Towards the very end of the film there is a classic shot by Guy Ritchie after Blackwood finally plummets to his death by hanging with a metal chain strangling him around his neck. It starts with a close up of Blackwood hanging and gradually zooms back to reveal the unfinished Tower Bridge and the city of London around it as we hear the words, “Death is only the beginning,” a clever thought, a new found clue, or just the thrill of the macabre as Holmes and Watson have closed another case. “This story has so many textures and personalities, that it really gave us the opportunity to create a diverse language of music for the film.” Explains Ritchie, “Hans and I are very much on the same page about taking a fresh approach to the music. The music has taken on its own identity and become a significant part of the creative process in giving Sherlock Holmes a contemporary feel.”

The composer’s contemporary style is subconsciously traditional with a strange and twisted approach instrumentally. Zimmer has managed to capture the world as it was in 1891, London’s surroundings, its characters, and the drama that unfolds with the pursuit of Lord Blackwood on a murderous rampage. “It was such a joy to work with Guy to capture the different tones of the worlds Holmes and Watson navigate, ranging from the halls of Parliament to a bare knuckle boxing ring to the shadowy crypts beneath a cathedral,” explains Hans about his first collaboration with the director. It’s in the mystery, the quirky scientific mind of Holmes, a cryptic reference to his cocaine usage (used for eye surgeries), and the clever plot that brings this updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ideas to life. You’re facing the unknown, like the crow that always shows up during key scenes throughout the film when Blackwood is around, as if it’s a supernatural transformation of Moriarty. Especially in the end when we’re watching Blackwood fighting Holmes on Tower Bridge which is under construction, the big black ominous bird watches the duel as if it was waiting for Holmes to die.

Born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire (United Kingdom) in 1968, Guy Ritchie has no fear when it comes to the critics; he just takes it on the chin and moves on. He feels that some critics don’t like his films, while others don’t understand them. These thoughts are past reflections of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000). These wild and highly entertaining films are extremely violent, move at a lightning pace, are hilariously funny during the violence, have clever twisted plots, and a cast of outrageous characters. Its hysterical humor interfaced with extreme violence and edgy suspense that makes Guy’s films a pleasure to watch, but Sherlock Holmes is completely different. By bringing his sensibilities to direct a mystery with suspense, action, and classic characters, which include a world famous British detective in 1891, Ritchie has taken filmmaking up a notch by envisioning the life and times of an icon with the perfect recreation of the period. Whether it’s the upper class look of The Temple of the Four Orders, Holmes unorganized messy lodging and laboratory on Baker St., the backstreets of London, a classic shipyard, the raw violence of a bare knuckle boxing match, or Tower Bridge being built, the director has successfully created the world and time of Sherlock Holmes. This amazing recreation needed a great score, an approach out of the ordinary, so Guy collaborated with Hans Zimmer, a game changer whose excellent music elevates his film with the discovery of new musical possibilities.

After watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a child, Ritchie realized he wanted to make films. He never attended film school because he thought the work of graduates was boring and unwatchable. At fifteen he dropped out of school and twelve years later was hired to be a runner, which proved to be the start of his film career. That very same year he started directing music promos for bands and commercials. The profits that he made from his work was invested into writing and making The Hard Case (1995), a twenty minute prequel made three years before his debut feature Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which was both written and directed by Guy. The film was made on a budget of £1.6 million or two and a half million dollars and became the third highest grossing British film of all time. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was followed up by Snatch with a larger budget and bigger stars including Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones and Jason Fleming from Lock, Stock. Snatch took in a record £3 million or approximately four and a half million dollars on its first weekend. Ritchie worked for BMW cars on a short called Star (2001), and then came Swept Away (2002), a misguided collaboration which was the remake of the 1974 Lina Wertmüller film. Swept Away wasn’t successful in the U.S. and went straight to video in the U.K. Then around three years later came Revolver, the television production Suspect (2007), and finally Guy returned to his style from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch with RocknRolla (2008). All three of these films are wonderfully perverse entertainment with twisted stories, laugh out loud brutality, humorous graphic violence, and mind blowing suspense where anything can happen at any time to anyone for any reason.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany on September the 12^th in 1957, Hans Zimmer’s initiation by fire into film composing took place in London during a long collaboration with famed composer and mentor Stanley Myers. Their collaborations include Moonlighting (1982), Success is the Best Revenge (1984), Insignificance (1985), and My Beautiful Launderette (1985). The music for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) was written by Ludas Tonalis and is produced by Stanley Meyers and Hans Zimmer, which is strange because Ludas Tonalis is not a composer, but a piano work by Paul Hindemith that was composed in 1942 during his exile in the United States. Ludas Tonalis explores different textures and harmonic frameworks, a distant work that’s faded from Hans’ memory after twenty years. The composer wrote his first solo score and the songs for Terminal Exposure for director Nico Mastorakis in 1987. Over the years Zimmer’s technique evolved by combining ancient instrumentation with futuristic cutting edge music technology, it’s this evolving style that inspired countless musical hybrids in films throughout his career. With his new found success, Hans set out to replicate the mentoring experience of working with Stanley Myers. With state of the art technology and a supportive creative environment, Zimmer offers film scoring opportunities to young composers at Remote Control, a maze of studios in different buildings where the career of many composers began. Hans pushes collaborations between composers because that’s how he learned. His most famous score is The Lion King (1994) and its soundtrack has sold over sixteen million copies, while his mesmerizing collaboration with Lisa Gerrard in Gladiator (2000) sold more than three million copies worldwide becoming one of the best selling film score albums of all time that year.

Hans Zimmer has scored over one hundred and twenty projects and after each one he just moves on, with new ideas on the horizon its boring thinking about your past. The word was out that Hans was exhausted and wanted to put film scoring on hold for a while after finishing The Dark Knight. Zimmer’s goal is to help out up and coming young composers and produce their scores, like his enjoyable collaboration with Lorne Balfe on Sherlock Holmes. He’s very excited about his future because Hans wants to pack up and tour the world performing live concerts with his original music. Considering all the great work he’s done in films over the years, is it even possible for Zimmer to take off for the tour of a lifetime? Only one man knows the answer to that question, but with his list of accomplishments how is it even possible to make such a decision? Hans has been nominated nine times for a Golden Globe for Best Original Score for a Motion Picture, winning twice for The Lion King (1994) and Gladiator (2001) with Lisa Gerrard. He’s been nominated seven times for a Grammy winning two, one for The Dark Knight (2008) with James Newton Howard and for Crimson Tide (1995). Zimmer has been nominated or won seventy six other awards for the World Soundtrack Awards, Golden Satellite Awards, Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Online Film Critics Society Awards, National Board of Review U.S.A., Las Vegas Film Credits Society Awards, Joseph Plateau Awards... (Cont...)

Right before we began our interview Hans sat back in his chair comfortably saying, “Rudy, we can talk about anything you want, we don’t have to go and talk just about Sherlock.” That’s when I mentioned that I’m totally fascinated by Chris Nolan’s film Inception and Zimmer responds, “I’ve been thinking about the music for a year now and I have no idea.” It’s a parallel to The Lion King; Hans worked on it for four years, but wasn’t playing with it and really reacting to the film until the last three and a half weeks. On the flip side, when he scored Crimson Tide the composer went in and within seconds knew what he wanted. That’s the beauty of film scoring; the approach always depends on the film. Then like a child who finds a new toy he says, “If you’re interested in Inception you should see this book I’m reading.” Later on during Hans’s phone call, I picked up the Pulitzer Prize winning book that was published in 1980 and looked at the cover, it read, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Below the title it reads, “A Metaphysical Fugue On Minds and Machines In The Spirit Of Lewis Carroll.” The words on the books cover reminded me of a trailer for Inception. It begins with Leonardo DiCaprio spinning a small double sided top on a table saying, “What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea, a single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the word and rewrite all the rules, which is why I have to steal it.” Chris Nolan’s world is fascinating, it transcends reality by being able to enter a dream and change it. It’s the perfect scoring vehicle for Hans Zimmer.

