Hans Zimmer’s Tips for Film Scoring: How to Compose Musical Film Scores

A film score is an original piece of written music that accompanies the visuals of a film. Various other mediums, like video games, can also feature scores.

Film scoring is a tough job. There are a lot of elements that go into the music composition for a motion picture, from writing the music itself to orchestration to sound effects to working with the music supervisor to ensure every piece of music accurately serves the final vision of the film.

Music theory also plays a part. When writing music for a film score, Zimmer starts by thinking of a theme as a conversation or as a set of questions and answers.

To try this out yourself, find a scene you love in a film, and create an original score by setting up a question and answer motif. Think about the fact that you know how the scene ends before the audience does, and establish a question at the beginning knowing how the scene will conclude. Write a cue that highlights those questions and answer them.

That’s just one tip from Zimmer about writing movie scores. Here are 13 more, directly from the master himself.

1. Choose a Theme Key. First, you need to pick a key—and stick with it. Zimmer takes this approach, rarely using many key changes. He mentions he likes to write in D, which gives him the solid ground and freedom he needs to create an original theme. Choose a key that gives you the room to express a full range of emotions.

2. Tell a Story. Your job as a composer is to tell a story; stick to the story and never abandon it. You will develop a score that coexists elegantly with the images and words, and colors the world the director creates. To do this, you must live in the world of the story. Think about the main characters in the film, and their journey. What does their story say to you about the human condition?

3. Learn the Rules of the Story. To begin living in the world of the story, learn the rules of it from your director. Working within these rules is like playing a game. The rules help you avoid arriving at a mashup of different Play-Doh colors. Only once you’ve established a strong framework of rules for yourself to build from, you can then start to break those rules to add a bit of “freshness.”

4. Don’t Get Too Technical Right Away. Films aren’t made by committee. Your duty is to follow the director’s lead and create a shared musical vision. If you jump into discussing music specifically or even technically, you may miss important subtext that informs the director’s intention. Zimmer makes a habit of starting conversations with directors as early as possible and allowing that conversation to inform how the music will shape the story. Avoid having those “reality” conversations that are imagination-killers, and save those for the producer.

5. Start Writing ASAP. Zimmer likes to write music as soon as possible, even before filming begins, to help influence the direction on set. He avoids temporary music because it can pigeonhole him into something that limits his freedom and creativity. The most effective environment exists when everyone on set works towards serving the story, and uses their individual voices (and talents) to do so. Trust your collaborators’ instincts and help influence their creativity by giving them your music early on in the process.

6. Keep a Music Diary. Zimmer keeps a music diary in which he writes and captures his ideas from day to day. He doesn’t edit prior work, instead moving on and continuing to develop certain ideas to find the right themes and styles for the film. To keep a music diary, start writing, even if you don’t think it works. You can always leave it out of your score. Don’t go back and edit your own work. Keep writing! You might find that an old, untouched piece works better for a different section of the film. Don’t worry about transitions between pieces; you’re not creating a full score just yet. You can play with tempos in your diary as well.

7. Write for Doris. Find your Doris. Zimmer has created a persona for whom he writes. This helps him ground his approach to ensure that he’s giving his audience an escape, an experience that she wouldn’t have in her day-to-day life. Write for Doris, and then test the score in front of an audience to see if you’ve achieved the escape they’re looking for.

8. Create a Sound Palette. Sound palettes are used to design the world of the film and give them unique atmospheres. Zimmer considers music and image as complements to one another, and attempts to create sound palettes that coexist with the cinematographer’s approach to telling the story. He also thinks every composer should study light, color, and editing to help with the world-building. He says it’s important to set up the sound palette early in the film, to inform
and invite the audience on the journey into the world that your sounds help build.

9. Take the Audience on a Journey—But Don’t Take It for Them. Know also when to avoid Mickey Mousing: don’t always hit the cut. By doing so, you can give the audience too much information about what emotion they should feel, which takes them out of the journey. Take them on the journey with you, don’t take it for them. And if the story is complicated, use music to your advantage to entertain them and help tell the story. Zimmer often talks about his approach to scoring Black Hawk Down, and allowing the score to hit the action one frame ahead of the action on screen. This creates a sense of tension, the idea of an event coming out of nowhere. Watch the film and think about the difference in feeling and emotion had he approached it by hitting the action and hitting the cuts.

10. Write for the Best Sound Systems. Zimmer encourages students to write for the best cinema experience possible. Your scores will be played in many different environments with varying sound quality, but you should write for the
best sound systems possible.

11. Find the Right Tempo. Finding the right tempo might be intuitive by this point in Zimmer’s career, but it isn’t that way for everyone. Your editor will be your guide as you narrow in on the tempo that best fits the scene at hand. Use the edit as the drum for your score, and determine a BPM from which to build your score that coexists with the edit. Zimmer will start composing by setting a metronome. The click is steady, reliable, and serves as your grid as you map out the pace of the drama. Zimmer used to watch a scene, then turn the picture on to write, and turn it back on to see if his composition and the scene matched up. Now, he’s able to identify common bpms. He mentions that 80 BPM is a great starting point, as it is seductive but easily fits with faster paced scenes. 60 BPM is a bit slower and easier to get more profound, whereas 140 is a bit more energetic and dancy.

12. Be Particular About Your Musicians. It’s your job as the composer to write to the strengths of the musicians you’re working with, and the strengths of their instruments. Write with specific players in mind, so that you don’t find yourself working with a player who can’t execute your vision. Find those collaborators who will find a solution rather than make up excuses for why they can’t create a certain sound. At the end of the day, Zimmer believes that you want to achieve what he calls “authentic passion,” and you want to work with musicians who will take the tune you wrote and “set fire to it.”

13. Revisions Should Be a Collaboration. Zimmer tells us that revisions should be a conversation between the composer and director, rather than about giving feedback and notes. It’s a collaboration, the goal of which is trying to find and write the best music for the story.

Revisions happen early in the process. During the diary process, Zimmer is figuring out his way into the score, and revising his intention as he gets more precise about the rules for his score. Take comfort in knowing that even for Zimmer, showing his music to the director is an emotionally tough experience, and he becomes fragile in the process. Show it to your music editor or a key collaborator first, and ask a very simple question: “Is it shit?”

1. 1. 12 Years A Slave
2. 2. Batman Begins
3. 3. The Dark Knight
4. 4. The Dark Knight Rises
5. 5. Gladiator
6. 6. Interstellar
7. 7. Pirates of the Caribbean
8. 8. Sherlock Holmes
9. 9. The Da Vinci Code
10. 10. The Thin Red Line
11. 11. Man of Steel
12. 12. The Last Samurai
13. 13. Dunkirk

When it comes to composing musical themes, anything from characters to setting can serve as inspiration. Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer begins with a character’s backstory and builds from there. In Zimmer’s MasterClass, you’ll find music composing fundamentals like creating sound palettes, working with synths, and understanding tempo in relation to pacing, to create your very own memorable film scores.

Want to become a better composer? The MasterClass Annual Membership provides exclusive video lessons taught by master musicians, including Hans Zimmer, Itzhak Perlman, and more.