Hans Zimmer Talks the Secrecy of The Dark Knight Rises

"You have to see [a sequel] as an autonomous movie. Otherwise you will end up with all the things that are the worst thing about a sequel. before Christopher Nolan started shooting, I had an idea. I went to the Warner [Bros.'] music department and I said, 'Have I earned the right yet to book the biggest, craziest orchestra for two days, and try this experiment for The Dark Knight Rises?' And if it goes wrong, if I don't like it or if Christopher Nolan doesn't like it, we can just pretend these two days never happened.

I had an idea of a different way of writing music, or a different way of getting an orchestra to perform music as well. And basically it worked out, and snippets of it are starting to appear in the trailer. And really I have 25 minutes of very, very radical, very different stuff. There were two great parts. One was Christopher Nolan came to the [recording] sessions and really embraced what I was doing and really liked what I was doing. But, in a peculiar way, the greater part was that the musicians had never worked in this way before, and really loved it. And months later, when I was doing the Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows sessions, the musicians were still talking about those two days, even though they'd done all this other stuff in the meantime. So I know I'm onto something. Really my enemy right now is time, because I have so many ideas."

"There's always this thing [that people say], 'Oh, Chris is so secretive.' Well, I think that there are two elements to this. One is, I think, to be able to do really good work, you have to have the chance to fail in privacy. And if everybody's watching you on the Internet, I think it stifles creativity. And I think The Dark Knight is the perfect example of this idea. Everybody knew we were making a Batman movie. But until it came out they didn't know it was going to be that sort of a Batman movie.

And isn't that what we're supposed to do? We're supposed to go and surprise you. And part of the experience has to be a surprise. It feels a little bit like we're working very hard at protecting part of what is great about movies - the surprise. Because it seems like the world doesn't want you to do that anymore. They want to know everything; they want to know about the stars and [this and that] immediately. And it's not important to us. To us, really, the thing is the writing and the script and the ideas and the journey, and making it into something really good."

"It seemed like a good idea as part of the score to have this chant. So I thought, 'How am I going to get hundreds of thousands of people to do this?' So we set up a website in Germany that could sort of handle it. And it sounds pretty amazing."