When “everything is happening,” it’s a sign that there isn’t enough of Hans to go around. Mentor, film composer, fund raiser for a disaster, director’s lined up to hire him, a desire to travel the world and perform live, the king of Remote Control, doing publicity for Sherlock Holmes, getting ready to score Sherlock Holmes 2 and Inception, advise and guide the musicians at Remote Control, deal with engineers, editors, orchestrators, contractors, copyists, record companies, and definitely keep his family happy, especially the kids. The collaborative possibilities are endless, the responsibilities daunting, and it’s hard to find a second to rest when “everything is happening” forever. This idea actually materializes when everything is about to happen as he searches for the music to his next film. “I have a calendar on the wall telling me how much time I have left, and how far behind I am. I look at it and panic, and decide which scene to work on. And you sit there plonking notes until something makes sense, and you don’t think about it any more. Good tunes come when you’re not thinking about it,” explains Zimmer. This is a composer who’s inspired by clearing his mind, releasing the pressure, and letting go, as the music naturally comes to him.

After our interview finished and it was one of the most relaxed times I’ve ever had, I realized Hans would have interviewed all night long, he was in no rush, and he enjoyed discussing anything. It was loose, it felt good, and I discovered that Hans wants to know the truth. He has a desire to know what you really think of his music, don’t appease him, an honest answer will do. He’s not wearing any blinders and is tired of the bullshit in the press; the truth is an exciting learning experience. His list of accomplishments and relationships are overwhelming with some of the greatest filmmakers in the business. When he scores a film the outcome is ignited by superior performances, emotional and technical philosophies merging, simply letting go, relaxing, and not pushing your performance to discover the music.

This is Hans Zimmer’s world, departing on a musical journey in search of the unknown, but always maintaining and watching over everyone at Remote Control; it’s definitely a lifetime of overwhelming responsibilities. With a sense of humor we discover the irony when Hans says, “It’s a very irresponsible life. The only decisions I make are about the notes I’m writing.” It’s these decisions that will reveal the composer’s next scores, which possibly could be the greatest music he’s ever written while “everything is happening”.

Has having a family and children changed your life as a composer?

With Dark Knight we have these little electronic bat flaps and we use that ostinato. Within a second you know its Dark Knight or Batman, so it’s not just random stuff to try to find something evocative and gets the audience into what this movie is, that’s what I’m trying to do.

How did you get involved with director Guy Ritchie?

He phoned me up and said he’s doing this Sherlock Holmes movie and every time he comes into the cutting room somebody’s put another piece of Dark Knight all over it and he doesn’t want that. I like working with directors who say to me, ‘I don’t want what you did last time,’ but say to me, ‘I don’t know what to do?’ And visa versa. Right now I’m working with Chris Nolan and really looking at Inception and this is not the first time I’m looking at his movie, it’s been over a year that Chris and I have been talking about this movie. I saw him last week and I’m going, ‘I have no idea what to do,’ and rather than him panicking and freaking out, it makes him happy that I say, ‘Why don’t we just do that thing that worked on Dark Knight, why don’t we do that?’, but I don’t have a drawer full of old ideas that I’m pulling out.

By seeing the trailer for Inception it’s hard for any composer to come up with an ‘idea’ about something that’s unknown.

Rudy I just don’t know. The problem is the ideas I have, which would work for the movie, are old ideas and so it’s not just that. It’s like I have a solution and it would be a solution that Chris would like, but in a funny way I don’t want to do it because I’ve done it before. They are not paying you for anything other than to invent, that’s really the job. You’re supposed to invent and supposed to try to be a little bit daring about the whole thing.

What makes this Sherlock Holmes different than his past portrayals in film and television, how has the character changed in 2009?

