Ook al heeft Hans Zimmer nog geen handtekening gezet om de muziek te verzorgen in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, er staat wel al een ontmoeting gepland tussen de twee. NBC San Diego spak met Zimmer en deze wist te vertellen dat Nolan volgende week bij hem langs zal komen om het over Batman te gaan hebben.

“We start early. I know he’s puttering around with ideas, and we sort of sneak up on things.”

Vervolgens beschrijft Zimmer zijn werkrelatie met Nolan, die niet zozeer gebaseerd is op muziek, maar meer op verhaal en de vrijheid die de regisseur hem geeft.

Working with Chris, he gives me all the freedom in the world and encourages me to go and be daring and unusual and crazy and all those sorts of things and be able to be the sort of emotional center of the film. It’s very give and take. I’ll start long before he starts shooting. Our conversations start there and it goes both ways: we just have conversations about the movie and less about what the music has to do, and it really comes out of that, whereby I felt that there was a real emotional core to be had and that that was something that the music had to do and I hung on that for dear life.

Vervolgens wordt Zimmer gevraagd of de toekomstige componist van Zack Snyder’s Superman het klassieke deuntje van John Williams moet hergebruiken.

It’s a hard one, but I followed one of the most iconic things on ‘Batman’ with Chris as well, and it’s the same thing. You are allowed to reinvent, but you have to try to be as good or at least as iconic and it has to resonate and it has to become a part of the zeitgeist. That’s the job. On ‘Gladiator’ I remember people always talking about ‘Spartacus’ and I kept telling them, ‘When you saw ‘Spartacus’ and how it affected it you, that’s how I want a modern audience to be affected by what we do now.’ So I think ultimately you’re supposed to reinvent.

The Dark Knight Rises en Superman staat beiden gepland voor de zomer van 2012.