Hans Zimmer says his music is “not original”: “My music is a subtotal of everything I’ve heard all my life”Hans Zimmer, the legendary composer behind some of the most iconic film scores of all time, has claimed that his music is “not original”.
In a new, wide-ranging interview with Rick Beato, the multiple Academy Award and Grammy-winning composer reflects on his artistic process, influences, and the creative philosophies that shape much of his work.
Asked to pick one of his scores whereby the music and visuals are “married perfectly”, Zimmer points to the track The Journey to the Line from the 1998 Terrence Malick war film The Thin Red Line as one that works “really well”.

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“You’re going to think I’m crazy but that’s okay,” Zimmer begins. “I wrote this piece – it’s really simple: we put it up against the picture and it’s sort of a jungle scene and suddenly we saw the sun shining through the leaves. And we’d never seen that before and so we turned the music off and we watched the scene again and we didn’t see the sun.”
“So now we got really excited like little boys and it was Sunday so there’s nobody around so we went out and there’s a cleaner. We get the cleaner in and we go ‘let us show you something’ and he saw it too.”
“I’ve never been able to repeat this, you know. It’s sort of really worked,” he adds. “I mean it turned the visual into something slightly different.”
The track, now known as the “forbidden cue”, has since become one of Hans Zimmer’s most widely used compositions, with directors using it as a temp track in everything from animated films to urban crime dramas and even baseball movies.
“It seemed to fit everything and I heard versions of it as well over the years which weren’t entirely my versions.”
When asked if he feels flattered by how often his work was repurposed, Zimmer simply replies, “Yeah, just go knock yourself out.”
“My music is not original. My music is a subtotal of everything I’ve heard all my life,” he explains. “My mum took me to my first opera when I was two and a half, and my dad was a jazz fiend.”
Watch the full interview below:

And head to Rick Beato’s YouTube channel for more.
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