Veteran musician Hans Zimmer, who has worked on award-winning films like the lion King, Inception, Interstellar, has now used his skills to liven up the marine world. He talked to TEAM VIVA about the ocean, working with Radiohead and more
Do you feel connected to the oceanIJ
Yes, it has always puzzled me that I can stare at the ocean forever. It’s the most hypnotic, most interesting and most transcendent experience that one can have. Usually, I need to spend time in front of the ocean after finishing a score, when I am most exhausted. One of the great things about Blue Planet 2 is that you get to see the world under the ocean. You get to travel below the surface in a way that we never have been able to do before.
How do you perceive musicIJ How do you perceive Radiohead’s musicIJ
The Radiohead guys and I were just having a chat about this earlier that we are quite chaotic about time. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, and the guitarist Jonny Greenwood, were talking that very often they don’t know where the downbeat of the bar is. That is sort of something that I do too. Everything comes from an idea. In my case, it comes from a sort of playfulness. I try to have an idea that could describe the emotion, and that is what I am trying to aim for.
Name any great writer. There are very few of them who can express true emotion, which usually is done through poetry, who can express emotional language. For me, music is an autonomous language and if I get the right ideas, I can sort of dig under the skin a little bit and can get to things which I just cannot do with words.
While working with Radiohead, I realized that the three of us grew up being completely influenced by what we saw. The song Ocean Bloom was originally written because of Blue Planet and it became our glue that pulled us together and gave us the language and the way to work together.
What were your first feelings after you listened to Ocean BloomIJ
It is very hard for me as a musician to listen to another musician’s work without instantly trying to figure out how they did it. I will never have a clean emotional response to a piece of music. Instantly, the geeky musician part of me will jump in. But, for me there was a sort of a free floating underwater feeling. In fact, they were saying earlier that they never thought about it as a piece of a song but as a piece of music.
What was the main idea or the emotion that you wanted to capture in the song you composed for Blue Planet IIIJ
Actually, it’s never quite about the emotion, it’s trying to create a world. I am trying to create an autonomous world that has its own logic but doesn’t necessarily have to be real. In this case, it had to be real because we are dealing with a documentary which gives you an extraordinary experience. So it wasn’t so much about trying to hold on to one emotion but opening the door for other people to have an emotional response.
(Blue Planet II is set to premiere on June 25 at 9PM on Sony BBC Earth)