Well it’s just Guy’s and my point of view is different. Actually it’s not just Guy’s and mine, its Robert Downey Jr., it’s his point of view, and how he acts the part. I’m just taking my cues from Robert and what he’s doing is discovering the nuances of Sherlock Holmes. If I had to sum the character up the way I have in the music, I’m really summing him up with one idea. He’s a manic depressive who is very interested in knowledge in the rest of the world. He’s not a xenophobe, he’s interested in Victorian London because at that time it was full of foreigners, so I thought there was something cool about combining Irish fiddles with gypsy Romanian fiddles. The one thing we agree on is that Sherlock Holmes plays the violin, that’s in the books, it’s absolute. We’ve always seen him play the violin, but what I remember is he played beautifully and he’d play Bach or Beethoven or Patrick Gowers for that matter, who is one of my favorite composers. I thought our Sherlock Holmes would widen his gaze, which is a line from the script, he would go further a field and would be interested in sitting there and playing around with gypsy music and turn his violin into a fiddle, not play classical music because his brain is so active and full of ideas.

Usually when he solves things there’s always exoticness about it, so I wanted to make the whole thing a little bit more exotic.

He even used his violin for a scientific experiment with a glass jar full of flies.

Exactly, there’s a whole conversation about diatonic and dissonance going on and a whole experiment in there, so that was interesting. The score is really simple. I’m always thinking the action is really in his head, so imagine that you’re scoring a car chase, but there is no car chase, the adventure is really the intellectual synapses firing in his head. Why can’t we make that be the adventure? I was forever trying to write it from this weird quirky perspective of what was going on in Holmes’ head.

Some of Guy Ritchie’s films like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and RocknRolla are infested with songs. Did he originally want to use songs in Sherlock Holmes?

I didn’t have to get past anything; we never even had that conversation. I was the first person to see the movie, so I went over to London and went to his cutting room. There weren’t any songs in it; there was never a thought of having songs. We always talked about this movie and just this movie alone and the conversation about songs never came up. Guy Ritchie is a really good filmmaker, he was making a Sherlock Holmes movie and he wasn’t making Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. What we did talk about was music we liked and it wasn’t about the movie, we were just talking about stuff we liked because we had to get know each other and we had to get to know each other quick. I’m a huge Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels fan and I love Snatch, it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen and I like his choices of songs or the way he hacks songs up. John Murphy did the scores for those films and I think John is such an underrated composer apart from anything, but I wasn’t going to say that to Guy because I was really happy to be doing Sherlock, if you see what I mean. Here’s the thing, you’re writing about film music and it’s the time of year where everybody goes crazy and we’re promoting the score for an Oscar and suddenly you’re talking to me, but if you want talk about film music and other things, knock yourself out.

Well, we know this interview is insignificant compared to the disaster in Haiti.

Was your intention when composing Sherlock to begin more quirky, rhythmic, but stay steady with a simple theme or melody for the score’s style which was Hungarian gypsy, and Irish?

Yeah, you got the styles, both Hungarian gypsy and Irish. My intention was really simple, but I fought for it. Not that anybody disagreed with me. I thought the most important thing is right at the beginning to tell the audience it’s going to be a different type of Sherlock Holmes, this isn’t one you’ve seen before, do quirky, do humorous, right over those logos, and basically say to the audience, ‘Ok, if you’re not prepared to come on this ride leave now, but if you are prepared I’m offering you a taste of where we’re going to go with this, so the first thing you hear is this out of tune piano, banjos, and instruments like that. You know, it’s not going to be your daddy’s Sherlock Holmes or your preconceived idea of Sherlock Holmes. Here’s the thing that nobody ever seems to get, the other Main Theme in the movie is the theme that the Big Ben bells play in a minor key, which is the bad guy’s theme, Lord Blackwood’s Theme. Just by taking something as simple as Big Ben and moving it to a minor key, I though it was a really obvious clue in the great tradition of Sherlock Holmes and everybody would have caught onto that by now, it’s just Big Ben, ‘Da, da, da, da,……da, da, da, da.’

Those are the only two themes you wrote for this score?

Pretty much, but there’s one other theme. Irene Adler unfortunately has too many themes because I could never settle on one. This is again about collaborating with my friend and co-producer on the score Lorne Balfe. Once I’d written the theme, both of us sat in my room just playing with it, finding different feels, how can we make something as trivial as that theme at the beginning and apply it to action scenes, daunting, or whatever, and achieve this by playing with those very simple notes.

What part of the film did you start with to score Sherlock Holmes?

