pirates of the caribbean - Cannes International Film Festival

effects artists, composer Hans Zimmer and others to complete the film in a pressure-
cooker six months before its mid/late May 2011 openings around the world.
Zimmer had already given Captain Jack and the gallery of “Pirates of the Caribbean”
characters their distinctive musical sound in the three previous films, creating fullbodied
orchestral scores which managed to walk the tightrope between the stirringly
traditional in grand Hollywood tradition, and simultaneously innovative, imaginative and
adventurous.
“I love writing music and coming up with new themes,” he notes, having already created
memorable leitmotifs for the likes of Captain Jack, Barbossa, Will and Elizabeth and
Davy Jones in the previous films. “It gets trickier because the style was established very
quickly in the first one, and then suddenly you start falling into things and start
identifying the new characters in a musical way. Then it just starts rolling again, and you
begin getting fresh ideas.”
“You try to treat each film as an autonomous movie,” Zimmer continues, “but at the
same time there’s great fun in revisiting old friends, as it were. We now have Penélope
Cruz playing Angelica, who’s Spanish, so I felt that there could be some Latin influences
in the score for ‘On Stranger Tides.’ I’ve been a big fan of Mexican guitarists Rodrigo y
Gabriela for years now, and I asked them if they wanted to come and play with us.
We’ve been having a really great time with them being part of the musical world this
film gets to inhabit.”
For all of his years as a film music
composer, Zimmer, a keen student of
world music, has often brilliantly
interwoven ethnic sounds into many of
his scores, from African (“A World
Apart,” “The Power of One,” Disney’s
“The Lion King,” Jerry Bruckheimer’s
“Black Hawk Down”) to Asian (“Black
Rain,” “The Last Samurai,” “Kung Fu
Panda”) and beyond. But as one who started his career as a rock musician in The
Buggles, Zimmer has maintained his links to that world. “I always saw ‘Pirates’ as rock
and roll scores,” notes the composer, “because pirates were sort of the rock and rollers
of the past. Rodrigo y Gabriela are basically flamenco guitarists, but they come from
metal music and very much inhabit the rock and roll world as well. So it was a perfect fit
between us and them.”
“It’s very exciting because it’s the first official invitation for us to collaborate with a
great composer for a film,” says the duo’s Gabriela. “That’s very different from what we
usually do. All of a sudden, we are here building all this music from scratch. It’s very
challenging and very inspiring to work on.”
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