I may have oversimplified my original entry on this one - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=107376
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Stanley Myers, the English composer who wrote the music for the acclaimed drama The Deer Hunter, got curious about electronic music in the 1980s, and he occasionally used Hans as a synth player. “He’d give me these parts, his handwriting was atrocious, and I can’t read music all that well anyway. So I would ignore the parts and just put anything on these tracks that I felt like. He obviously liked it because one day he phoned me up. It was the shortest conversation I ever had. ‘Hans, would you like to do a film with me?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Good!’ And he hung up.”
It made sense why Stanley needed help with electronics, as many of the European films he worked on in the 1980s didn’t have the budget for a full orchestra. But in the early days Hans’ job was what you’d expect a studio assistant to do. “My job was to make [his] complicated espresso machine work, and in exchange he would explain the orchestra to me. My first day was a meeting on Eureka, the Nic Roeg film. I would not say a word. Here was a movie, how are we going to go? I have no idea. And by the end of the meeting, you saw the possibility.” It wasn’t just coffee he made, as Hans later recalled also making tea while Stanley was composing for the 1983 series Widows. But eventually Hans got to write music for Stanley, with co-composer credits coming on the British drama Success is the Best Revenge and the erotic French film Story of O: Chapter 2 in 1984. More came throughout the decade. “Sometimes I was just around and might have contributed an idea, but he always gave me credit. He never treated me like a ghostwriter. He didn't like writing for car chases, so I got very good at those!”
The most notable thing Hans and Stanley worked on together was the 1985 movie My Beautiful Laundrette, largely remembered today for casting the actor Daniel Day-Lewis in an early role. Hans and Stanley were friends with Tim Bevan and Sarah Radclyffe, who’d recently founded the studio Working Title Films that was making the movie. “None of us really quite knew how to make a movie, but it was a really great time.” Hans later said the film’s gay love story between an Englishman and a Pakistani man living in London was a reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as the U.K.’s conservative Prime Minister. “You need something to push up against. My Beautiful Laundrette couldn’t have been made any other [time].” The film’s score even included bubble sounds, an on-the-nose element that Hans chuckled about in 2013. “The stupid bubbles! You can imagine who wrote the good music and who did the bubbles.”
In 1988, Hans started to score films on his own. One of those was Chris Menges’ A World Apart, a dramatization of the intimidation the anti-apartheid Slovo family faced in South Africa which came to Hans thanks to his friendship with My Beautiful Laundrette producer Sarah Radclyffe, who knew the family. Hans created most of the score on his devices at the Lillie Yard studio he and Stanley had set up in London’s Hammersmith and Fulham borough, and it featured several hallmarks he would be known for in his early days as a solo act: soothing keyboard tones, electronics imitating high-pitched winds, glassy suspense. The composer even got an African choir to sing some traditional pieces and impressively blended them with his sounds in his piece for the end credits.
The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1988, was widely acclaimed when it was released in June, and received the award for Best Screenplay during the British Academy Film Awards ceremony the following March. Its score didn’t generate much attention at the time, but it was still a very important step for Hans, not only for what it did for his resume but also in how the director’s approval of the main theme Hans wrote for the movie boosted his confidence. “Chris said this is good. I started believing in myself.”
A World Apart got a stellar reception but only earned around $2 million in worldwide box office. No one had any clue at the time that it would be an enormously consequential movie. But then an American director’s wife saw it and fell in love with its music. And she told her husband that kind of music belonged in the movie he was making with Tom Cruise.
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By 1988, Barry Levinson’s resume included directing the acclaimed films Diner, The Natural, and Good Morning, Vietnam, with the latter serving as the big break for the film career of Robin Williams. His next film Rain Man, a drama about a man on a road trip with his newly-discovered autistic brother, had Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise in it. As Barry was getting into postproduction, his wife Diana brought the music of A World Apart to his attention. In Hans’ telling, “I don’t think Barry saw it. Diana bought the record. [Barry] was in London promoting Good Morning, Vietnam and didn’t have my number, but he had my address.”*
*Barry also pointed to the song Scatterlings of Africa by Johnny Clegg’s band Jukula for the kind of tone he was looking for; some of Clegg’s songs showed up on Hans’ album for The Power of One a few years later.
Hans heard a knock on his door late one night. “I open the door [to] a guy standing there, going, ‘Hello, my name’s Barry Levinson. I’m a Hollywood director.’ I’m going yeah you and me both. But I look behind him and there’re these two limos, wedged down this alley in one of the shadier neighborhoods of London, so maybe he’s telling the truth.” Levinson asked Hans to score Rain Man on the spot. He had no clue how hard the composer was working to keep his cool, not only because of the great opportunity he’d just been handed but also because he thought his career was in jeopardy after exceeding a studio’s music budget for First Born.
That genetics-run-amok miniseries was an early starring vehicle for the actor Charles Dance who’s now known to many as Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones. Its director Philip Saville had worked with Hans earlier on the movie The Fruit Machine, which even with its limited music budget saw Hans somehow afford a few real instruments, the haunting operatic vocals of Nicole Tibbels, and keyboards played by Fiachra Trench, an Irish composer who’d also worked with Stanley Myers. On First Born, Hans felt Saville had “hired me to write a movie score. So now I want an orchestra [and] a choir!” Joe Walker, then a sound editor on the series and now an Oscar-winning film editor, recalled being blown away by a large string section. “The television image was being magnetized by the huge sound.”
