Hans Zimmer

“With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.”

“When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.”

“'The Graduate' must be the best use of songs ever in a movie; it adds a layer to the movie you wouldn't ever get from a score.”

“Here's something I probably shouldn't be saying: I never listen to my soundtrack albums because I can't stand it. It's just stereo. When I write, I write in surround. My life is in surround.”

“I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.”

“If something happened where I couldn't write music anymore, it would kill me. It's not just a job. It's not just a hobby. It's why I get up in the morning.”

“The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.”

“If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only way to move things forward.”

“If somebody tells you there's a rule, break it.”

“Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.”

“You have to realize I like doing big movies that appear on a big screen. So the visuals and the audio have to be of a certain quality before I start to get excited about the thing.”

“If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only thing to move things forward.”