In an alternate universe, I am seated in the front row at Qudos Bank Arena, tears balancing on the brink, a friend beside me clutching their chest as Hans Zimmer’s scores bloom and detonate like emotional landmines. In that world, I made it through the ticket queue. I did not spend hours refreshing tabs, only to be greeted by the last available seat tied to some Diamond-Encrusted-Sell-A-Kidney VIP package priced at $899 — a figure I hope included lifetime rights to the Interstellar soundtrack and co-ownership of a small private island somewhere off the coast.
But I don’t live in that universe. In this one, I managed the next best thing and pulled over a trench coat and light-washed jeans, and laced white sneakers untouched by the streets of Newtown. A city dipping into its late-autumn hush, the sky was split between golden reluctance and cold breath, and I walked beneath it naïve and wide-eyed, a swing in my step and confident stride — skipping into Dendy Cinemas on a Saturday afternoon with a heart I could have guarded. Instead, I opened it up for Zimmer to fill it with love and then break it all over again, using nothing but a few notes from my childhood and the disarming weight of an 18-piece orchestra.
My connection to Zimmer is forever entangled in celluloid, caught somewhere between the light and the flicker where music doesn’t follow meaning, but forges it. Inception, The Lion King, Interstellar, Pirates of the Caribbean, Gladiator. Sometimes it charges ahead of the frame, dragging emotion behind it like a body too heavy to carry. Sometimes it stays low, just beneath the dialogue, pulsating those emotions and yet remaining impossibly quiet.
The concert-film moves through its own landscape: a golden-lit arena in Dubai, a rooftop pulled out of a dream, a stage carved into the open desert. These opulent performances are interspersed with intimate conversations Zimmer has sitting across from his fellow creatives and the artists he has made music with over the years. The chats are strikingly unguarded, with no performance to their praise and what comes off as friends hanging out, speaking with real warmth and admiration about someone they clearly hold in the highest regard.
He shares one of the first conversations in the lounge with Billie Eilish and Finneas. He had worked with them on ‘No Time To Die’, which later won Best Original Song at the Oscars in 2022. Finneas thanks him, sharing that the experience gave them the bones they needed to score Greta Gerwig’s Barbie a year later. That song won the Oscar in 2024. Eilish looks over at Zimmer and says, “You were our whole childhood,” referring to Pirates of the Caribbean. Later, Jerry Bruckheimer appears and mentions, offhand, that Zimmer wrote the Pirates theme in a single night. It sounds apocryphal. But then again, so does most of Zimmer’s career — until you hear it, and realise of course he did.
Following a deeply moving arrangement on Interstellar (though, and I say this with great confusion, ‘Cornfield Chase’ was inexplicably missing), we enter perhaps the most affecting part of the concert-film. Zimmer sits with Zendaya and gets vulnerable. She tells him how she played Interstellar on long car rides back home, windows down, her family humming along to the score with the wind blowing into their faces. Then she asks him the most important question anyone can ask a composer: where does your heart lie in the music?
“The music is always personal,” Zimmer answers. Regarding The Lion King, he shares that he never wanted to score a “silly cartoon”, referring to his general dislike for Broadway musicals. Then he realised, while working on the film, that he had never grieved his own father — who passed away when he was six. That same year, his daughter turned six. And for the first time, he found an excuse to take his daughter to a film premiere. A story about a boy who loses his father and still tries to face the world. “The Lion King,” he tells Zendaya, “is a reliquary to my father.”
The Lion King was my favourite moment of the entire set. For 13 minutes, Zimmer and his heavenly orchestra took me back to my childhood. That iconic opening cry. The sun rising over an animated savannah that didn’t feel drawn so much as remembered. The xylophone textures, the percussive heartbeat, the dry brush of melodic rhythm — it was like I was right there, threaded into the tall grasses I ran through as a little kid, the magical heat of an evening where the African sunset stretched endlessly into a pink and orange sky, and I stood so small beneath it all.
I suddenly realised how many of these scores are about parenthood. About love that moves forward even when it can’t look back. About trying to hold someone close without holding them back. Zimmer’s music returns, again and again, to that impossible space between attachment and departure. What does it mean to be a good parent? What does it mean to be a child who loses and still tries to love? What does it mean to leave and still hope to return?
Interstellar is, of course, about time, gravity, and the death of planets. But at its centre is a father trying to return to his daughter, simply wanting to see her again. Nolan gave Zimmer no script, only the heart: a single page, a father and daughter. And from that, Zimmer built the score. You can hear it in the drawn-out organs, in the restrained crescendo, in the silence between the notes where the yearning sits.
The final set of the concert-film is Inception. Another father. Another chase. Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, trying to claw his way back to his children’s faces — blurred by time, by guilt, by the layers of a dream that can’t quite be undone. Zimmer’s final track, ‘Time’, begins on some heartbroken notes on an untuned keyboard, that swell into full orchestral grandeur.
In those final notes, Zimmer gives no answers. Just a possibility: that maybe music can carry us back to the people we used to be. Or at the very least, hold the door open.
