Inception Composer Hans Zimmer to Score New Superman Movie
Posted 12.04.10 by BrentJS
Director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) has said that his take on the Superman mythos in Superman: The Man of Steel, the Warner Bros. franchise reboot being produced by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception), will be "different" than previous movies and not linked to previous movies or to any particular DC Comics storylines. Now, we have the first indication of how different it will be. Apparently, Nolan and Snyder will be ditching the iconic theme music and score composed for Richard Donner's Superman by five-time Academy Award-winning composer John Williams—which Bryan Singer also used in Superman Returns—for a new score by Hans Zimmer, who composed the scores for Nolan's Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception. The news was revealed at a recent DVD release party for Inception and Zimmer discussed reinventing the sound for such an iconic character in an interview with NBC San Diego's PopcornBiz.
It's a hard one, but I followed one of the most iconic things on Batman with Chris as well, and it's the same thing. You are allowed to reinvent, but you have to try to be as good or at least as iconic and it has to resonate and it has to become a part of the zeitgeist. That's the job. On Gladiator I remember people always talking about Spartacus and I kept telling them, 'When you saw Spartacus and how it affected it you, that's how I want a modern audience to be affected by what we do now.' So I think ultimately you're supposed to reinvent.
Zimmer also said that, although he has not officially been commissioned to compose the score to Nolan's next movie, The Dark Knight Rises, he has plans to meet with Nolan in the coming week to discuss the movie.
We start early. I know he's puttering around with ideas, and we sort of sneak up on things.... Working with Chris, he gives me all the freedom in the world and encourages me to go and be daring and unusual and crazy and all those sorts of things and be able to be the sort of emotional center of the film. It's very give and take. I'll start long before he starts shooting. Our conversations start there and it goes both ways: we just have conversations about the movie and less about what the music has to do, and it really comes out of that, whereby I felt that there was a real emotional core to be had and that that was something that the music had to do and I hung on that for dear life.
In addition to producing The Man of Steel and hiring its composer, Nolan also came up with the original concept for the plot of the movie, which is being translated into script form by David S. Goyer,co-writer of both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. There is no set start date for the movie as of yet, but it may go into production as early as June 2011.