Dark Knight Composers Sound Out

Los Angeles-based NPR station host, KCRW’s Jason Bentley speaks with composers of the latest Batman movie, Dark Knight. Collaborators and industry giants Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard describe their creative process in writing the score to suit one of Hollywood’s most memorable characters of the year – one instance referred to in a video posted on Hans Zimmer’s website as “razor blades on piano wire”.

An excerpt:

Jason Bentley: We’re here to talk about a little film called the Dark Knight…does this film give you a unique opportunity, musically, that might be different from your prior film work?

Hans Zimmer: Well, I think being able to set up and go — I can be provocative. I can be completely uncompromising. I can basically go back to my roots and, let me be specific about this, when you’re a kid starting out and making music, you make music for the great pleasure of it and you don’t censor yourself. You don’t try to write pretty. You write what’s in you and I think in a funny way this really allowed us to do this and to be very experimental and not hold back and scare the children with it.

James Newton Howard: … One of the interesting things that has happened is that after Batman Begins, which was so successful for Hans and I, I think, because we were either going to succeed or not speak to each other any more and we ended up becoming better friends that we were — now the combination of the two of us has become the voice of the score in a way. So it’s no longer any kind of a liability. I think if Hans were to do the whole score or I were to do the whole score, it wouldn’t be the same.

Read the entire transcript at KCRW.

[via slashfilm]