‘The Fan’: Hans Zimmer’s most overlooked film score
When it comes to the Mount Rushmore of movie composers, Hans Zimmer has more than earned his place on the side of the mountain. Throw a dart at some of the biggest movies of the past four decades and there’s a strong chance you’ll hit something that the German has worked on. His list of Oscar nominations (12 in total) is a great summary of his work, ranging from Disney’s The Lion King to As Good as It Gets, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.
Zimmer has provided scores and soundtracks for over 100 different films, as recently as 2024’s Dune – Part Two. When your discography is that large, some great stuff is going to slip through the cracks. The music he provided for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes captures the off-kilter vaudeville of the titular character, for example. As for the man himself, he cites one cult classic as some of his best work that doesn’t get the love it deserves.
“I’ve done a lot of movies that failed, The Fan being one example,” he told Vulture. “Nobody went to see the movie, and the score is unflinchingly dissonant. There’s a nihilistic poem that I read through a vocoder, and you cannot understand the words, but it’s really evil. Don’t-try-this-at-home type of music. But I sort of love it, and I suppose I’m just going to ruin the next tour because the whole band is basically going, ‘We’ve got to put this into the next show.’ I don’t think an audience is interested in playing it safe. They want to have an experience. They want to be right at the edge of disaster. And that’s where I live.”
The Fan, directed by Tony Scott, was released in 1996. It stars Robert De Niro as a baseball fanatic who gets embroiled in a criminal scheme involving his favourite player, played by Wesley Snipes. At the time, it was absolutely eviscerated by critics and, as Zimmer pointed out, failed to draw a significant audience. Recently however, the movie has undergone something of a reevaluation, with De Niro and Snipes’ performances especially coming in for praise.
The movie’s soundtrack album, which also features songs from Black Grape, Terence Trent D’Arby, and Massive Attacks, ends with a nearly 20-minute-long piece written by Zimmer called ‘Sacrifice’. The full version is hard to track down online as the album isn’t on Spotify – despite Zimmer’s huge presence on the streaming service – but there are excerpts from it on YouTube. It’s a dark, tense orchestral piece with hints of electronica underneath, the perfect choice for a movie as psychologically challenging as The Fan.
The iconic genius also referenced the film as a score he would like another crack at. “I can get into that mode where everything I’ve ever done is terrible, or not terrible, but I haven’t actually written the piece that I feel I’m capable of doing,” he revealed. When asked if there was a particular franchise he wishes he could have worked on, he gave the brilliantly blunt answer, “There’s never enough pornography.”
Nobody gets it right all of the time, not even one of the greats, but hopefully, Zimmer can take some comfort in the fact that The Fan has since found its audience. He seems to have reached a certain level of peace with the score, however, even admitting that he wanted to incorporate it into his next tour.
