‘Blitz’ Composer Hans Zimmer Interview

While legendary film composer Hans Zimmer previously ventured musically into the realm of the Second World War with films such as Dunkirk And Pearl Harbor, working on that of filmmaker Steve McQueen Lightning – set during Nazi Germany’s brutal, eight-month bombing of London – allowed him to look at the era and a facet of his own family history in a way he never had before.

“My mother was a refugee in England during World War II and Steve McQueen gave me one direction. He said, ‘After you see this movie, you’ll understand your mother better,’” Zimmer revealed during Deadline’s Sound & Screen event on Friday. ‘That’s all he said. And I knew all the stories while I was working on the film. I started to feel her stories. So he was absolutely right.”

Indeed, the story prompted Zimmer to create a musical score that reflected the relentless chaos and brutality of the blitz, so disturbing that it was difficult for him to put together a sonically savory collection of passages to perform with a live orchestra at the Sound & Screen audience to present. .

“This score is absolutely terrible,” he admitted. “It’s an absolutely terrible score, it’s so dissonant, it’s so committed to this atonality that it was very difficult to put pieces together where you wouldn’t go and run from the room screaming because I thought I that wasn’t possible. do that to you. But these are literally the fun parts. That was it.”

Perhaps only half-jokingly, Zimmer described the main instrument that inspired his musical take on psychological torture. “One of the most tortuous instruments in the world, and that’s the alto recorder,” he said. “And I don’t know who’s ever been to an English public school where we’re learning how to play this little recorder and everyone’s out of tune and everyone’s blowing into it really loud – and it’s the sound of hell!”

Yet there was a method behind Zimmer’s musical madness, which was entirely in line with McQueen’s unwavering vision of music. Lightning. “The idea behind the whole thing is the story of a child trying to get through war-torn London, which is constantly bombed, and trying to find his mother,” the composer explained. “What I wanted to do is I wanted the adults – you, me, the adults – to feel the same kind of dissociation, being completely lost in the world, being illogical, not knowing how to get there, not knowing how to get there come. at home, not knowing how to find home, and having that fear, that fear that you will never find it again; the horror of the crash of these enormous bombs. So the only way I could figure it out was to write music that was so brutal and so absolutely violent.

How did Zimmer know he had completed his mission? “When I got a text from my producer saying, ‘That takes balls.'”

Come back Monday for the panel video.