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German-born composer Hans Zimmer is recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents. He featured in the music video for The Buggles' single "Video Killed the Radio Star", which became a worldwide hit and helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video to be aired on MTV (August 1, 1981).
Hans Florian Zimmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, then in West Germany, the son of Brigitte (Weil) and Hans Joachim Zimmer. He entered the world of film music in London during a long collaboration with famed composer and mentor Stanley Myers, which included the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). He soon began work on several successful solo projects, including the critically acclaimed A World Apart, and during these years Zimmer pioneered the use of combining old and new musical technologies. Today, this work has earned him the reputation of being the father of integrating the electronic musical world with traditional orchestral arrangements.
A turning point in Zimmer's career came in 1988 when he was asked to score Rain Man for director Barry Levinson. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year and earned Zimmer his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Score. The next year, Zimmer composed the score for another Best Picture Oscar recipient, Driving Miss Daisy (1989), starring Jessica Tandy, and Morgan Freeman.
Having already scored two Best Picture winners, in the early 1990s, Zimmer cemented his position as a preeminent talent with the award-winning score for The Lion King (1994). The soundtrack has sold over 15 million copies to date and earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, an American Music Award, a Tony, and two Grammy Awards. In total, Zimmer's work has been nominated for 7 Golden Globes, 7 Grammys and seven Oscars for Rain Man (1988), Gladiator (2000), The Lion King (1994), As Good as It Gets (1997), The The Preacher's Wife (1996), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Prince of Egypt (1998), and The Last Samurai (2003).
With his career in full swing, Zimmer was anxious to replicate the mentoring experience he had benefited from under Stanley Myers' guidance. With state-of-the-art technology and a supportive creative environment, Zimmer was able to offer film-scoring opportunities to young composers at his Santa Monica-based musical "think tank." This approach helped launch the careers of such notable composers as Mark Mancina, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Nick Glennie-Smith, and Klaus Badelt.
In 2000, Zimmer scored the music for Gladiator (2000), for which he received an Oscar nomination, in addition to Golden Globe and Broadcast Film Critics Awards for his epic score. It sold more than three million copies worldwide and spawned a second album Gladiator: More Music From The Motion Picture, released on the Universal Classics/Decca label. Zimmer's other scores that year included Mission: Impossible II (2000), The Road to El Dorado (2000), and An Everlasting Piece (2000), directed by Barry Levinson.
Some of his other impressive scores include Pearl Harbor (2001), The Ring (2002), four films directed by Ridley Scott; Matchstick Men (2003), Hannibal (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Thelma & Louise (1991), Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), and A League of Their Own (1992), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), Tears of the Sun (2003), Ron Howard's Backdraft (1991), Days of Thunder (1990), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), and the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) for which he also co-wrote four of the songs with Bryan Adams, including the Golden Globe nominated Here I Am.
At the 27th annual Flanders International Film Festival, Zimmer performed live for the first time in concert with a 100-piece orchestra and a 100-voice choir. Choosing selections from his impressive body of work, Zimmer performed newly orchestrated concert versions of Gladiator, Mission: Impossible II (2000), Rain Man (1988), The Lion King (1994), and The Thin Red Line (1998). The concert was recorded by Decca and released as a concert album entitled "The Wings Of A Film: The Music Of Hans Zimmer."
In 2003, Zimmer completed his 100th film score for the film The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, for which he received both a Golden Globe and a Broadcast Film Critics nomination. Zimmer then scored Nancy Meyers' comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003), the animated Dreamworks film, Shark Tale (2004) (featuring voices of Will Smith, Renée Zellweger, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese), and Jim Brooks' Spanglish (2004) starring Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni (for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination). His 2005 projects include Paramount's The Weather Man (2005) starring Nicolas Cage, Dreamworks' Madagascar (2005), and the Warner Bros. summer release, Batman Begins (2005).
