Legendary Hollywood music score composer and music producer Hans Zimmer has announced he will perform his live tour in Dubai for the first time. Speaking to Euronews, he said that people can expect “chaos” and “something a little different”.
He likens his touring band to a ‘supergroup’ and says, “I got Lisa Gerrard from Gladiator [and] from Dead Can Dance if you want. You’ve got Lebo [Lebo M.], who is the voice of the Lion King. You know, I mean, they got my favourite guitarist, Guthrie Govan. And you never know if Johnny Marr comes in or not.”
Hans has worked on over 150 films, including Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Interstellar, Rain Man, Dune and The Lion King. The latter two earned him Oscar wins for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score) and Best Music, Original Score. He also has three Golden Globes and four Grammys to his name.
The new show will feature specially reimagined arrangements from some of his most popular scores. Hans is also in the UAE working on the sequel to Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve.
He says the Dune films are a ‘passion project’ for him and credits Villeneuve as being ‘remarkable’. “All directors come to you with great imagination, great plans. They seduce you into doing something. You know, they have these amazing ideas, you know. But the thing about Denis is, on top of all that, he leads with kindness,” he told Euronews.
Another director that the musician has developed a great friendship with is Ridley Scott, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, Thelma and Louise and Blade Runner.
“Number one, he’s an artist. So, he responds to another artist as well. He lets me pretty much do what I want to do,” Hans said. “It’s this constant sort of let’s try something new, let’s see if it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. I mean, we’ve had a bit of that as well.”
Aside from two weeks of piano lessons when he was six years old, Hans is self-taught. He started in a rock band and even played keyboards with Trevor Horn and Buggles on Video Killed the Radio Star, the first music video played on MTV. He fondly joked, “Who would have thought it? Yeah!”.
Despite an illustrious film score career, he says that working on David Attenborough’s Planet Earth programmes is the most important thing he’s ever done.
“He’s making us remember that we are actually supposed to be in love with this planet, that we all share this planet.”
He also told Euronews about growing up in post-war Germany in a Jewish family. He remembers a time he feared a backlash of anti-Semitism when he ‘outed’ his family at a press conference at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival while promoting The Thin Red Line, a WWII film. The Last Days, which focuses on the Holocaust, was also at the festival.
“The journalists were going, ‘Why do you still have to go on about this?’ And I was sitting next to Renee Firestone, who had come out of Auschwitz at the age of 14. I was surrounded by people who had come back to Germany for the first time, and I was frightened.”
“And I said, ‘Well, I have a weird relationship with this country. You know, I come from a Jewish family’, and as I said it, I suddenly went, ‘Oh my God, I made a terrible mistake’. I outed my family and I started getting an anxiety attack. And I remember Renee Firestone, Auschwitz survivor, just taking my hand under the table, because she [could] tell I was having a small meltdown.”
Hans Zimmer Live in Dubai takes place at the Coca-Cola Arena 27th January 2023.
