[JamesSouthall]

I probably still am (though I try not to be) but 25 years ago when I was extremely pompous and arrogant I had an allergic reaction to Gladiator. Back then, I viewed Zimmer as someone who could write entertaining music for action films but not as a “serious” composer (Thin Red Line apart, which I adored – and still do). So when I heard that power anthem stuff in Gladiator I thought – no, this sort of “cheap” music REALLY doesn’t belong in an historical epic! This is supposed to sound like Rozsa. And I couldn’t get over my own foolishness in that regard and it ended up polluting my opinion of him for a little while.

These days of course I recognise him for what he is, a genuine innovator who engineered a paradigm shift in film music which hadn’t previously been seen since the 1960s (had I been alive back then, I would no doubt have been lambasting people like John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith and Ennio Morricone for also not sounding like Rozsa). This is in no way Zimmer’s fault, but there is something still in there – Barry, Goldsmith, Morricone (and all the other greats who emerged during that time) are all completely, fundamentally different from each other – whereas the shift that occurred from Zimmer didn’t really see other innovators at the same time driving things in other ways – so perhaps that was when (in Hollywood at least) things became a little more homogeneous. Yes other composers emerged during this time who have their own voices (Giacchino, Desplat etc) but they haven’t really inspired imitators the way Zimmer did.

And it wasn’t just the musical style – it was the way films were scored that changed. By design, these basically interchangeable musical passages which can just be copied and pasted and modified at a whim when the film gets digitally re-edited – Zimmer was the first who really tapped into that, the first big film composer who managed to respond to the new way in which films were being made towards the end of the 1990s and then into this century. Which is a big part of why he became so influential, of course.

It is very simplistic, but I’ve always thought of his career as having four phases – I think he started off in the early days as being a bit of a Faltermeyer wannabe, then progressed to a Vangelis wannabe, then to a Morricone wannabe, before finally just being him. Nobody else has ever scored a film like Dune the way Zimmer scored Dune. At the top of his game he’s phenomenal.