Hans Zimmer

“Or like that? Right, there we are. Battle of Algiers. Hugely influential film. Ennio Morricone’s first score. But that’s sort of beside the point because a film so incredibly good and so incredibly… Oh, yes, the… the true… freedom fighters are actually playing their parts in it. Whoever’s left alive, as it were. But it’s an extraordinary film.”

“Oh, God, I went for all the heavy ones, didn’t I? Night and Fog. The film that, to me, in its most unflinching way describes the Third Reich, the Holocaust and the concentration camps. So you have to have strong nerves to go and watch this one.”

“I think I need to get up to the step stool. Here we are. Favorite film my whole life long. Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky. It’s inexplicably beautiful. It’s inexplicably profound. It’s shot in 65mm black and white, except for… But I won’t give it away. And… you have to be patient with it. I mean, look, how many films do you know where your main protagonist takes a vow of silence for a whole act? But it’s… it’s such an incredible, incredibly well-crafted and well-thought-out film which just deals with everything, everything that life is about somehow.”

“And, just to counter it, we’re going to go for Sid & Nancy. The history of that time, and I was very much part of that time and I loved that time, and I believe my friend Eric Fellner produced it. And… it’s, of course, the great Gary Oldman.”

“Now, I always… I always wonder what the best script written is, the best comedy. And if it’s not Lubitsch with Ninotchka, I go to His Girl Friday. Do you want to have a good time? His Girl Friday will show you a good time like you’ve never had before.”

“The great Les Blank, of course. This is a journey through different lives, which I love because we get so isolated these days, and especially because we’re sitting behind our little phones and our iPads and our televisions, etc. But sometimes there’s something you can put on that just rips right through the screen and takes you outside and takes you into the world, and there’s something more to see, to explore, something more to see than you ever imagined. So.”

“Story goes something like that: Nic Roeg was the second-unit cameraman on Lawrence of Arabia and the studio would get all these fantastic reports back about how beautiful everything looked. And Freddie Young, who was the main cameraman, started getting a little bit jealous and so Nic got fired. Nic was seriously down. He teamed up with his partner, Donald Cammell, and they made this movie about the London East End. But it’s really a movie about the ’60s. It’s really, you know… Mick Jagger and James Fox, and – I’m saying this for myself – a very big Moog synthesizer, and lots of orgies. I think people didn’t quite know what to make of it, in the best possible way. And I’m not sure if even now we know what to make of it. It’s a gangster movie with philosophy. So, what can I say? And of course it’s incredibly, immaculately shot. It was Tony Scott and my favorite film. We would talk about it all the time. So. Nic was the first director who taught me anything. And Tony, I suppose, was another one who taught me a lot. So there is that as well, you know. And so, for Tony and Nic, I’ll take Performance.”

“House. Know nothing about it other than that I sure would love the one sheet. Actually I had heard of it. But the ladies here have highly recommended it to me, which probably means they’re trying to go and pour acid into my brain and make my head explode or something like that, or turn me into a real composer. I don’t know what it is, but I’m pretty sure there’s a trick behind this whole thing. So if this is the last you see of me, I wish you all a good life because mine’s over.”

“I found another one. I found a true treasure. David Lean Directs Noël Coward. In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, and Brief Encounter. That’s going to be a really good weekend. God, my tastes are all over the place, aren’t they? But I think that’s what movies are supposed to sort of do to you. You know, you’re supposed to get excited about life.”