1990s and 2000s
The soundtrack to Ridley Scott's 1991 film Thelma & Louise by Zimmer featured the trademark slide guitar performance by Pete Haycock on the "Thunderbird" theme in the film. As a teenager, Zimmer was a fan of Haycock, and their collaboration on film scores includes K2 and Drop Zone. Zimmer wrote the theme for Tony Scott's 1993 film True Romance, which he based on Carl Orff's Gassenhauer. Gassenhauer had previously been used in the 1973 film Badlands, which had a similar story of a young man and a girl on the run following a violent crime. The catchy theme, played on nine marimbas, contrasts starkly with the violence of the film.
For the 1992 film The Power of One, Zimmer travelled to Africa in order to use African choirs and drums in the recording of the score. On the strength of this work, Walt Disney Animation Studios approached Zimmer to compose the score for the 1994 film The Lion King. This was to be his first score for an animated film. Zimmer said that he had wanted to go to South Africa to record parts of the soundtrack, but was unable to visit the country as he had a police record there "for doing 'subversive' movies" after his work on The Power of One. Disney studio bosses expressed fears that Zimmer would be killed if he went to South Africa, so the recording of the choirs was organised during a visit by Lebo M. Zimmer won numerous awards for his work on The Lion King, including an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, and two Grammys. In 1997, the score was adapted into a Broadway musical version which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1998. As of April 2012, the musical version of The Lion King is the highest grossing Broadway show of all time, having grossed $853.8 million.
Zimmer's score for Tony Scott's 1995 film Crimson Tide won a Grammy Award for the main theme, which makes heavy use of synthesizers in place of traditional orchestral instruments. For The Thin Red Line (1998), Zimmer said that the director Terrence Malick wanted the music before he started filming, so he recorded six and a half hours of music. Zimmer's next project was The Prince of Egypt (1998), which was produced by DreamWorks Animation. He introduced Ofra Haza, an Israeli Yemenite singer, to the directors, and they thought she was so beautiful that they designed one of the characters in the film to look like her. Zimmer's score for the 1998 film The Thin Red Line is regarded as one of his most important works. The nine-minute cue at the climax of the film, "The Journey to the Line", uses a recurring theme based on four chords, combined with a "ticking clock" motif that has been featured in a range of subsequent scores composed by Zimmer. The piece has been used in numerous trailers and video games, and has earned the nickname "the forbidden cue" due to the tendency of film makers to use it as a temp track for dramatic scenes.
In the 2000s, Zimmer composed scores for Hollywood blockbuster films including three Ridley Scott films, Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down and Hannibal (2001), followed by The Last Samurai (2003), Madagascar (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Simpsons Movie (2007), Kung Fu Panda (2008), which he co-composed with John Powell, Angels & Demons (2009), and Sherlock Holmes (2009). Other work in the 2000s included the Spanish language film Casi Divas, and The Burning Plain (2009). He composed the theme for the television boxing series The Contender and worked with Lorne Balfe on the music for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which was his first video game project. Zimmer also collaborated with composers Borislav Slavov and Tilman Sillescu to create the music score for the video game Crysis 2.
In October 2000, Zimmer performed live in concert for the first time with an orchestra and choir at the 27th Annual Flanders International Film Festival in Ghent. While writing the score for The Last Samurai, Zimmer felt that his knowledge of Japanese music was extremely limited. He began doing extensive research, but the more he studied, the less he felt he knew. Zimmer took what he had written to Japan for feedback and was shocked when he was asked how he knew so much about Japanese music.
During the scoring of The Last Samurai in early 2003, Zimmer was approached by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with whom he had worked previously on Crimson Tide, Days of Thunder, The Rock, and Pearl Harbor. Bruckheimer had finished shooting Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl but was unhappy with the music composed for the film by Alan Silvestri and wanted a replacement score. Bruckheimer wanted Zimmer to rescore the film, but due to his commitments on The Last Samurai, the task of composing and supervising music for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was given to Klaus Badelt, one of Zimmer's colleagues at Media Ventures. Zimmer provided some themes that were used in the film, although he is not credited on screen. Zimmer was hired as the composer for the three subsequent films in the series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), collaborating with Rodrigo y Gabriela for the last.
Zimmer is noted for his work on the scores of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008), which he co-composed with James Newton Howard. For the soundtrack of The Dark Knight, Zimmer decided to represent the villain of the Joker by a single note played on the cello by his long-time colleague Martin Tillman. Zimmer said: "I wanted to write something people would truly hate." The scores for these films were disqualified from receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score due to too many composers being listed on the cue sheet. Zimmer succeeded in reversing the decision not to nominate The Dark Knight in December 2008, arguing that the process of creating a modern film score was collaborative and that it was important to credit a range of people who had played a part in its production. Zimmer explained his approach to scoring with other musicians in an interview with Soundtrack.net in 2006:
Originally I had this idea that it should be possible to create some kind of community around this kind of work, and I think by muddying the titles – not having "you are the composer, you are the arranger, you are the orchestrator" – it just sort of helped us to work more collaboratively. It wasn't that important to me that I had "score by Hans Zimmer" and took sole credit on these things. It's like Gladiator: I gave Lisa Gerrard the co-credit because, even though she didn't write the main theme, her presence and contributions were very influential. She was more than just a soloist, and this is why I have such a problem with specific credits.
For the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, Daily Variety reported that Zimmer purchased an out-of-tune piano for 200 dollars and used it throughout the scoring process because of its "quirkiness". For the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Zimmer and director Guy Ritchie incorporated authentic Romani music, which they researched by visiting Slovakia, Italy, and France. The music in the film is played by Romani musicians.
