Hans Zimmer discusses his iconic ‘Dark Knight’ score
The Dark Knight completely changed the Batman franchise. With the buffed-up pomposity of 1997’s Batman & Robin still ringing in movie-goers’ ears, it was time to introduce fans to a new kind of superhero. Christopher Nolan laid much of the groundwork with his 2005 offering Batman Begins, but the Dark Knight reached new heights. Here was a superhero film with real moral complexity. As if that wasn’t enough, it boasted a brilliant score by the enfant terrible of the Hollywood soundtrack, Hans Zimmer.
When Nolan asked Zimmer to compose a score for The Dark Knight, the composer came back with a request of his own. He’d been planning to collaborate with fellow composer James Newton Howard for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. He asked if Howard could come along for the ride, and Nolan agreed. The pair quickly set about establishing separate themes for the dual personality of Bruce Wayne and his suit-clad alter ego, Batman.
Zimmer was keen to craft something that sounded genuinely new, so he employed electronic instrumentation, which he blended with the score’s orchestral elements. Working closely with members of London orchestras (the UK still boasts some of the best classical musicians in the world), Zimmer crafted a near-perfect score. Christopher Nolan was so impressed that he ended up putting the score very high in the mix during the edit. “I told Chris the music was too loud—you couldn’t hear the lines,” Zimmer recalled during an interview with Vanity Fair. “He said, ‘I wrote them. I can do what I want.’ He was right; people do remember the lines. He could have done 200 different cop-out endings, but he put that ending on.The composer wen It’s hard to pull off a satisfying ending, if you’re that ambiguous. One second longer, or one sentence or note different, and it would have been a different movie.”
One character Nolan wanted Zimmer to pay particular attention to was the Joker. The character was the subject of their earliest conversations about the score. Nolan would send Zimmer stills and segments of footage so that he could see how the villain was evolving. His dark, maniacal energy seemingly rubbed off on Zimmer, who would later say that he had no intention of writing a Hollywood blockbuster score; he wanted to write “something people could truly hate,” as he put it. “I made the conscious decision to go out there on the edge; that was the first step I took, he continued. “And the great thing about working with Chris is that when I go, ‘maybe I’m going a little too far off into the deep end’, he’ll push me a little further.”
