Composers

German-born composer Hans Zimmer is recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents. He featured in the music video for The Buggles' single "Video Killed the Radio Star", which became a worldwide hit and helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video to be aired on MTV (August 1, 1981).

Hans Florian Zimmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, then in West Germany, the son of Brigitte (Weil) and Hans Joachim Zimmer. He entered the world of film music in London during a long collaboration with famed composer and mentor Stanley Myers, which included the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). He soon began work on several successful solo projects, including the critically acclaimed A World Apart, and during these years Zimmer pioneered the use of combining old and new musical technologies. Today, this work has earned him the reputation of being the father of integrating the electronic musical world with traditional orchestral arrangements.

A turning point in Zimmer's career came in 1988 when he was asked to score Rain Man for director Barry Levinson. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture of the Year and earned Zimmer his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Score. The next year, Zimmer composed the score for another Best Picture Oscar recipient, Driving Miss Daisy (1989), starring Jessica Tandy, and Morgan Freeman.

Having already scored two Best Picture winners, in the early 1990s, Zimmer cemented his position as a preeminent talent with the award-winning score for The Lion King (1994). The soundtrack has sold over 15 million copies to date and earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, an American Music Award, a Tony, and two Grammy Awards. In total, Zimmer's work has been nominated for 7 Golden Globes, 7 Grammys and seven Oscars for Rain Man (1988), Gladiator (2000), The Lion King (1994), As Good as It Gets (1997), The The Preacher's Wife (1996), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Prince of Egypt (1998), and The Last Samurai (2003).

With his career in full swing, Zimmer was anxious to replicate the mentoring experience he had benefited from under Stanley Myers' guidance. With state-of-the-art technology and a supportive creative environment, Zimmer was able to offer film-scoring opportunities to young composers at his Santa Monica-based musical "think tank." This approach helped launch the careers of such notable composers as Mark Mancina, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, Nick Glennie-Smith, and Klaus Badelt.

In 2000, Zimmer scored the music for Gladiator (2000), for which he received an Oscar nomination, in addition to Golden Globe and Broadcast Film Critics Awards for his epic score. It sold more than three million copies worldwide and spawned a second album Gladiator: More Music From The Motion Picture, released on the Universal Classics/Decca label. Zimmer's other scores that year included Mission: Impossible II (2000), The Road to El Dorado (2000), and An Everlasting Piece (2000), directed by Barry Levinson.

Some of his other impressive scores include Pearl Harbor (2001), The Ring (2002), four films directed by Ridley Scott; Matchstick Men (2003), Hannibal (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), and Thelma & Louise (1991), Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), and A League of Their Own (1992), Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), Tears of the Sun (2003), Ron Howard's Backdraft (1991), Days of Thunder (1990), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), and the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) for which he also co-wrote four of the songs with Bryan Adams, including the Golden Globe nominated Here I Am.

At the 27th annual Flanders International Film Festival, Zimmer performed live for the first time in concert with a 100-piece orchestra and a 100-voice choir. Choosing selections from his impressive body of work, Zimmer performed newly orchestrated concert versions of Gladiator, Mission: Impossible II (2000), Rain Man (1988), The Lion King (1994), and The Thin Red Line (1998). The concert was recorded by Decca and released as a concert album entitled "The Wings Of A Film: The Music Of Hans Zimmer."

In 2003, Zimmer completed his 100th film score for the film The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, for which he received both a Golden Globe and a Broadcast Film Critics nomination. Zimmer then scored Nancy Meyers' comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003), the animated Dreamworks film, Shark Tale (2004) (featuring voices of Will Smith, Renée Zellweger, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese), and Jim Brooks' Spanglish (2004) starring Adam Sandler and Téa Leoni (for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination). His 2005 projects include Paramount's The Weather Man (2005) starring Nicolas Cage, Dreamworks' Madagascar (2005), and the Warner Bros. summer release, Batman Begins (2005).

Zimmer's additional honors and awards include the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in Film Composition from the National Board of Review, and the Frederick Loewe Award in 2003 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. He has also received ASCAP's Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement. Hans and his wife live in Los Angeles and he is the father of four children.

Ludwig Göransson is a Swedish composer known for composing Black Panther, the Creed films, Venom, Fruitvale Station, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Turning Red, New Girl, Community, Top Five, Central Intelligence, 30 Minutes or Less, and Tenet. He has a son with Serena McKinney, who has been married to him since 2018.

Bear McCreary is a degreed graduate of the prestigious USC Thornton School of Music (in 'Composition and Recording Arts'). Bear McCreary was one of a small and select group of proteges of the late, many-honored film composer Elmer Bernstein. Although he is now firmly in the mainstream of film composition, many of McCreary's earliest soundtrack-music compositions were for independent motion picture productions.

Oleksa Lozowchuk is a Canadian Academy nominee, and an award-winning music composer, music producer, music director, music supervisor, and multi-instrumentalist whose work spans many genres in both Film, TV, Video Games, Pop, Advertising, Dance and the Concert Stage. He is best known for his work on the Dead Rising video game series, and most recently scored the first two seasons of Disney's new series "Gabby Duran and the Unsittables".

Oleksa is recognized internationally for his award-winning music composition and production, winning Hollywood Music and Media Awards, Global Music and Sound Awards, Annual Game Music Awards, Game Audio Network Guild Awards, multiple 1st round Grammy ballots and more.

