Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer has done scores of awesome titles over the years. Movies like Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Amazing Spiderman 2, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy — Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) — as well as Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) are just a few of the amazing movies that owe their terrific sounds to his brilliance.
However, after Hans Zimmer finished working on Batman v superman: Dawn of Justice, the fabled composer announced that he would never again work on another superhero movie. Although he later changed his mind earlier this year by saying he would work on a superhero movie only if “somebody came along with a great idea.”
In a recent interview, Zimmer talked about how he struggled to connect with Ben Affleck’s tired and weary Batman, preferring Christian Bale’s more grounded and layered take on the iconic character.
“I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben,” Zimmer told Inverse. “The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can’t quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged, he seems to be grumpy as hell but I didn’t feel the pain that I felt in Christian’s performance. And it was that pain that made [me] interested.”
He was then asked, “So you handed Batman off to Junkie XL?”
“Well… nearly,” he replied. “We did it together. Well, you know, honestly, thinking about it, we really did do it together. And it was great having a partner in crime on this thing. And you can’t have a better partner than Junkie (aka Tom Holkenborg), the guy is on fire constantly. He’s one of the most creative people I know, and plus he’s as geeky as me.”