Entering what he described as “the Vatican of film,” composer Hans Zimmer decided to take a more solemn approach to his selections in the Criterion Closet. Pouring over the options, the Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve collaborator chose to recognize a fair amount of dark choices, starting with war film “The Battle of Algiers,” then moving on to Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog.”
“Oh, God, I went for all the heavy ones, didn’t I?” Zimmer said. “‘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.”
Another bleak pick, Zimmer went on to grab Andrei Tarkovsky’s biographical drama “Andrei Rublev,” which uses the story of the 15th century artist to craft an intricate portrait of medieval Russia.
“Favorite film my whole life long. ‘Andrei Rublev,’ Tarkovsky,” said Zimmer. “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?”
Later, Zimmer went into detail about how Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s 1960s-set crime drama “Performance” came to be. The film stars James Fox as a London gangster who’s forced to hide out at the house of an isolated rock star played by Mick Jagger.
“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,” Zimmer said. “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.”
Watch Zimmer’s entire visit to the Criterion Closet below.
