if you can be, you know, it's your first day, you're here to make coffee, but you're in the room with Chris Nolan and Hans Zimmer and you're seeing them scratching their head and somehow Even if you don't open your mouth, just by your presence, you're part of the solution. Or at least you get to see it. This is, of course, where Chris gets tricky. Really about a father and his relationship to his son. It's only later on that I found out that the son wasn't a son at all. It was a daughter. [SPEAKING GERMAN] I sat down and I wrote this piece really about what it feels like to be a father and what it feels like to have a son, and I was writing about my son.

When he played me the piece of music which became the basis for the entire score, I thought it was absolutely perfect and captured the emotional qualities of the film that I wanted. And it was at that point that I told him it was actually a large-scale science fiction film. I hadn't given him any clues about that. You know, it's not an action film, it's not Batman, it just isn't any of those things. I think what that did for him is it set him very firmly in a direction relating to the heart of the film. I mean, I listened to it extensively while I was finishing writing the script, and then when we were in production as well.

The organ really is a huge, complicated synthesizer. If you think about it, you have a pipe, and air blows through it, and that makes a sound. And it makes the sound of one pitch. And then if you want to shift color, you add another pipe to it, and you add more pipes. And so it becomes these really very, very complex harmonic structures. And there was this endless discovery going on for both Chris and me, you know, where Roger would take us through all these different voicings and all these different colors. You can even go a little darker. Actually, then we should go for this sound. There's something very human about it because it can only make a sound with air, and it needs to breathe. Each note, you hear the breath. You hear the exhale.

You feel human presence in every sound. And I think that was very important to keeping the film about not just the space that we're looking at, but the people in that space. There's an intimacy as well as massive scale. Sometimes within a few bars, there's that shift. Pulling out all the stops. I now know what that expression means for real.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because David Doumet asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which rule had the biggest impact on you? What did Han say that is gonna have an impact on your life or business somehow? Leave it in the comments below. I'm gonna join in the discussion. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Fred McCormick. Fred, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. It really, really, really, really means a lot to me. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

I think the only thing that can save us at the end of the day as a human race is science. And the only thing that inspires science all the time is dreamers. You know, I mean, would we have gotten to the moon without Jules Verne or Isaac Asimov or, you know, I don't know, good designers?

So you're hopeful because we still have heart and art?

I think I'm hopeful because I'm a musician, you know, and I'm realizing this more and more. What happens is it's not that we can play really well, we learn how to listen. We learn how to listen to each other. So we can come from totally different cultures. We might not be able to speak the same words as language, But when we all get together, if I got a bunch of musicians into this room right now, and we'd start playing, the first thing we would do is we would listen to each other. And then there comes respect and empathy. And the only way the music can get beautiful is if we listen to each other. And I think it's something some politicians can learn a little something from. You know, all politicians should be forced to learn an instrument. And have to jam together every weekend. They'd have to get—

and listen to each other.

And listen to each other because you got to shut up. You can't be right. It's indefensible music. It's not about being right or wrong. There are no right notes, there are no wrong notes. But it's like, I throw you a note, what are you going to do with it? I'm not trying to be pretentious about it, but it's— the listening part is quite good. It's not unimportant. Sampling isn't the reason that concert halls are empty. What our job is, is to drive music forward, to make it interesting, to make it commercial in the best possible sense, to say, you know, an orchestra can rock out. I mean, you can go and see an orchestral performance and it'll knock your socks off. I'm just interested in seeing how far we can push that. I mean, movies is one way, sampling is another way, live performance is another way, and the way these, you know, it's one of the reasons I love working with Junkie XL, because, you know, I mean, he does these shows in front of 250,000 people, and, you know, they go nuts, and it's just one man and his synthesizers. You know, he's just written his first symphony, which was performed in Amsterdam, so, you know, yes, with a full orchestra. So these ideas are not mutually exclusive. You know, tools are tools. All music relies on technology. A violin is just, you know, a bit of good carpentry and some dead cats. I mean, it does involve a certain amount of technology to get you there. At the end of the day, it's the ingenuity of the player and it's the ingenuity of the composer that are going to go and really make something out of this thing. Somebody said to me recently, you know, when you don't feel the nerves, you have to go and do something else. I feel the nerves, trust me.