Film Score Composer: Hans Zimmer Quiz

Answer: Rain Man

Hans Florian Zimmer was born in Germany in 1957. His last name, Zimmer, means room in German.

In the beginning of his career, Zimmer partnered with his mentor, Stanley Myers. Among the first films that they scored were "Moonlighting" (1982), "Eureka" (1984), "Success Is the Best Revenge" (1984), "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1984), "Insignificance" (1985), "The Lightship" (1985), "Castaway" (1986), "Terminal Exposure" (1986) and "Burning Secret" (1988).

"Rain Man" won the Best Picture award at the 61st Academy Awards held in 1989. Dustin Hoffman took home the Best Actor award for his role as Raymond "Rain Man" Babbitt. Also, Barry Levinson won the Best Director award. The film received a total of eight nominations and won four of them.

Zimmer was nominated for the Best Original Score award but the award went to Dave Grusin, who scored "The Milagro Beanfield War".

Answer: The Lion King

The album accompanying the film, entitled "The Lion King: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" featured songs written by Elton John as well as scores composed by Zimmer.

Zimmer's work on the score of the film earned him an Oscar at the 67th Annual Academy Awards held in 1994. In the same year, he also won the Best Original Score award at the 52nd Golden Globe Awards, beating Alan Silvestri, who scored "Forrest Gump" (1994).

The IMDb or internet movie database website honored Zimmer with the title of "the father of integrating the electronic musical world with traditional orchestral arrangements".

Answer: Crimson Tide

Zimmer won the Best Instrumental Composition award at the 38th Grammy Awards held in 1996.

In an interview with Edwin Black from filmscormonthy.com, Zimmer revealed that the score he composed for the film "Crimson Tide" was one of his favorites.

He said, "Ironically, despite all the scores I've written, there are very few I'm proud of. [They are] "A World Apart", "Driving Miss Daisy", and a couple of cues in "Crimson Tide". "Black Rain" had somehow set up a new way action movies should be scored. Soon everybody was doing the "Black Rain" thing. In "Crimson Tide", I managed to break out of that trend, push it a bit further. So it was an evolutionary step."

The music in the action-thriller film, "Black Rain" (1989) was also scored by Zimmer.

Answer: Gladiator

"Gladiator" won the Best Picture award at the 73rd Academy Awards in 2001. The main actor in the film, Russell Crowe also took home the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Maximus Decimus Meridius.

The score for "Gladiator" was also nominated for both Oscar and Grammy. The first album, entitled "Gladiator: Music from the Motion Picture", released in 2000, featured 17 tracks. Due to its success, a second album, entitled "Gladiator: More Music from the Motion Picture" was released in the following year, which featured 18 tracks, including a remix of the popular song, "Now We Are Free".

The first few lines of the lyrics of the song "Now We Are Free" are:
"Anol shalom
Anol sheh lay konnud de ne um shaddai
Flavum
Nom de leesh
Ham de nam um das
La um de
Flavne"

The lyrics of the song were written by Lisa Gerrard, who wrote the song in an idioglossia (a language she invented herself).

Answer: Pirates of The Caribbean

The first film of the series was released in 2003 and although uncredited, Zimmer composed the score together with Klaus Badelt. The second, third and fourth installments were released in 2006, 2007 and 2011, respectively.

Initially, Alan Silvestri was chosen to compose the scores for "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" (2003). However, the producer of the film, Jerry Bruckheimer and he had different views so the director Gore Verbinski suggested Hans Zimmer.

Unfortunately, Zimmer declined the offer because he had another project at that very same time, namely composing scores for "The Last Samurai" (2003). He recommended his colleague, Klaus Badelt. Zimmer eventually helped Badelt write most of the scores.

For the second, third and fourth films, entitled "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" (2006), "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" (2007) and "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" (2011), respectively, Zimmer was credited as the music composer of the films.

Answer: The Last Samurai

For his work in "The Last Samurai" (2003), Zimmer won the Satellite Award for Best Original Score at the 8th Golden Satellite Awards. His works also received a Golden Globe nomination, but the award went to Howard Shore, who composed the scores for "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003).

Commenting on his work in "The Last Samurai", Zimmer wrote on ew.com (Entertainment Weekly's website), "I'm dealing with a culture I have no clue about. I kept endlessly researching Japanese music, and the more I researched it, the more I realized I had no clue about it. I went to Japan to sort of test-drive it - to see if I got it wrong. I played it to a whole bunch of people and they came up to me and said, 'How do you know so much about Japanese music?' So, I should worry maybe a little less."

Answer: The Da Vinci Code

The director of "The Da Vinci Code" (2006), Ron Howard elaborated on the difficulty and challenge of composing the scores for the film. He commented, "Like every other facet of this movie, the score for "The Da Vinci Code" demanded a range of textures that recognized and reinforced the layers of ideas and emotion, which unfold as the basic story does."

He praised Zimmer for his truly original and spectacular work. He said, "Hans Zimmer has given us extraordinarily memorable music to appreciate within the framework of a film or completely on its own, where you can let the sounds carry you on your own private journey."

Zimmer collaborated with Ron Howard again in "Angels and Demons" (2009).

Answer: Toy Story

The music in "Toy Story" (1995) was scored by Randy Newman.

The first animated film that Zimmer scored was "The Lion King" (1994), which earned him an Oscar. He then composed the scores for several other animated films. Among the notable ones were "Shark Tale" (2004), "Madagascar" (2005), "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" (2008), "Kung Fu Panda" (2008), "Megamind" (2010), "Rango" (2011) and "Kung Fu Panda 2" (2011).

Answer: "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight"

Commenting on his scores in "Inception", Zimmer said, "It's a very electronic score. There is orchestra, but the electronics share an equal spotlight."

Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard composed the scores in "The Dark Knight" (2008). Their work won them the Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack Album (Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media).

The theme for "The Dark Knight" was introduced at the end of "Batman Begins" (2005). In an interview on soundtack.net, Zimmer revealed, "There's a whole theme that's written and on purpose not in the movie. We were basically betting that this movie might work out alright and there would be another one, so we wanted the character to develop."

Answer: Driving Miss Daisy

The score in "Titanic" (1997) was composed by James Horner, who also wrote the song "My Heart Will Go On", sang by Celine Dion. Horner won two Oscars at the 70th Annual Academy Awards, namely Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song. "The King's Speech" (2010) was scored by Alexandre Desplat while "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008) was scored by A. R. Rahman.

From 1989 to 2011, Zimmer received a total of nine Oscar nominations for his work in "Rain Man" (1989), "The Lion King" (1994), "The Preacher's Wife" (1997), "As Good As It Gets" (1998), "The Prince of Egypt" (1999), "The Thin Red Line" (1999), "Gladiator" (2001), "Sherlock Holmes" (2010) and "Inception" (2011).

"The Lion King" (1994) won Zimmer his first Oscar. In his acceptance speech, he thanked his wife and daughter. He said, "I'd like to thank my wife because she's my best friend. I'd like to thank my daughter because she now thinks I'm cool because I did "The Lion King." I'd like to thank the directors Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers. I'd like to thank the nicest producer in the business, Don Hahn. I'm incredibly nervous. I tell you what, writing a score is much easier than this."

The movies "Rain Man" (1989), "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989) and "Gladiator" (2001) won the Oscar Best Picture award for their respective years. Zimmer composed scores for all these three films.