Chris Nolan always said he had to convince you to do Batman Begins. Was it a struggle?
I kept telling him that I had no time and that I was busy on something else and he'd phone and would describe shots to me. He wouldn't send them. He was in London and I was in LA and was supposed to come over to London but was stuck on this movie. There's an iconic shot of Batman on top of this tall building looking out over the city, and Chris was describing it to me saying, "I just can't make this shot work. Can you just write something that delivers me to it?" I was saying, "No, no, I don't have time... Okay, I'll do something really rough" and did it and next day we get a phone call saying, "The shot is in now... I have this other thing, could you just..." I kept telling him I didn't have time and would whip something rough up and by the time James (Newton Howard) and I got over to London, the whole movie was temped with all those rough sketches, but at least it wasn't everybody else's music! It started to already have the tone of where we were going.
Did anyone think you'd end up working on a trilogy?
Not at all. In fact, if anything, I seem to remember Chris and everyone feeling a little bit like the fans are watching what we're doing, are we going to ruin this movie? Because we were trying some very different things. I remember having a safety heroic tune written, which I didn't like very much, but it was in case anyone would turn round to us and go, "hang on, he's supposed to be a superhero and you're doing this two-note thing here!" On the second one, the super heroic thing came out of the drawer and Chris said, "I quite like this..." And I kept saying, "But the character hasn't earned it!" By the time we got to the third one, really what the character became was the antithesis to that theme so it's in a bin somewhere. The way we work is, we put everything, every idea into the movie that we're in front of. We don't ever think if there's going to be another. You don't keep anything in reserve, either.
I've never had a real job in my life that lasted any longer than however long working on the movie lasts. If Chris had said at the beginning, "We're going spend eight or nine years of our lives doing Batman movies" I would have balked at the whole thing. I balked enough as it is!
Was it different working on Inception with a couple of movies already under your belts together?
I'd go to the set and we'd spent a long time talking about it, I'd started writing ideas and themes. When he finished shooting, I said, "Can I go and see the movie now?" He said, "no! Not until you finish writing the score!" So again it was a little bit like the Batman Begins process, because there is something that happens. It became a game with me where I would know what scene I was writing for but I hadn't seen the theme and I would send a piece of music over without writing on it what scene it was for and then when I finally saw the movie, I wanted to see how much of it translated and it all did! There's a moment in Inception when she's on the ledge and the shoe falls and I'd really specifically had in my head what that would be and that's exactly what it was, the timing and everything worked perfectly. So it's that being in sync with the director is really important. But Chris and I have an unusual way of working.
How much input did you have into the famous "Braaam" sound that is so associated with the film and Zack Hemsey's trailer tune?
We did the first two trailers and the famous "Braaam" sound or whatever you want to call it, is in Chris' script. So we already had done that, and then I got really busy actually writing the movie and Chris played me the Zack piece and there are a couple of chords in it that I was really trying to avoid, and I thought it was funny because they're sort of Batman chords (laughs)), which I didn't want in Inception. But I thought, 'at least it seems part of the family!'
Does it annoy or please you that it gets used on every big trailer now?
It doesn't please me or annoy me. Look, we weren't going to do it again! On one of the trailers for Dark Knight Rises that had been cut by a trailer house used that sound and so now we had to come up with something to replace that. What we did was, we went exactly the opposite way. There's a trailer that starts off with these really abstract piano notes, really lonely. That all used to be action-y music and big 'braaams' etc. and because Chris and I realised that the great thing we have in Batman, when you hear those little off sonatas or that string thing, you know in a second that it's a Batman movie. So we could postpone in a funny way, giving away what you were looking at. It was just a fun game to play not to use it.
And The Dark Knight Rises kept the collaborative spirit up?
The stuff for Bane in Dark Knight Rises was written... I just tried to beat Chris in a way so it was written before he went out to shoot any of the theme. So it was recorded before he started doing the movie. And we talked about this process we have where it's not that I'm trying stay ahead of him, but we try to develop certain things simultaneously. I asked him if it was helpful to him and he said, "Sometimes on the set, you have all these people but you're still the director and the writer and sometimes it's nice if you can go, 'Over there, there's a little bit of Zimmer that I can go to.'" I'm just this little brick that you can plug in if you veer suddenly. We came up with the idea for the chant and then I hear from the sound crew and the assistant directors that they're trying to teach the chant to the extras, so something that was something I was just playing around with suddenly becomes part of the film. We wouldn't have been able to do it afterwards. These ideas happen earlier at the script stage.
Of your career, was there a tough job that came out exactly the way you hoped?
None of them come out the way I want or hope. Actually, that's not true. There are two movies. The Thin Red Line was a lot of work and it turned out exactly how I hoped. It's pretty good. And then The Dark Knight Rises, it was a really great way of finishing nine years of our lives. It was a great journey and it felt satisfying on a personal level.