Hans Zimmer Says ‘The Fan’ Is His Most Underrated Score, Even if It ‘Failed’ as a Film

Famed composer Hans Zimmer is reflecting on the best (and worst) of his career.

Zimmer told Vulture while promoting Steve McQueen’s”Blitz” that he considers Tony Scott’s “The Fan” to be his most “underrated” work. Zimmer scored the 1996 sports thriller that starred Robert De Niro as an obsessed baseball lover. Wesley Snipes co-starred.

“I’ve done a lot of movies that failed, ‘The Fan’ being one example,” Zimmer said. “Nobody went to see the movie, and the score is unflinchingly dissonant. There’s a nihilistic poem that I read through a vocoder and you cannot understand the words, but it’s really evil. Don’t-try-this-at-home type of music.”

The “Dune” composer even added that he wants to incorporate the score from “The Fan” into his next tour.

“I can get into that mode where everything I’ve ever done is terrible, or not terrible, but I haven’t actually written the piece that I feel I’m capable of doing,” he continued. “I remember I played something for Gore Verbinski, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s good if you want serviceable and ordinary.’ That was on ‘Rango.’ Serviceable and ordinary went out of the window at that moment, and it became something completely different and impossible to do. People nearly died on it. You’d have to listen to it because it’s very hard to describe psychedelic country-western rock and roll with a heavy disco beat.”

When asked what franchise Zimmer wishes he could score, the musician quipped, “There’s never enough pornography.”

He clarified, “No, there’s very little left for me to score. No, there’s very little left for me to score. I remember working on a film, and the scene was Paris by night. It’s raining, and a girl has just broken up with her boyfriend, and she’s walking along the Champs-Élysées and she’s crying. The director is starting to explain the scene to me, and he’s a friend, but he spends a long time explaining the scene, and I finally have to say to him, ‘Do you know how often I’ve written this scene already?’.”

Zimmer, whose career spans over 40 years, told IndieWire that he has no plans to retire.

“Are you kidding me? I’ve played all my life. Why would I stop playing?” he said. “Why would I stop living a playful life? Why would I stop trying to, you know, invent things? Why would I? I mean, there are good reasons because, as soon as I sit down and there is the blank page and I’m supposed to write something, I’m like ‘Oh my god, I have no idea how to do this.’ After two weeks I want to phone the director and give him a number of a composer who can, but somehow this dichotomy of wanting to do something new, it’s the truth.”