Zimmer's additional honors and awards include the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Film Composition from the National Board of Review, and the Frederick Loewe Award in 2003 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. He has also received ASCAP's Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement. Hans and his wife live in Los Angeles and he is the father of four children.- Sound Department
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Richard King was born in Tampa, Florida and attended the University of South Florida graduating with a BFA in painting and film.
Since 1985 he has worked in film sound design. Richard has been fortunate to work with such directors as Nicolas Roeg, M. Night Shyamalan, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, William Friedkin, Peter Weir, Steven Spielberg,Christopher Nolan, Patty Jenkins and Jeymes Samuel. He is the recipient of four Academy Awards, three Bafta Awards, and four MPSE awards for Best Sound Editing as well as the MPSE Career Achievement Award.
Richard lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.- Music Department
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John Ottman holds dual distinctions as a leading film composer and an award winning film editor. Ottman has often completed both monumental tasks on the same films. Such remarkable double duties have included The Usual Suspects, X-Men 2, Superman Returns, Valkyrie, and Jack the Giant Killer. He has also held producer roles on several of these films, as well as directing, editing and scoring Urban Legends 2.
From an early age in San Jose, California, Ottman began writing and recording radio plays on cassette tapes. He'd perform many characters with his voice (and some sound effects), and called upon his neighborhood friends as extra cast members.
By the fourth grade, Ottman was playing the clarinet and continued doing so throughout high school. But his real concentration turned from audio productions to making films. He turned his parents' garage into a movie studio, where multiple sets were interchangeable to accommodate productions - invariably some sort of science fiction film. By high school, his films evolved to hour-long productions complete with large sets and lavish scores edited together from his favorite soundtracks.
Having been a veteran of numerous short films, Ottman excelled at USC film school, receiving accolades for his direction of actors and for how masterfully he edited their performances. It was in this directing course that a graduate filmmaker asked Ottman to re-edit his thesis film. John modified the story from raw footage and also designed the film's extensive sound. The film ended up winning the student Academy Award. On that film, Ottman met a production assistant named Bryan Singer.
Singer, only aware of Ottman's editing (Ottman stayed awake into the wee hours learning midi gear and composing music), asked him to edit a short film starring Ethan Hawke - a childhood friend of Singer's. Ottman ended up co-directing the film (Lion's Den) as well as editing and doing the sound design.
Ottman edited Singer's first feature, Public Access. His effective sequences and editorial montages became the highlight of the picture. In the eleventh hour, the film lost its composer. Singer asked Ottman to write the score, after much prodding from the editor. Public Access received the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, with the score and editing being lauded in reviews.
With The Usual Suspects and future Singer films, Ottman held to a promise that, despite his scoring dreams, he would commit to the months required to also serve as editor on Singer's films. The wary producers of The Usual Suspects gave the go-ahead for him to both edit the complicated picture and write the score, the demands of which no one had undergone. The film was edited in Ottman's living room on a Steinbeck flatbed and a splicer. The Usual Suspects and Ottman's work received widespread acclaim, earning Ottman the British Academy Awards for his editing, a Saturn Award for his score, and a nomination by the American Cinema Editors.
Since then, Ottman has scored numerous films with the intent of keeping thematic film scoring alive. Ottman also made a brief foray into television for which he received an Emmy nomination ("Fantasy Island.")- Composer
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John Powell was born on 18 September 1963 in London, England, UK. He is a composer, known for How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014), Happy Feet (2006) and Shrek (2001). He was previously married to Melinda Lerner.- Music Department
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Dustin O'Halloran is an American pianist and composer with four acclaimed solo albums under his own name, and is a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Winner of a 2015 Emmy Award for his main title theme to Amazon's comedy drama "Transparent", he was also nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, and a Critics Choice Award for his score to 2016's "Lion", written in collaboration with Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka). O'Halloran's film career began when Sofia Coppola invited him to contribute to 2006's "Marie Antoinette", and since then he's worked on multiple films and TV shows, including Drake Doremus' Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner "Like Crazy" (2011), and Marc Turtletaub's "Puzzle" (2018), for whose closing song he collaborated with veteran Scandinavian chart-topper Ane Brun. In 2018 he scored George Tillman Jr.'s "The Hate U Give" and joined forces with Bryan Senti for Nick Murphy's six-part Sky TV series "Save Me". He and Bertelmann reconvened for the BBC's adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" (2019), for Netflix's "The Old Guard" (2020) starring Charlize Theron, and Francis Lee's "Ammonite" (2020) starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.