 It was the first scene between Holmes and Watson. Holmes is at home and Watson comes in and opens the curtains, while Holmes is shooting a ‘VR’ into the wall with his gun (NOTE: The 'VR' that Holmes shot onto the wall was the royal cypher of Queen Victoria and stands for 'Victoria Regina'). This is actually from the books (‘His Last Bow’). Really the whole movie was scored around that because ultimately I try to stick with the character and if I find the one pivotal thing that’s about the character, I just go and run that over and over and over again. The other thing in this case is that Robert Downey; he inhabits that character, so I got him down because I basically took the easy way out. I know Robert had been thinking about this for awhile, so I asked him about his character, tell me about how you see Holmes? I would take my direction from Robert and Guy, they obviously thought about it a lot.

So what did Robert Downey say when you asked him about his character?

I promise you, you can turn the sound off and I know half of the actor is his voice and half of the actor is the delivery of the line, but you can take the sound off on this movie and just watch the body language of Robert Downey Jr. and you can get ideas about what the character is about, he inhabits that character.

Often you leave the film behind; you sit down at your master keyboard and play being inspired with ideas from the film. You create long suites that contain different themes and elements of your score in it. Did you do this for Sherlock Holmes?

Yeah, I did. It’s a very simple suite, actually you could get it free as a download when you bought a ticket on whatever it was, I can’t remember. It’s called The Hans and Guy Suite because I wrote it with Guy in the room. It’s great when you have a director that you like hanging out with. He’s a very inspiring guy to be around and he’s completely egoless. We’re both interested in just making a good movie. This is a very different movie than The Last Samurai; this was about having fun and not only enjoying the music, but enjoying the process.

You used the opening Main Theme dominantly throughout the film, when we see the Warner Brothers logo in a cobblestone street with rain on it, the title of the film, even the human sacrifice by Blackwood, and countless other times. Was that your intention?

If you explore the theme’s sense of humor, we hear it when Watson and Holmes are riding in a carriage. Watson throws this vest out of the carriage and Guy has the camera follow the vest into this spectacular shot of a river with boats on it.

The shot of the vest being throwing out of the window into seeing the big Tower Bridge, the one thing I tried to do was not to make the music tell you what you’re seeing. Whenever you get a big scenic shot of London they play big scenic music, this was the one thing I didn’t want to do. If I play the tune in a quirky way, even though it gets relatively big, it works by keeping the quirkiness about to keep a sense of humor alive, which is more important than another panoramic shot of London. The thinking throughout was, ‘How can I keep the humor going? How can I go and support the humor in the movie?’

The orchestral parts seemed to put an emphasis on the strings throughout the score, while your brass work was more character specific.

Well, there was very little orchestra. You have to realize that this was Warner’s big Christmas movie, so the instinct is to go and score it with a hundred piece orchestra. This is thirty six players when the orchestra plays; it’s a tiny line up on purpose. There are strings, brass, and I wanted the brass to be like a Salvation Army brass band. The brass is really the counterpoint to Holmes and Lord Blackwood gets a lot of brass, so the bad guy gets the brass. There’s a tradition of brass in England anyway, which is the Colliery bands. I wanted it to be somewhere between the Colliery and a Salvation Army brass section and Ompa, German Ompa music.

A key element to your sound comes from an old fashioned detuned upright piano; did you already have the piano in your studio?

It’s devilishly hard to get the right out of tune piano that’s within the same age. We actually went on to Craigslist and we found a piano for a hundred bucks, but that one wasn’t right so we found another one. Everybody can detune a piano, but it doesn’t have the soul. It was a bit of a struggle to find good out of tune pianos, actually Robert Downey now has it, and it ended up at his house because it was actually very sweet and very cute. With the out of tune piano I wanted to invoke the thought of a pub like atmosphere of the Victorian age. Almost every pub had a piano and you knew they were never tuned, banjos, fiddles, there’s a very interesting Italian bass player, Diego Stocco, who does interesting experiments with his bass, and he invented an instrument called the ‘Experibass.’ Its virtuoso playing and having virtuoso musicians, a superior Cello player, also accordions, and the usual sort of instruments you find and very little percussion, most of the percussion is Diego’s bass. You know, taking acoustic instruments and thinking about them in a modern way as well. For a lot of rhythms I used pub rhythms.

