Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer (born 1957 in Frankfurt, Germany) is among the most influential film composers alive. Largely self-taught, he fused synthesizers with orchestral writing across more than 150 scores — Rain Man, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Inception, Interstellar — winning Academy Awards for The Lion King (1995) and Dune (2022). His career was built on embracing new music technology earlier than almost anyone in Hollywood.

The silent album

In February 2025, Zimmer was credited alongside more than 1,000 artists — including Kate Bush — on “Is This What We Want?”, a protest album organized by Ed Newton-Rex consisting of recordings of empty studios. Its twelve track titles spell out a single sentence: “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies,” aimed at a UK proposal to let AI developers train on copyrighted work unless creators opt out. Profits went to the charity Help Musicians.

Zimmer’s opposition is pointed but not fearful — the Wall Street Journal’s podcast episode about him was literally titled “Hans Zimmer Isn’t Scared of AI.” Asked at WSJ Tech Live in October 2024 about his music being ingested into AI models without permission, he said that rather than calling up the lawyers, he’d rather sit down and write another piece of music. The market seems to agree: MIT Technology Review reported in 2023 that director Gareth Edwards tried an AI-generated Zimmer-style score for The Creator — and ended up hiring the real Zimmer.