O'Halloran released his first EP "Sundoor" for renowned classical music label Deutsche Grammophon in 2019, with a new album in the works, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen, his ambient orchestral project with Adam Wiltzie, released their latest album, The Undivided Five, on Ninja Tune the same year. In addition, O'Halloran worked as a producer for Katy Perry's 'Into Me You See', from her 2017 album, Witness, and appears on Leonard Cohen's 2019 posthumous album, Thanks For The Dance. O'Halloran lives in Los Angeles and Reykjavík.- Composer
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Volker Bertelmann, also known as Hauschka, is an Academy Award-nominated composer, pianist and experimental musician.
In 2016, Bertelmann collaborated with Dustin O'Halloran on the score for Garth Davis' Lion, which was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for Best Original Score. Since then, he has gone on to score numerous film and TV projects, among which Baltasar Kormákur's Adrift (2018), HBO mini-series Gunpowder (2018) and Showtime's Emmy-nominated TV series Patrick Melrose. Bertelmann teamed up with O'Halloran again on the scores for The Art of Racing in the Rain (2019), based on the best-selling novel by Garth Stein, Ammonite (2020) and The Old Guard (2020).
Beyond his work as a film composer, Bertelmann has gained recognition as a recording artist through his compositions for the prepared piano. In 2018, he signed a record deal with Sony Masterworks and released his first record on the label in 2019.- Composer
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Daniel Hart is a composer and performer based in Los Angeles. Hart made his feature film debut in 2013 with the critically acclaimed Ain't Them Bodies Saints, which began his collaboration with filmmaker David Lowery. Hart has composed the music for all of Lowery's films, including Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story, Old Man and The Gun, and 2021's The Green Knight. Over the past decade, he has also scored multiple TV shows, from Fox's The Exorcist, to SMILF, to The Society. Hart has written music for This American Life, and composed the score for S Town, one of the most popular podcasts of all time.
Hart's musical career started on the road, as a hired gun for bands such as St. Vincent, Broken Social Scene, Other Lives, and The Polyphonic Spree. He continues to work in this field, having recorded strings for St. Vincent's 2021 album Daddy's Home, re-arranging songs for Anjimile's latest release Reunion, and writing new music for his own band Dark Rooms, which has released two albums, and toured extensively throughout the US and Europe over the past eight years.- Composer
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Will Butler was born on 6 October 1982 in The Woodlands, Texas, USA. He is an actor and composer, known for Love and Monsters (2020), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) and Boyhood (2014).- Composer
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Clinton Darryl Mansell is an English singer, musician and film composer known for his collaborations with Darren Aronofsky. He composed Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, Black Swan, The Wrestler, Noah, Ghost in the Shell, Peacemaker, Doom Patrol, Loving Vincent, Mass Effect 3, Titans, World Traveler, Smokin' Aces, Doom, The Hole, and Definitely, Maybe.- Composer
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Jon Brion was born on 11 December 1963 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, USA. He is a composer and actor, known for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Other Guys (2010) and Step Brothers (2008).- Music Department
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David Torn (and, aka "splattercell") is a composer, guitarist & producer of actual international stature, reknowned for his unique musical voice(s) spanning a broad range of idioms & styles. His groundbreaking compositionally textural work has had a material impact & influence upon both film scoring --- through his own scores, in addition to his creative contributions to the scores of Carter Burwell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Howard Shore, Mark Isham, and others' --- and upon contemporary electric, electro-acoustic & electronic music, in general.
