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Hans Zimmer says the Lion King score was a requiem for his late father
22 March 2025, 19:40
Hans Zimmer on his iconic film scores – Gladiator, Inception, The Lion King & more | Classic FM
Legendary film composer Hans Zimmer shared his personal story with Jonathan Ross in an interview about his most celebrated film scores, from 'Gladiator' to 'Interstellar' and more.
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Music is one of the most powerful vehicles for human emotion and, despite composing some of the greatest and most moving film scores of all time, it seems Hans Zimmer is not immune to its effect.
Speaking to Jonathan Ross on Classic FM at the Movies, he shared the tender moment from his childhood that his score to the 1994 Disney cartoon The Lion King came to represent.
“My dad died when I was six years old,” he said. “And so here I am, sitting in front of this cartoon, and it’s about the death of a father.”
Zimmer continued that children don’t ‘get over’ events like that, but instead discover ways to cover up their grief. However, in working on The Lion King, he found that he could express his grief through the music: “I couldn’t hide it anymore. I basically wrote a requiem for my dad, and it became a really serious piece.
“I think people notice that it’s written from a deeper place than your normal cartoon,” he concluded.
Read more: Hans Zimmer hid this ominous medieval chant in his score to ‘The Lion King’
He also told Jonathan that he hadn’t really wanted to write the score at first, but was inspired to accept the job for his then six-year-old daughter, Zoe: “I [had] never been able to take her to a premiere, because all the movies with Ridley Scott are not necessarily child-friendly.”
The No Time to Die composer also shed some light into his partnership with director Christopher Nolan, revealing that Interstellar was his favourite of the projects they have collaborated on.
But it was The Dark Knight that Zimmer felt had really demonstrated Nolan’s confidence in their creative alliance: “You have to have a director that’s prepared to protect you, when you go out there on a ledge and do some really stupid things.
“The whole idea of The Dark Knight was this one single note which just felt like stretching the bow, building the tension. Both Chris and I felt there was no way we could play it to the powers at Warner Bros.: ‘Hey, this is your big summer movie and this is the main theme – a single note!’
“So we kept it all really secret until the whole movie was finished. And then it was sort of, you know, there was no discussion.”
Read more: The 10 best Hans Zimmer soundtracks
Another of Zimmer’s collaborators in recent years is the director Steve McQueen, for the 2024 film Blitz. In writing the score, the composer said he was forced to confront one of his childhood fears.
He told Jonathan: “I said to [McQueen], I want the grown ups to feel the same terror the child feels. So the only way I can do this is I have to over-amplify the dissonance and the scariness and everything.
“And the most scary thing I remember as a kid was going into the classroom, and they’re all playing those little treble recorder flutes, and it’s such a racket and everybody’s doing their own thing. And it was just a din, and it’s just terror.
“So many places in that score is a cacophony of badly-played recorders.”
During the interview, Hans Zimmer also confessed to ‘borrowing’ a prop from the set of Inception.
He told Jonathan that he often receives phone calls from Warner Bros. asking if he has found the small spinning top that Leonardo diCaprio’s character, Cobb, uses to tell if he is in reality or not. As to whether or not he was in possession of the set piece, Zimmer said: “I have to plead the fifth.”
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As fans await Zimmer’s next theatrical film score for F1, which will be released this summer, they can fill their plates in the meantime with his newly released film Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert.
After selling out back to back world tours, Zimmer made the surprising admission that he suffers from stage fright and had been reluctant to perform for the film. But, he says, two members of pop music royalty twisted his arm into saying yes.
“One day I come into the studio, [Johnny Marr and Pharrell Williams] sort of sit me down between them so I can’t move and I can’t get up... They go: ‘Listen kid, everybody’s got stage fright.’”
The film, which is out on limited release in cinemas, sees Zimmer and some of his greatest musical collaborators join forces in Dubai for show-stopping performances of his greatest works, as well as insights into the composer’s creative process from the likes of Billie Eilish, Timothée Chalamet, Christopher Nolan and more.
