Hans Zimmer was hesitant to revisit ‘The Lion King’ score until playing the music at Coachella gave him a spark of inspiration

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Famed music composer Hans Zimmer talked to Business Insider about how he changed things up to do the score for the remake of "The Lion King."
He said a big inspiration came from playing some of the score from the original movie at Coachella in 2017.
It led to him enlisting over 100 musicians to come and do the score for the remake, something that is rarely done in today’s tech-savvy world where a composer needs no musicians to create music.
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Hans Zimmer had no interest playing his music from "The Lion King." He and his band were about to take the stage at the 2017 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and probably the last thing the 80,000-plus adults out there would want to hear was music from a Disney movie, he thought.

"I remember saying to the band before we went on, ‘We’re not going to do ‘Lion King,’" Zimmer recalled while talking to Business Insider over the phone from London. "And one of them, this 23-year-old, said to me, ‘Hans, get over yourself, it’s the soundtrack of my generation.’"

Zimmer and his band eventually did play arrangements from "The Lion King," which had earned the famed movie composer his only Oscar win when the animated classic opened in 1994.

And while playing, he snuck a glance at the crowd to see the reaction.

"It was this emotional wave," he said. "I really don’t know how to describe it, I just know we touched them deeply."

Frazer Harrison/GettyZimmer’s music in movies is unmatched. The scores he created for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, Christopher Nolan’s "Dark Knight" trilogy, "Gladiator," and "Dunkirk," are as memorable as the movies themselves. But he has always been conflicted about the music he did for "The Lion King."

The score came from his own raw emotion of losing his father when he was a young boy, which also happens to the movie’s main character, Simba. To write the score, Zimmer said he was forced to delve into a part of his life that he had emotionally tucked away deep inside. And when he hears that the movie’s music is one of the most memorable works in cinema, he cringes.

"I never thought of it as iconic," he said. "It was just something that I wrote."

But that doesn’t mean Zimmer isn’t aware of the importance of the work, which is why he was skeptical of coming on to score a remake of "The Lion King" director Jon Favreau was embarking on. That skepticism quickly changed for Zimmer when Favreau showed him the opening footage of the movie: the animals converging on Pride Rock to celebrate the birth of Simba over the original music of "Circle of Life."

"As opposed to giving me some long verbal explanation he just put me in a dark room with a screen and just showed me," Zimmer said. "It was absolutely gorgeous."

GettyZimmer saw that the visuals would be elevated for the remake, but how could he do that for the music? That brings us back to Coachella.

In that moment of seeing the massive crowd react to the performance of "The Lion King" score, Zimmer finally embraced the fact that it was generation defining. And he had an epiphany of how to do the music for the remake.

"I would have real musicians really perform it," he said. "Because they really loved the music, they would be committed to each note."

Thanks to technology, scoring a movie today can be as simple as a composer using audio sampling. In many cases, they don’t need other musicians at all. But Zimmer wanted to go old school: a big room filled with musicians.

He brought in over 100 musicians, ranging from the all black ReCollective Orchestra in New York, to original musicians who were on the first "Lion King" with him, to Zimmer’s band.

For the two-day rehearsals they all played while a giant screen ran "The Lion King" remake.

"From start to finish, the whole way though, no stopping," Zimmer said. "I put out 20 chairs and the filmmakers, crew, they became our audience. I feel musicians play a little better when they are put on the spot and there’s an audience there. There really was an electricity in the air."

DisneyZimmer then recorded the music for real with the group for the next four days, but he said the two days prior were important for everyone to really get the material down and the flow of playing together.

Over the weekend, "The Lion King" remake made over half a billion dollars worldwide, which should be the latest example for Zimmer that people can’t get enough of the movie he contributed to. But for now, he’s just happy he got a second chance to fix a few things.

"What artist doesn’t want to go back to their old material and have a chance at personal redemption," he said. "Even though everyone thinks the original ‘Lion King’ score is really good, there’s always little bits that bug me, so I was able to clean those up."

"The Lion King" is currently playing in theaters.

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Source: Business Insider – jguerrasio@businessinsider.com (Jason Guerrasio)