Beyond the medium of film scoring, David's compositional, textural, production & guitaristic contributions have continued to grace the works of other musical artists-of-note as diverse as David Bowie, Jeff Beck, Sting, Mick Karn, David Sylvian, John Legend, Tori Amos, Tim Berne, Madonna, Meshell Ndegeocello, John Popper, Jan Garbarek, Jarboe, Manu Katché, Laurie Anderson, Kaki King, kd lang, Chocolate Genius, Don Cherry, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tony Levin, David Douglas, etc.
David was educated by Leonard Bernstein ("Music for Young Composers"), John Abercrombie, Pat Martino, Paul Weiss & Arthur Basile. He has been the recipient of many awards, including: The Cowboy Award for Best Score (Jackson Hole Film Festival, 2006), a Grammy (for Jeff Beck's recording, which David composed & mixed), a Bronze Axis Award (NZ), and 2 Readers' Poll Awards from Guitar Player Magazine, etc.
In 2006, David returned to recording for Manfred Eicher & ECM Records. David resides both in Los Angeles & NY.- Composer
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John Murphy is a British film composer from Liverpool. He began composing music scores for films in the early 1990s, working on several successful British movies, enjoying particular success with the soundtracks to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000).
Since 2000, Murphy has been based in Los Angeles. From here, he has worked with some of the industry's most respected and luminary filmmakers, including Danny Boyle, Stephen Frears and Michael Mann, and produced several prominent and diverse successes, including 28 Days Later, Miami Vice, Sunshine and 28 Weeks Later.- Composer
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Kensuke Ushio is known for A Silent Voice: The Movie (2016), Chainsaw Man (2022) and Boogiepop and Others (2019).- Music Department
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As one of the best known, awarded, and financially successful composers in US history, John Williams is as easy to recall as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein, illustrating why he is "America's composer" time and again. With a massive list of awards that includes over 52 Oscar nominations (five wins), twenty-odd Gold and Platinum Records, and a slew of Emmy (two wins), Golden Globe (three wins), Grammy (25 wins), National Board of Review (including a Career Achievement Award), Saturn (six wins), American Film Institute (including a Lifetime Achievement Award) and BAFTA (seven wins) citations, along with honorary doctorate degrees numbering in the teens, Williams is undoubtedly one of the most respected composers for Cinema. He's led countless national and international orchestras, most notably as the nineteenth conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980-1993, helming three Pops tours of the US and Japan during his tenure. He currently serves as the Pop's Conductor Laureate. Also to his credit is a parallel career as an author of serious, and some not-so-serious, concert works - performed by the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich, André Previn, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Leonard Slatkin, James Ingram, Dale Clevenger, and Joshua Bell. Of particular interests are his Essay for Strings, a jazzy Prelude & Fugue, the multimedia presentation American Journey (aka The Unfinished Journey (1999)), a Sinfonietta for Winds, a song cycle featuring poems by Rita Dove, concerti for flute, violin, clarinet, trumpet, tuba, cello, bassoon and horn, fanfares for the 1984, 1988 and 1996 Summer Olympics, the 2002 Winter Olympics, and a song co-written with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman for the Special Olympics! But such a list probably warrants a more detailed background...
Born in Flushing, New York on February 8, 1932, John Towner Williams discovered music almost immediately, due in no small measure to being the son of a percussionist for CBS Radio and the Raymond Scott Quintet. After moving to Los Angeles in 1948, the young pianist and leader of his own jazz band started experimenting with arranging tunes; at age 15, he determined he was going to become a concert pianist; at 19, he premiered his first original composition, a piano sonata.
He attended both UCLA and the Los Angeles City College, studying orchestration under MGM musical associate Robert Van Eps and being privately tutored by composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, until conducting for the first time during three years with the U.S. Air Force. His return to the states brought him to Julliard, where renowned piano pedagogue Madame Rosina Lhevinne helped Williams hone his performance skills. He played in jazz clubs to pay his way; still, she encouraged him to focus on composing. So it was back to L.A., with the future maestro ready to break into the Hollywood scene.
