All language subtitles for Hans Zimmer Live in Prague

Hello, Prague.

This is sort of a little bit of my life story here.

Because the reason I start the way I start,

with my friend Richard Harvey, here on clarinet.

And the amazing Nick Glennie-Smith on...

...accordion, OK.

Thirty five years ago or maybe a little more,

just after leaving school, I met these two,

and we started making music then,

and we're still making music and...

Actually I'm not sure if it's getting any better,

but the friendship is still there and the friendship is the important part.

So much of my life and so much of my music is all about,

you know, friendships you've made.

So let's treat this like a little dinner party,

just you and me, and we're just here, we're just having a chat,

and we're just gonna play you a bit of music.

The next thing we're gonna do is actually from a friend

that I truly seriously miss, the late great Tony Scott.

And tonight, with the amazing Czech National Choir,

we're gonna do Crimson Tide.

So yes, it wasn't all Crimson Tide.

There was a little Angels and Demons.

And tonight, I really want to make this about

the musicians that I work with.

And there's no one greater...

One of the truly, if not. . .
Oh yeah, come on.

My friend Satnam Ramgotra,

the most amazing drummer I have ever had the honour...

...to ride on a bus with.

And the little devil over there is Lucy,

and she's got an angel on her shoulder named Holly.

So from one Scott brother to another Scott brother.

I'm a musician which means partly

I'm unemployable for a real job.

I'm up at night and I sleep during the day.

Or I have a 9 to 5 job which starts at 9 in the evening

and goes until 5 in the morning or something like that.

So, when somebody phones me at 9 o'clock in the morning,

I'm very, very vulnerable, and they know it.

So, Ridley Scott when he phoned me at 9 in the morning

and said to me, "Hans, do you want to do a Gladiator movie?"

I just started laughing.

Because to me a gladiator movie was men in skirts and sandals

and it was basically, we were going to do a comedy.

And he said, "It's not really like that."

And he started telling me the story,

and as he was telling me the story

I could see what amazing vision he had.

And we were really gonna do a gladiator movie

that was going to be great.

We finished talking after about an hour and I got off the phone,

and my wife's looking at me and she's going,

"What did you and Ridley talk about?"

By this point I was really excited and I said to her,

"You won't believe it but we're gonna do a gladiator movie."

And she just paused, and she looked at me and went,

"Oh, you boys."

The weird thing is that she was absolutely right.

And I told Ridley about this

and we started really questioning the idea

that we had no female soul in this movie.

We needed to get a muse.

We were talking about this in the cutting room

and Pietro Scalia our editor, he's got like three CDs,

I'm not kidding, he had three CDs on his shelf.

One of them was Dead can Dance, and he picked it up and he goes,

"What about Lisa Gerrard?"

To make the story very short, I phoned Lisa in Australia.

She said she'll come and she was going to come for three days.

And the three days turned into three months,

and the three months...

God, hang on, this was sixteen years ago.

So, we're still friends, you know.

These little movies make these little families and you get to meet really interesting people through music.

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen,

Czarina Russell is going to do Gladiator for us.

And Mike Einziger from the band Incubus.

Guthrie Govan.

Oh, yeah, and Steve Mazzaro.

In the middle of Gladiator we've got this guitar concerto,

this crooked guitar concerto going on.

It's an experiment.

It will either work or it won't work.

But ladies and gentlemen let me not bore you any longer.

Because in the immortal words of Gladiator,

you will not be entertained.

Here we go, Gladiator.

Ladies and gentlemen, Czarina Russell.

All right, so from Rome to Paris,

Da Vinci Code.

It wasn't really about the novel that inspired me,

the thing that really inspired me was Paris.

But what really inspired me there

was when we were shooting at the Louvre,

and then next to the Louvre is this beautiful pyramid,

this very provocative modern pyramid built by I. M. Pei.

And that really gave me the idea of how I wanted to attack the whole thing.

Then I wrote this tune for Ron Howard called Chevaliers de Sangreal.

I actually wrote it very quickly,

I just wouldn't play it to him forever.

Eventually he was starting to get very nervous

and I played it to him, and he loved it,

and it became really our main theme for The Da Vinci Code.

And tonight we're gonna go and do it in sort of the version that it was originally thought of,

where we have an ancient...

No, no, you're not ancient, your instrument is ancient.

The very young Rusanda Panfili is going to be playing

her old violin, while we do a sort of electronic thing,

so you get the...

I love it when two cultures sort of collide and then become something really interesting.

I think every sentence is getting me more into trouble here, right?

OK, I'll just shut up.
Here is Da Vinci Code.

Buyi she has such an amazing voice, she moves me.

She moves you.

But...

- From Soweto to Prague.
- To Prague.

