Last week I got to do something extremely cool…I got to interview Hans Zimmer in his private Los Angeles recording studio!  While I get to speak with actors and directors all the time, getting to talk with a great composer is not the norm.  And getting to speak to one where he records his music…let’s just say I jumped at the chance to make this happen.

Thankfully, Zimmer could not have been nicer and while we spoke for over twenty minutes, our interview could have been all afternoon.  That’s because as the composer of such scores as Sherlock Holmes, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight (with James Newton Howard) Frost/Nixon, Inception and a ton of others….I had a million questions.

And while we talked about how he comes up with his music and all the normal questions, the best part was getting him to give me a tour of the room and show me all the equipment.  If you’re a fan of Hans Zimmer, want to write music for movies, or just a movie fan curious how composers work, you are going to absolutely love this interview.  Take a look after the jump:

Frost/Nixon has to have one of the more interesting pedigrees of any film in recent years:  televised interviews about historical events, dramatized into an award-winning play, which was then adapted into an Academy-Award-nominated movie.  And yet the resultant motion picture remains as gripping as the original interviews must have been when first broadcast (alas, I was too young at the time to remember them).

Frost/Nixon is as much about the lead up to and circumstances surrounding the famous David Frost interviews of Richard Nixon as the interviews themselves.  The film injects verbal sparring with a tension more reminiscent of a political thriller-which, of course, isn’t that far from the case, considering the interviews’ subject matter.  Considering how many dialogue-driven character dramas these days fall completely flat, it’s a joy to see one that is truly enthralling.