#330
Post
autor: Adam » czw lis 05, 2020 09:41 am
Hansik dla GQ - dużo o Bondzie:
GQ Magazine: Bond is such a huge franchise and you’re perhaps the best known living composer of film music. I find it hard to believe you’ve never been invited to do a Bond soundtrack before.
Hans Zimmer: I've known Barbara [Broccoli, the long-time producer behind Bond] for a long time, socially. I would consider us friends. And no, she hasn't ever asked me before. There hasn't really been any point – I would give Tom Newman and Dave Arnold the job any day. Those are two composers I truly admire, so I never felt the need to. You have to remember that, at the end of the day, I'm still the audience. I still love going and seeing those movies and being knocked out by other people's work.
Bond is special and, I can honestly say, with Steve Mazzaro by my side, a chap I've been working with for nine or ten years, the whole team, it just felt like a band.
How do you approach something like Bond, when John Barry’s theme is already so well known?
You’ve got to acknowledge, number one, that I'm a fan of his music – I was a fan of the man, we knew each other – and I kept thinking: there are timeless parts to this and there are parts that we have absolute license to go and reinvent.
Plus, this is an autonomous piece of work, this movie, so it needs its own colour. The way Cary [Fukunaga] shot it is in a very particular style, so it needed that as well. The first thing I did was I phoned Johnny Marr and I said, “I have two questions for you. What's the only guitar tune worth playing in a movie?” And he goes, “Well, it’s the Bond one.” And I'm going, “I agree with you. Second question. Do you think we should do it?” And he said, “Yes, of course we should.” So having Johnny on board was very helpful.
The other thing that was incredibly helpful is that I know all the musicians that have played on Bond. No matter how big the movie is, it's still a personal experience. You want to get your mates around you and I have a feeling that's sort of what Barbara did. She phoned me up and went, “Oh, Hans' around, maybe he's not doing anything.”
When you’re working on something like Bond, which has a theme song as well as a soundtrack, how closely do those reflect each other? How closely did you work on ‘No Time To Die’, the song?
I got that a bit late. It’s a Bond film, there's going to be a song and there was like a box full of songs lying around that people were listening to and trying to make decisions on them. They wanted me to be part of the decision-making process. There was this small, leanly produced, very personal song by Billie. I just went, “That's it.” And everybody said, “Well, but it's not quite right. It's not good.” [I said,] “No, no, no, here's the mistake you're making: she and Finneas haven't seen the movie yet. They don't know what they're writing about. Get them on a plane, get them over here.” So on a dark, grey, typical English night, they arrived in the middle of Soho, jet-lagged beyond anything, and we showed them the movie and the next day the three of us got to work on it.
For me, it was undeniable that that was the right way to go. It felt hugely personal; it felt really well crafted. I really liked how lean it was. My friend Matt [Dunkley] actually did the majority of the string arrangements and Steve Lipson, engineer extraordinaire, came in. We just spent the day adding little orchestral touches. And, of course, the other thing, which I knew was missing before they even wrote it, was [that] it needed a Johnny Marr guitar.
So there was literally a box of options and you picked out Billie and Finneas’ composition?
Let me be candid. I think everybody discussed what to use, I just kept saying, “Nah. Billie and Finneas. We’re done!” I’d never met them, but I felt [that] there’s Shirley Bassey, there's Adele – everybody who's ever worked on [Bond] has come at it with a strong style of their own, with conviction and a great commitment. And this song had it. It maintained an intimacy, which I thought was beautiful.
#FUCKVINYL