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GLADIATOR COMPOSER FACED EPIC TASK

Hans Zimmer faced a major challenge in the score the hit movie Gladiator. How could he write music that reflected the action of battle without turning women off?

Jamie Portman
Southam News

Beverley Hills, Calif. - Last year, award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer was enduring the mud and misery of an outdoor film shoot in Britain, attempting to get a handle on the type of music he should be composing for Gladiator.

He knew he was dealing with an epic film, but was at loggerheads with DreamWorks boss, Steven Spielberg, who had been pestering him to do a score similar to the one composed by Alex North for the 1960 film Spartacus. "Steven was forever sending me CDs, cassettes, DVDs and videos of Spartacus because he loves Spartacus," Zimmer sighed. "And I kept saying: "I don't know how to do Spartacus. It's not what I do."

Zimmer has a theory about Spielberg's infaturation with North's music. "Steven saw Spartacus as a young man. He had an extraordinarily emotional response to it and to the music. My job with Gladiator was to find a new way of giving a new audience a similar response."

But what kind of response. That day in Britain, watching director Ridley Scott oversee a massive battle scene, Zimmer knew that a traditional epic score was not necessarily what he wanted to deliver.

"I was in gritty, dirty, filthy England, in the mud while they were shooting the battle. And I was surrounded by men in armour, very big men in armour, and I thought to myself: 'There's not a single woman here'".

In fact, he began wondering whether women would even relate to this picture. "So I said to Ridley: 'I've got this vision. I don't want a single woman to get out of her seat in the theatre and leave because she thinks this is some kind of male-dominated thing.'"

His solution was to deliver music that gave these action sequences an emotional context and thereby advance Gladiator's appeal beyond the film industry's most prominent audience segment: males younger than 25. And nobody is happier than Zimmer over the fact that, contrary to initial expectation, women love the movie.

"You know, all the battle sequences are waltzes," he mused. "I don't think anybody has done that before - to write an action piece as a waltz."

It's only 12 years since the German-borg Zimmer's work in Europe attracted the attention of Hollywood and landed him his first big American assignment - his award-winning score for Rain Man. Today, his imporessive list of film credits ranges from the The Lion King, which earned him an Academy Award, to such high-profile hits as Driving Miss Daisy, Black Rain, Thelma and Louise and Broken Arrow.

Zimmer, 42, keeps telling people the his musical background is limited. "I have no technique," he said. "My musical education is two weeks of piano lessions and the rest I make up as I go along." Yet Zimmer is scarcely a musical illiterate. The people at DreamWorks have such confidence in him that they named him head of music at the studio. He supervises music for all their film and TV projects and seeks out promising composers.

Unlike some prominent Hollywood composers, Zimmer is capable of deciphering a score and performing it. Furthermore, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is "totally" involved in orchestrating his own music.

"My Mom, who's a complete classical fanatic, used to play this little quiz with me when I was 2 or 3," he said. "The radio would be playing a classical work, and I would have to guess the composer. The only way I could do that was to figure out the period when the music was written, the size of the orchestra, and the orchestration. I went to my first opera when I was 3. Music was performed at home. Once a week, I would go to concerts. I know the shape and form.

A few years agoo, Disney asked another orchestrator to prepare a suite based on Zimmer's music for The Lion King.

"It didn't sound anything like my stuff. I need to do my own orchestration because so often it's the colour that supports the integrity of the tune and makes your musical idea possible. For one scene in Gladiator, the colours used are two guitars, a pan flute, a solo trumpet and a solo cello. Now, that shouldn't work, but it does. And that's how I heard it in my mind."

Zimmer also wants to win greater rspect for film music. Despite the fact that it has attracted such prominent composers as Aaron Copeland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Prokofiev and Philip Glass over the years, many critics remain dismissive of film music, particularly if it's done by career movie composers such as Zimmer or John Williams.

Zimmer gets particularly incensed at the suggestion that a good film score is the one you don't really hear because if it's too obtrusive it wrecks the cinema-going experience.

"That's complete rubbish. If I write something I want people to be able to hear it. I want to say all those things you can't say elegantly in words or images."

Zimmer says his Gladiator score works because he was prepared to be "reckless". He didn't worry about record-store sales. And he drew upon his classical background to incorporate an ominous theme from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique into the score.

"It's a powerful motif that actually dates back to 1256. We've all stolen from it - Berlioz, Verdi, Liszt, myself."

He'll continue to battle the snobbery towards film scores. "There are only two types of music - good music and bad music," he says.

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