With the BBC having told Hans he’d never work for them again, Rain Man was thus near-term salvation and the fulfillment of an aspiration to work in Hollywood. “I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to come to the U.S. unless I was asked to do a job. I knew I’d make a terrible waiter, so I was always hoping that the call would come.” He left in such a hurry that he didn’t even complete the jingle he was working on for Colgate; the half-finished piece was handed off to Gavin Greenaway, a fellow composer at Air-Edel, to finish. Hans thought he would be stepping into a technologically advanced Hollywood that would put to shame everything he’d used in Europe. “It [wasn’t] that at all. [Barry] was used to somebody playing something on the piano, and then he could wait four weeks and they would have the orchestra. My method was I could make any sound. He thought it was very exciting.”
To fill the requirement for a music mixer who was in an industry union, Hans got in touch with Jay Rifkin. They’d met through some mutual friends when they both lived in England. Per Jay, 'We put together our own studio in Brighton, which became this kind of music hub. At the time there wasn't a lot going on in Brighton from the recording studio point of view, so we were kind of a magnet for a lot of different bands and activity. This soon morphed into playing less music, and I started producing and engineering, working with a number of different bands and really whatever came about.' Jay, a native New Yorker, eventually moved back to the U.S., and when Hans reached out to Jay his only other movie credit at the time was the 1985 Gene Hackman film Target. It would become a successful partnership for the next 15 years.
Hans set up his devices near Levinson’s editing room, and the director and composer quickly got on the same page about how they would avoid the music they felt was typical of road trip movies. “Whenever you see people driving in a car across America you have either guitars or you have a big orchestra. We gave ourselves those limitations on purpose. Go find a different voice. Take out everything that is the normal convention.” Hans later said this was also due to his own ignorance. “I didn’t know about Hollywood budgets. I was doing everything on English budgets. I just set up my Fairlight with a couple more toys and gadgets. [But] Rain Man wouldn’t have been able to handle a huge orchestral score. I [learned] from Stanley [to] never make your music bigger than your characters.”
Hans took inspiration from Dustin Hoffman’s high-functioning autistic character Raymond and his lack of comprehension of his surroundings. “The character doesn’t know where he is. He might as well be on Mars. Why don’t we just invent our own music for a world that doesn’t exist? I wrote this culturally non-specific African-Cuban-electronica hodgepodge.” The warm keyboard tones from A World Apart would now be supported by various world music sounds including pan flutes, steel drums, a didgeridoo, and a Syrian drum called the darbuka. And Hans would have Raymond inform his main theme as well. “It's fragmented and in odd meters. It had a tune which didn’t add up to anything. It’s always interrupted by things interfering. There was something longing in that sound as well.” There was one exception to this approach: seven minutes of raucous gospel rock that Hans wrote for the film’s Las Vegas sequence, which sounded less like world music and more like This Corrosion by the English rock band The Sisters of Mercy (Hans called it as a “weird heavy-metal opera” decades later). Few American films had ever been supported by a score like this. To put in terms Hans would become quite fond of in his Hollywood career, it was very unexpected.
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Hans thought it was the only film he’d ever do in America. But Rain Man was an immense critical and commercial success when it came out in December 1988, easily making its small budget back to become the highest-grossing film released in the U.S. that year and winning a host of awards including Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Screenplay. Hans’ first Hollywood job got him an Oscar nomination for Best Score, and it deserved to take home the trophy instead of Dave Grusin’s music for The Milagro Beanfield War, a bizarre winner in part because it never received a dedicated album release. But for Hans, who’d spent most of his adult life being a jobbing musician, the assignment was still rewarding. “I didn’t win, but it didn’t matter. Everybody wanted to meet me. Rain Man paid off my bank overdraft. I could pay my bills. For the first time, I wasn’t in debt. My mom was very proud of me.”
Despite the acclaim for the score for Rain Man, its CD release would spend most of its runtime on songs, with only 11 minutes of Hans’ music spread across two tracks. This may have been driven by Hans, who in the years to come would often cut down the amount of score he put on albums over concerns about repetition or it being unlistenable apart from the film. It took until 2018 for the complete score to receive an adequate legitimate release, though that would be just a limited edition CD on the Notefornote Music label that would sell out within weeks.
The full score loses some of its impact when removed from the film, but its power in context still can't be denied, something another director noticed when he saw Rain Man. “It felt bigger than it ought to be and yet it worked. It was playing an internal world. And I thought, ‘Hans Zimmer, who the hell is that?’” And that’s how Hans came to the attention of Ridley Scott, who’d become an even more important collaborator for Hans than Barry Levinson would.
My Beautiful Launderette: **˝
The Fruit Machine: ***
A World Apart: ***
First Born: N/A (not enough out there)
Rain Man: ****˝
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If you got that aforementioned Notefornote release, the new release by La-La Land may not be an absolute necessity; the sound is definitely improved, but it was adequate the last go-round. The alternates and a demo of the 2000 Ghent concert suite that was arranged by Geoff Zanelli are conceptually intriguing but also likely the kind of things most listeners will only explore once. The new interview responses from Barry, Hans, and others are entertaining and insightful, even for someone like me who came in already knowing a great deal about the making of the score. The producers even went on a noble mini-quest to find out the name of one of the instrumentalists.
And it appears Barry Levinson still has not seen A World Apart!
If you’ve never heard the score, now’s the time to pounce. It’s the definitive presentation of the score that put Hans on the map, and at only 1,500 units it likely won’t be around forever.
(Message edited on Tuesday, June 3, 2025, at 11:58 a.m.)
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