Williams found work with the Hollywood studios as a piano player, eventually accompanying such fare such as the TV series Peter Gunn (1958), South Pacific (1958), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as well as forming a surprising friendship with Bernard Herrmann. At age 24, "Johnny Williams" became a staff arranger at Columbia and then at 20th Century-Fox, orchestrating for Alfred Newman and Lionel Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, and other Golden Age notables. In the field of popular music, he performed and arranged for the likes of Vic Damone, Doris Day, and Mahalia Jackson... all while courting actress/singer Barbara Ruick, who became his wife until her death in 1974. John & Barbara had three children; their daughter is now a doctor, and their two sons, Joseph Williams and Mark Towner Williams, are rock musicians.
The orchestrating gigs led to serious composing jobs for television, notably Alcoa Premiere (1961), Checkmate (1960), Gilligan's Island (1964), Lost in Space (1965), Land of the Giants (1968), and his Emmy-winning scores for Heidi (1968) and Jane Eyre (1970). Daddy-O (1958) and Because They're Young (1960) brought his original music to the big theatres, but he was soon typecast doing comedies. His efforts in the genre helped guarantee his work on William Wyler's How to Steal a Million (1966), however, a major picture that immediately led to larger projects. Of course, his arrangements continued to garner attention, and he won his first Oscar for adapting Fiddler on the Roof (1971).
During the '70s, he was King of Disaster Scores with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974). His psychological score for Images (1972) remains one of the most innovative works in soundtrack history. But his Americana - particularly The Reivers (1969) - is what caught the ear of director Steven Spielberg, then preparing for his first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974). When Spielberg reunited with Williams on Jaws (1975), they established themselves as a blockbuster team, the composer gained his first Academy Award for Original Score, and Spielberg promptly recommended Williams to a friend, George Lucas. In 1977, John Williams re-popularized the epic cinema sound of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman and other composers from the Hollywood Golden Age: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) became the best selling score-only soundtrack of all time, and spawned countless musical imitators. For the next five years, though the music in Hollywood changed, John Williams wrote big, brassy scores for big, brassy films - The Fury (1978), Superman (1978), 1941 (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) ... An experiment during this period, Heartbeeps (1981), flopped. There was a long-term change of pace, nonetheless, as Williams fell in love with an interior designer and married once more.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) brought about his third Oscar, and The River (1984), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Accidental Tourist (1988) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) added variety to the 1980s, as he returned to television with work on Amazing Stories (1985) and themes for NBC, including NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt (1970). The '80s also brought the only exceptions to the composer's collaboration with Steven Spielberg - others scored both Spielberg's segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and The Color Purple (1985).
Intending to retire, the composer's output became sporadic during the 1990s, particularly after the exciting Jurassic Park (1993) and the masterful, Oscar-winning Schindler's List (1993). This lighter workload, coupled with a number of hilarious references on The Simpsons (1989) actually seemed to renew interest in his music. Two Home Alone films (1990, 1992), JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), Sleepers (1996), Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Angela's Ashes (1999), and a return to familiar territory with Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) recalled his creative diversity of the '70s.
In this millennium, the artist shows no interest in slowing down. His relationships with Spielberg and Lucas continue in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the remaining Star Wars prequels (2002, 2005), Minority Report (2002), Catch Me If You Can (2002), and a promised fourth Indiana Jones film. There is a more focused effort on concert works, as well, including a theme for the new Walt Disney Concert Hall and a rumored light opera. But one certain highlight is his musical magic for the world of Harry Potter (2001, 2002, 2004, etc.), which he also arranged into a concert suite geared toward teaching children about the symphony orchestra. His music remains on the whistling lips of people around the globe, in the concert halls, on the promenades, in album collections, sports arenas, and parades, and, this writer hopes, touching some place in ourselves. So keep those ears ready wherever you go, 'cause you will likely hear a bit of John Williams on your way.