There are ethnic instruments that are a bit off key in places intentionally.

You can’t just go and randomly detune something, it doesn’t work. We got into a whole science of how to make things out of tune in the right sort of way because it will either sound completely horrible or it will have a certain spirit, man, it was an adventure.

Did you develop the Main Theme or was there an alternate theme that underscored the lurking or overseeing crow that we see throughout the film?

That was actually the first thing and you’re the only person who’s figured that one out. The crow has this little weird bending of strings thing. It’s sort of the opposite of what the Joker has in Dark Knight, but it’s the same idea of strings unraveling, un-tuning itself, so I thought the crow deserved its own little musical idea. The whole movie in a way is about black magic, but it’s not about black magic. That’s the red herring of the story and the crow at the end of the day is just a crow. It just felt like fun to go and give it a little iconic sound each time it appeared.

Isn’t the crow an alternative personality or a watcher for Blackwood?

Yes it is, absolutely. If you want to read it that way, read it that way. That’s a bigger conversation that depends on if you do believe in magic or if you don’t believe in magic. At the end of the day I don’t believe in magic, so mine is a rationality of it. The crow happens to turn up a lot, you know, every time something bad happens. It’s a coincidence, but the notes aren’t a coincidence.

What are the most powerful parts where the film and the score are inseparable as one?

We had one thing where there’s a scene with lots of explosions in it and Guy is going, ‘God, I hate explosions. Why do we have to put it in the movie? What can we do with these explosions to make them different?’ That’s when I decided to score it with a solo violin. You have this big action stuff going off in the background and you have this rather heartfelt gypsy violin playing. Yeah, that took a bit of persuading the powers at Warner Brothers that this was a great idea. You know the score is about ideas and it’s about being very particular about each note and giving each note a real attitude. I think the whole opening, until you get to Baker St., is really strong and very different. Again, I’m using a very little orchestra. It’s five people playing in a room making a hell of a racket and that was fun.

If you’ve been to different size studios and heard different size orchestras you realize that the number of players really has to do with your approach and what you’re trying to accomplish with the film. I’ve learned that you don’t have to use a large orchestra to perform a great score.

Things which might have been a little jarring or were a bit of a mystery actually all come together and that’s the architecture of it. I thought long and hard about how I wanted this thing to sound, where we wanted to go with it. The great joy of working with a Guy Ritchie for me is that there’s a guy who’s fearless. He embraces what I do. This isn’t a shy score, this isn’t an underscore, I wanted it to be polarizing, and you either hated it or loved it. I didn’t want my music to be in-between and Guy approached the movie very much in the same way. If it annoyed you and you thought it was too dissonant, great, but if you can get on board, it’s even greater.

During my first listen to the soundtrack I thought I lost my mind when I heard the Main Theme and the Irish and Romanian gypsy influences up to track eleven and then you cut loose. After listening to the soundtrack many times, every track has grown on me and it gets better every time I play it.

This is the other thing, this is the conversation I can have now and couldn’t have at the time with the people at Warner Brothers. Because it’s very polarizing and it is very different, it’s actually incredibly detailed as well. I thought whenever they said, ‘Well, this is so unusual,’ or, ‘This is not what we imagined,’ I kept thinking, but that’s the job, I’m supposed to do something that grows on you and you may not entirely be ready for, otherwise it’s just the same old, same old. I’m supposed to be a little bit ahead right now. If you’re a little uncomfortable with it at the beginning that’s a good thing, it’s not going to wear out its welcome, you’re not going to get bored with it, it’s not what you expected and that’s part of the job. It’s supposed to be a little bit ahead of where you think this Sherlock Holmes is going to go.

I thought it was Hungarian or gypsy music until I heard track eleven, Psychological Recovery … 6 Months, and all of a sudden these was a twenty minute symphonic piece that blew me away, I didn’t know what to think of it.

Guy Ritchie has this interesting technique, certain scenes have this muffled sound combining Foley, special effects and score: you hear it in the bare knuckle boxing match during Holmes narration and the explosions towards the end of the film set for Holmes, Watson, and Adler. What was Guy trying to accomplishment?