Every night we play this game,

it was a long time ago when I first met Lebo in Los Angeles.

He was a refugee from South Africa.

Things were bad in South Africa.
So things have changed.

So every night I just like to remind both, him and me,

from Soweto to Prague.

It's been a journey, it's been a journey.

Thank you.

You could go to see the play and you see an actor do his part,

you see the movie and you hear his voice,

but this, ladies and gentlemen, this is the true Lion King.

And one thing I always have to add,

Lion King was written for my daughter Zoe,

who's somewhere here in the audience.

I want to say it a lot during the day,

but it's sort of nice to say it in front of ten thousand people.

Zoe Zimmer, I love you from the bottom of my heart.

Thank you.

Meanwhile, just cast your eye over there.

In the string section is young Tina Guo.

Not quite the same but all the way from China to Prague,

but it's not quite the same story.

Everybody works so hard,

but I'm always astonished at her playing.

So, this very trivial piece she is going to perform as a cello concerto tonight,

and I'm honoured for you to be playing this, thank you Tina.

Now you know, that piece is only in there,

so that I get to play the timps and make a lot of noise,

because everybody wants to play the timps.

But the true heroes of this piece are over there.

Young Nathan Stornetta, from Switzerland.

And I just have to take a moment to tell you about the guy next to him.

That is Gary Kettel, he is a true legend.

He's played on more film scores than anybody else,

for John Williams, for John Barry.

I mean, are there any other Johns left?

Truly, I mean, this man is amazing.

I'll go and play a little piano.

Young Yolanda Charles.

The beauty's on duty.
Thank you so much.

You are so wicked.

Thank you very much.

That was a piece from a movie called The Thin Red Line.

And I know Johnny Marr really likes this piece,

and that's why it's in the set.

Because like that, I get to have my friend Johnny come out.

Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Marr.

But it doesn't just end there.

So Johnny, Andrew Kawczynski, Steve Mazzaro,

Mike and Ann Marie,

and of course Satnam, would we go anywhere without Satnam?

We sort of formed a band with Pharrell a while back to do

a superhero movie, Spider-Man.

So we all wrote this next piece,

this is truly the band at its finest.

And of course what would we write if not a clarinet concerto

in a very classical way?

So this next piece is called Electro.

The.

Dark.

Knight.

Let me tell you one last story,

about twelve years ago, maybe thirteen,

Chris Nolan phoned me and asked me if I wanted to do a Batman movie.

Of course I wanted to do a Batman movie,

and more than that I wanted to work with Chris Nolan.

But I had a problem,

I didn't know how to be Batman and split my personality and become the suave and elegant Bruce Wayne.

So Chris suggested that I call my friend James Newton Howard,

who's one of the most brilliant, elegant and wonderful composers.

And off we went to London with our friend Mel Wesson.

The four of us together came up with Batman Begins,

we never thought about a sequel or anything like this.

A few years went by and one day Chris turned up at my studio,

and he started telling me the story of the Joker.

And he told me a story of anarchy,

he told me a story of a punk attitude to music and to acting.

And I said to him, "Who's going to be the actor in this,

who's going to play this Joker?"

And he said to me, "Heath Ledger."

And Heath gave this incredible performance,

totally fearless, totally on the edge, totally out there.

Every day, when we saw it daily, we were just like, "Amazing."

Just before he finished the movie,

we found out that our Heath had died.

And I thought I should tone the music down,

I thought it was all too much and I suddenly realised that the only way to really show respect to this performance,

to give respect to the man, was to keep the edges in it.

The razor blades, the steel, the broken glass.

And a few years went by and Chris said,

"Come on, we've got to finish the trilogy.

We owe it to ourselves."

And so, Dark Knight Rises came about.

Somehow we found the playfulness again,

the experimentation, all that stuff was all back.

We did the movie, we finished it,

we went to New York, we had an amazing premier.

The next morning we got on a plane

and we arrived at dawn in London

and I went to my apartment.

And a journalist was on the phone and he asked me

what I felt about the mass shooting while they were showing our movie,

in the small town in Colorado called Aurora?

I hadn't heard of it and I said, "Devastated."

The first word that popped into my head.

And I realised everybody was going to use that word,

and I don't use words.

Words aren't the way I express myself.

All day I was thinking about the victims and their families,

and the loneliness they must have experienced.

So that night I phoned the choir and I said,

"Can we do something? Can we do a piece of music with no words,

that should feel like we're stretching our arms out

all the way across the Atlantic, for the small town in Colorado?"

And let them not feel alone any more,

let them know we're thinking of them,

let them know we're feeling for their hearts.

And the world hasn't gotten any better, and tonight we're here in Prague.

And we're stretching our arms out,

and we're playing and singing from our hearts for you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Aurora.