Hans Zimmer stepped away from composing for superhero movies when he was done with Batman v Superman, and a new interview with Inverse reveals the reason for his decision: He preferred Christian Bale’s Batman.
Zimmer is no stranger to composing movies; he’s been doing it for over three decades. But when trying to compose the score for Batman v. Superman, he couldn’t quite connect with Ben Affleck’s interpretation of the Dark Knight, which stunted the development of the movie for months.
“I spent months trying to come up with something for Ben,” Zimmer said. “The Batman that I know and the one I learned is the one that Christian did, and Ben plays it differently. And I can’t quite shake that off. For me, the Christian Bale character was always completely unresolved. It was always about that moment at the beginning of the first movie, where he sees his parents getting killed. It was basically arrested development. The Ben character is more middle-aged, he seems to be grumpy as hell but I didn’t feel the pain that I felt in Christian’s performance. And it was that pain that made be interested.”
The music version of writer’s block for Zimmer was such a struggle, Junkie XL was brought on by the studio to help complete the score.
When creating a score for a trilogy that is as iconic as The Dark Knight, it seems like a tall task to shift gears and start brand new. That’s what Hans Zimmer had to do and it ended up being really challenging leaving his preexisting bias for Christian Bale behind.
The movie’s crew is still a fan of the material
Zimmer went on to say that he felt like he was betraying Christian Bale while trying to compose a score for Ben Affleck’s Batman. Amidst the bloated budgets and growing interconnected universes, it’s easy to forget that the people involved in these movies get really attached to the characters. Just like how ’80s kids who felt like Michael Keaton was their Batman after the character was rebooted, Christian Bale is Hans Zimmer’s Batman. Cue the sad Affleck memes.