The pre-visualization, where you are being led into Downey’s thought process. We just took the entire top end off the sound. We were trying to figure out a way you were inside Sherlock Holmes’ mind. The most exciting thing about Sherlock Holmes is his mind. Was there a way of letting you as the audience, as a participant, to be inside Sherlock Holmes’ brain? That’s all we were trying to do and it was part of the great adventure of this movie, how were we going to do that? We’re not being incredibly clever about it. It was a very simple way of doing Guy’s idea, which is very clever, to actually be in Holmes’ mind because it justifies everything. My problem was when Guy first phoned me up I had heard that it was going to be some sort of an action Holmes, super hero Holmes, and I thought, “You can’t do that.’ Literally within the first twenty seconds of the movie where he does that thing where you are led into Holmes’ mind and he shows you how he’s going to go and solve the physicality of it, I was sold on the whole thing because it was a genius move by Guy Ritchie. This was Guy Ritchie’s way of letting you into somebody’s thought process and making it action.

Psychological Recovery … 6 Months is definitely the orchestral climax on the CD, what does this twenty minute cue underscore in the film?

We actually cut it down because the cue is much longer. It’s the last two reels of the movie. Its starts off with Holmes putting all the pieces together and then it’s the whole action scene through the Houses of Parliament. I used to write these twenty minute suites, but we’re not writing twenty minute suites anymore, we actually used one of the cues, even though we still cut three or four minutes out of it. I thought you had to earn it, I thought that’s why the score starts off with the least amount of instruments and by the time you get to the last two reels you’ve earned having the orchestra and a big sound.

The final music on the album, Catatonic, what part is this in the film?

The last piece on the soundtrack is really the first piece I wrote. Catatonic was partly where the ideas came from was when we thought, ‘Should we ever be so lucky as to do something else with this, if we ever came up with a sequel, it’s the beginning of that.’ It was the first piece I wrote, but it was just when I was fooling around before the theme actually grew up. It was all my first impressions of where we are going to go with it, starting off with the crow and including most of the beginning of Blackwood’s human sacrifice in it.

Earlier you told me that one of the first things you wrote was for Sherlock at home as Watson comes in and opens the curtains.

Yes, it’s the B part of that theme.

The string work in Catatonic is extremely powerful, how do you get a performance out of an orchestra like that?

about is the performance and virtuosity because you don’t get to write a film score where your soloists are allowed to get off their leash that much and they can really perform. It’s the antithesis to underscore, every note is bold and every note is very expressive. Catatonic was performed with a fiddle, it was played by my friend Aleksey Igudesman, a great Russian violinist who has a great sense of humor, he’s fearless. All you have to do is let them off their leash. A big sound is not necessarily the amount of people you employ, but it’s how big their heart and emotion is. I was listening to one of the Beethoven’s string quartets the other day on the radio, it just came on. The first chord was the biggest orchestral sound I ever heard and its four players, but it’s having players who are really committed and play with confidence. This is the tradeoff, if you don’t have one hundred players sitting there and you have fewer players, you can focus on them more. Your rehearsals are better, so there were a lot more rehearsals going on; there was a lot more practicing going than I usually have on a score. Rehearsing makes a huge difference, people underestimate rehearsal time.

His playing is unbelievable, a fiddle performance like that can say more than what a one hundred piece orchestra can play.

That’s the idea, that’s what I’m trying to get back to. Part of the agenda I have, if there’s an agenda outside this movie and I’m using Sherlock Holmes to further this agenda, we’re in an age where the economy is in the toilet, there’s no more money spent on music education in schools, kids don’t have lessons anymore, they don’t learn how to play an instrument great, so what I want to do is to go put a spotlight on great players and go, ‘If you come to our movie and you hear some great playing, you could be that great player,’ and open those possibilities again. Great virtuoso playing is as much fun as anything else and it’s worth while to go and learn how to play the violin, you can rock out on the violin. You know who introduced me to Aleksey? Ennio Morricone, Ennio is a huge fan of Aleksey’s.

