When it was first announced that then-up-and-coming filmmaker Christopher Nolan would be rebooting the Batman franchise with an origin story film called Batman Begins, fans knew immediately this also meant we’d probably be getting a new iconic Batman theme. Danny Elfman set the tone for the Caped Crusader with Tim Burton’s first two films, which then carried on throughout the 90s with the lesser sequels. But for a “gritty and grounded” reboot, the soundscape would need to change.
Little did we know that would mean pairing up two of the best composers of their generation. In the early 2000s, Hans Zimmer was the Oscar-winning composer behind bombastic films like Gladiator and The Lion King, and multiple Oscar-nominee James Newton Howard had just changed the game tremendously with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense a few years earlier. Batman Begins would combine these two magnificent forces to set the tone for not only a new franchise, but a new type of superhero movie.
So when I recently got the chance to speak with Howard about his incredible score for the brilliant Tom Hanks Western News of the World on an upcoming episode of Collider Connected, I asked how this unique collaboration with Zimmer on Batman Begins came about, and what the experience was like working together on that film and The Dark Knight.
As it turns out, Zimmer and Howard were originally supposed to co-compose a different film, David Koepp’s 2004 thriller Secret Window:
“Hans and I had become good friends, and then there was a David Koepp movie that came along that was called [Secret Window], and Hans and I had talked – at one point we were saying, ‘Gosh, how many more car chases can we write?’ and I think he said, ‘What if I start a cue and you finish it, and then you start a cue and I finish it?’ So when David called me to do the movie, I said, ‘Well, what would you think if I did it with Hans Zimmer?’ and he said ‘Great!’ And then for a number of reasons – I was going through some personal stuff, I think I was getting divorced – and it didn’t happen. I pulled out of the movie, which is a very difficult thing to do because David is a good friend, and he was supportive.”
So when Zimmer was asked by Nolan if he wanted to score Batman Begins, the composer pitched teaming up with Howard again:
“And then Chris Nolan called Hans and said, ‘I’m doing this Batman movie, do you wanna do it?’ and Hans said, ‘Yeah, can I do it with my mate James Newton Howard?’ and he said ‘Yeah great!’ The thing is, Hans and I are wildly different musical entities, but we do have a similar process. We use the same technology, we tend to approach scores the way you would approach making a record – that is, the production values are extremely important to us, how the bass drum sounds, what the low end is like, is the mid-range too harsh? We really try and shape it sonically, so that allowed us to have a lot of commonality.”
How did this collaboration work, exactly? Howard said the two co-wrote almost every single cue in the film save for one – and it’s a biggie:
“We set up two writing studios, a pair of studios in London up on the third floor across the hall from each other. His door was open, I could hear what he was doing; and my door was open, he could hear what I was doing. We were smoking like chimneys. On that movie, on Batman Begins, we truly did co-write every cue together with the exception of the most famous cue, which he wrote, which is the two-note thing. Which is fabulous.”
The composer says the experience working on Batman Begins couldn’t have come at a better time, and he credits Zimmer with bringing him out of a funk and reminding him of one key component of film composing: it should be fun.
“Every day Chris would come over and we would play him what we’d done, and it was just really, really fun. I learned a lot from Hans, I learned mainly that film composing should be fun. And I had reached a point where – I had left Secret Window, I had just finished I think Collateral with Michael Mann, I don’t know I was going through a tough time and I was ready to take a long break. And Hans said, ‘No come over, we’ll have fun!’ It really taught me to relax a little bit.”
Batman Begins was of course a massive hit, but the score was ruled ineligible for the Oscars because of the number of composers credited with the music (which is dumb).
When Howard and Zimmer returned for The Dark Knight, however, they took a different approach to tackling the score:
“The Dark Knight was a little bit different. We did most of the writing in Los Angeles. His studio in L.A. is about 300 yards from my studio, it’s very close. We split up some of the assignments – he took The Joker and did such a crazy good job on that, I took Two-Face, and then we split up some of the action stuff. I did, predictably, maybe more the psychological stuff, but we went through it and it was great. It was also great fun.”
Again, The Dark Knight was a huge hit – and an Oscar-winning one at that – so another sequel felt inevitable. But when it came time to make The Dark Knight Rises, Howard decided to politely bow out of the film due to the close collaboration that Nolan and Zimmer had forged on Inception:
“Hans did [Inception] with Chris and it was clear to me that those two guys have such a great relationship, so when The Dark Knight Rises came along I just politely said, ‘You know what, you guys do it. I’ve got other movies that I’m doing, and I think I’ve offered everything. You guys are killing it.’ So I just bowed out, but it was very friendly.”
So far those are the only two films Howard has worked on for Christopher Nolan, but he says he learned a lot from him while noting his more traditional approach to composing was maybe sometimes a bit too traditional for the boundary-pushing Nolan:
“He’s such an extraordinary filmmaker. Really challenging for me, because you can’t predict what he’s gonna hear or what he’s gonna respond to. There are situations — and not just Chris, but a number of directors where I would bet the farm that I’m gonna play them a cue that’s gonna knock their socks off, they’re just gonna be on their knees thanking me. And I play it, and they’re sitting behind me on my couch, and it’s just silence, and it’s a big miss. So Chris is one of those people I found, for me, he loves adventure and experimentation, deviating from what is expected. I tend to be more of a traditionalist, I really am. I’m a 19th century romantic guy that happens to be pretty good at electronics when I need them, but I’m a melody [guy], I live there more. But he’s great, I learned a lot from Chris.”
Look for much more from my conversation with Howard and the full hourlong interview on Collider later this week. In the meantime, check out his incredible work on News of the World, which is currently available on VOD.