After working with the Buggles, he started to work for the Italian group Krisma, a new wave band formed in 1976 with Maurizio Arcieri and Christina Moser. Zimmer can be seen briefly in the Buggles' music video for the 1979 song " Video Killed the Radio Star". He worked with the Buggles, a new wave band formed in London in 1977 with Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley. Zimmer began his career playing keyboards and synthesizers in the 1970s, with the band Krakatoa. So I grew up modifying the piano, shall we say, which made my mother gasp in horror, and my father would think it was fantastic when I would attach chainsaws and stuff like that to the piano because he thought it was an evolution in technology." In an interview with the German television station ZDF in 2006, he commented: "My father died when I was just a child, and I escaped somehow into the music and music has been my best friend." Career 1977–1988 In an interview with Mashable in February 2013, he said of his parents: "My mother was very musical, basically a musician and my father was an engineer and an inventor. In a speech at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, Zimmer stated that he is Jewish, and talked about his mother surviving World War II thanks to her escape from Germany to England in 1939. During his childhood, he was strongly influenced by the film scores of Ennio Morricone and has cited Once Upon a Time in the West as the score that inspired him to become a film composer. He moved to London as a teenager, where he attended Hurtwood House school. And I'm a child of the 20th century computers came in very handy." Zimmer attended the Ecole D'Humanité, an international boarding school in Canton Bern, Switzerland. In one of his Reddit AMAs, he said: "My formal training was two weeks of piano lessons. As a young child, he lived in Königstein-Falkenstein, where he played the piano at home but had piano lessons only briefly, as he disliked the discipline of formal lessons.
Zimmer was born in Frankfurt, West Germany. Zimmer has collaborated on multiple projects with directors including Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Gore Verbinski, Michael Bay, Guy Ritchie and Christopher Nolan.
His studio in Santa Monica, California has an extensive range of computer equipment and keyboards, allowing demo versions of film scores to be created quickly. He is the head of the film music division at DreamWorks studios and works with other composers through the company that he founded, Remote Control Productions, formerly known as Media Ventures.
Zimmer spent the early part of his career in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. He was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by The Daily Telegraph. He has received four Grammy Awards, three Classical BRIT Awards, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award. His works include The Lion King (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1995), Crimson Tide, Gladiator, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune. Since the 1980s, Zimmer has composed music for over 150 films. His works are notable for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements. Hans Florian Zimmer ( German pronunciation: ( listen) born 12 September 1957) is a German film score composer and record producer.