What about your music at the very end of the film when we see that classic shot after Blackwood plummets to his death, it starts with a close up of Blackwood hanging and gradually zooms back to reveal the unfinished Tower Bridge and the city of London.

Tell me about your upcoming collaboration with Chris Nolan on Inception; is the idea of this film revolutionary?

I have my own voice and style; you either like it or don’t like it, which is fine. Some people like Schoenberg and Alban Berg and some people only want to stick with Mozart, I like them all, but that doesn’t mean I want to orchestrate like them, I don’t want to write like them. I don’t even try to have my own style, and I have my own style and my own limitations, but I try to turn those limitations into an advantage, we all do. I bet you Beethoven tried to turn his limitations into his advantages too. I try to write from a point of view and have my voice, but the interesting thing is that Hollywood is the last place on earth where we commission orchestral music on a daily basis and that’s a really important thing to preserve, I have made that a bit of a mission. If there’s anybody who can probably replace an orchestra with a sampler it’s me, but I don’t want to do that, I’m not interested in that.

You did those experiments in London with some players for Inception. Was Chris there to hear those and how did he react?

Yes, absolutely he was there. I was trying to explain to Chris what I hear in my head. The music in my head is hard to translate into words when I explain it to Chris so he can understand what it sounds like. Can you imagine going up to the director saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea for The Joker, it’s a single note.’ If Chris didn’t have some faith in me that would have been a good moment to say, ‘Hans, you must be joking, you’re fired,’ right? That’s not what he said, Chris said, ‘Oh that’s interesting, let’s try some experiments.’ I’m trying to explain this idea for Inception to Chris and I say, ‘You know something? This is a waste of time, let’s just book a studio and some musicians and let’s just do it.’ We’re really starting out so that’s interesting, we should pursue that for a while longer. Hey, it might never end up in the movie, you have no idea how much stuff goes into the bin.

The great thing is that I work with people who in a funny way encourage failure because you’ve got to be prepared to fail to come up with new things, they are not all going to work out. Right at the end of the dub on Sherlock Holmes I suddenly realized why people don’t do scores with these small ensembles that are playing loud and strident music. It’s really hard to dub because the orchestra gives you a beautiful homogenous blanket that you can pull back under the dialog. If you pull Aleksey’s crazy violin playing back, all it is, is like a dog barking very loudly in a corner, it’s still a dog barking. No, I don’t mean Aleksey barks like a dog, but I’m saying there’s something bold and brash and balls, even quietly is still bold, brash, and balls.

What do you love about film music?

I keep still having ideas; it’s still why I get up in the morning. Not just my film music, man I get excited when I hear a John Powell score. I can’t wait to hear the next John Williams score. I truly love film music. The weird and funny thing is that you have to keep a love of this alive for yourself. One of the greatest moments in my life was after doing Pearl Harbor, which I didn’t think was great shakes or whatever, I got a letter from Elmer Bernstein. I’m not going to even mention the scores of his I was a huge fan of, there are just too many. It was one of the great letters of my life. He’s absolutely one of my heroes and here I’m getting a letter from Elmer telling me how moved he was by the music, it was a long letter where he got into how smart he thought my choices were and how good he thought my craft was. It was a letter from somebody who really loves film music, someone still actually bothering to sit down and go see a movie, being moved by it, and bothering to write the young composer a letter and encouraging him. It blew me away. Actually I just got a note from John Powell after he saw Sherlock Holmes saying how excited he was about what I’d done and how he didn’t expect that. In a funny way it just moved him to write that E mail, that’s huge praise indeed. Hearing that just validates the craziness of it. Sherlock Holmes was impossible, for seven months Lorne Balfe and I worked on it. I keep trying to make people understand that this is a collaborative process, Guy, Lorne, and I, in the room with Bob Badami, with the musicians, all of us, seven months of our life passed on this adventure, but it was seven months well spent.

With thanks to Hans Zimmer, Trey Ratcliff and everyone at Remote Control. To see more of Trey Ratcliff's work go to www.StuckInCustoms.com.

Hans' score for Sherlock Holmes is available on CD or digitally courtesy of the Decca Records label.