He has worked with directors like legendary producer Kenny Ortega (High School Musical/Michael Jackson), Cannes Camera d'Or winning Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner), and Emmy-nominated director Zach Lipovsky (Steven Spielberg). He has also worked with world class orchestras and choirs, and collaborated on soundtracks with multiple award winning artists including Celldweller, Kylie Cantrall, the Yoshida Brothers, Carlos PenaVega, Julie and The Phantoms, Jon Hassell, Damian Taylor (Bjork), Ogre (Skinny Puppy), DJ QBert, John Luongo (Michael Jackson/Aerosmith), Deezle (Lil Wayne), Kevin Churko (Ozzy/Shania Twain), Steve Moore (Goblin/Zombi), Dominic Davis (Jack White), The Humble Brothers, Dave Genn, Kinzaza, the Braxton Cook Quartet and Sumthing Else Music (Niles Rogers).

Oleksa has also worked with clients such as Apple, Disney, Netflix, McDonalds, Microsoft, Cafe Royal (ft. Robbie Williams), Legendary Films/Crackle and more.

The recording of Lozowchuk's work, 'Bright Sadness' gained international attention, with the American Record Guide calling it "... a disarming charmer."

In April of 2018, Oleksa co-founded Interleave, a super-collaborative team of award winning music and audio professionals with extensive experience in both interactive and linear media across all genres and formats, and with a primary focus on interactive, immersive and multi-platform.

Collectively, Interleave has provided music, audio and voice direction, composition, sound design and implementation for more than 50 AAA games, dozens of mobile titles and immersive projects, and composition, sound design and music supervision for hundreds of TV shows, feature films, ads and trailers.

Credits include Disney, Marvel, Microsoft, EA, Capcom and 2K Sports titles such as Lord of the Rings, Spider Man, FIFA, Ratchet & Clank, Lego, Transformers, Hot Wheels, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, hit television series including Homeland, Taken, Rogue, Ray Donovan and Stargate, and ads for brands like Universal, Adidas, BMW, Samsung, Audi, McDonald's and Mercedes-Benz.

The Interleave team is based in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, with people in Los Angeles, London and beyond, and works with an array of award winning composers, music, audio and voice directors, editors, music supervisors, sound designers, audio leads, implementation experts and more.

Ludvig Forssell is known for Death Stranding (2019), Boy Kills World (2023) and Belle (2021).

Argentine musician and leader of the now defunct bands "Arco Iris" and "Soluna", Gustavo Santaolalla was one of the references of his country's national music by the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. During the 70s he relocated to the United States, where he formed the band Wet Picnic, with Aníbal Kerpel, Aaurie Buhne and Robert Brill, with which he developed an intense activity in the city of Los Angeles. In 1982 he returned to Argentina to record a solo work - with a new sound- very influenced by the American pop trends of the time, called "Santaolalla", in which participated Argentine bassist Alfredo Toth (GIT band) and keyboardist Alejandro Lerner. In the music production area, his work was emphasized in "De Ushuaia a La Quiaca" ("From Ushuaia to La Quiaca") -another Argentine mythical musician León Gieco's project- following his same national folk line. Back in Los Angeles, produced records for "Café Tacuba" and "Maldita vecindad" among others, returning once more to Argentina in the middle of the '90 with a second solo work, "GAS" (his name's initials). His works in group production from the USA have turned Santaolalla into a prominent figure in that area, what gave him, besides, the chance to participate in big musical projects for cinema movies with successful results ("Amores perros", "21 Grams", "Diarios de motocicleta" -"The Motorcycle Diaries"), crowned with the Oscar award in March, 2006, by the music of the controversial film "Brokeback Mountain" and in 2007 for his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel". This makes him the third composer to win in the Best Original Score two years in a row.

Composer Klaus Badelt started his musical career writing and producing music for dozens of highly successful movies and commercials in his native Germany. In 1998, Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer invited him to move his musical home to Media Ventures in Santa Monica, CA. Since then, Klaus has composed scores on his own film and television projects as well as collaborating with Zimmer and other composers.

Working with Zimmer, Badelt contributed music to the Oscar-nominated scores for Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) and Dreamworks' The Prince of Egypt (1998). Klaus collaborated with Zimmer on the music for Mission: Impossible II (2000) with producer Tom Cruise and director John Woo, Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001) and Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (2001). He also co-wrote the score to Sean Penn's The Pledge (2001) with Zimmer.

Klaus recently completed the scores for Werner Herzog's Invincible (2001) (Tim Roth). Dreamworks' The Time Machine (2002) (Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons) and independent film Manfast (2003). Also in 2002, Badelt scored the independent feature Teknolust (2002) (Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Davies) followed by Miramax/Dimension Films' upcoming feature Equilibrium (2002) (Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Taye Diggs).

In summer of 2002, Badelt completed the music to Paramount's K-19: The Widowmaker (2002). The world-renowned Kirov Orchestra, under the baton of Valery Gergiev, was recorded in Washington, DC's Constitution Hall for the powerful score. Director Kathryn Bigelow's film tells the tale of nuclear calamity aboard a Russian sub, with Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson portraying two conflicted Russian naval captains under deadly circumstances.

Badelt recently finished the score for The Recruit (2003), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, and Bridget Moynahan. It is scheduled for release in January 2003. In October 2002, Klaus is writing the score for Basic (2003), directed by John McTiernan and starring John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.

Shirô Sagisu was born on 29 August 1957 in Tokyo, Japan. He is a composer, known for Shin Godzilla (2016), Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009) and Wotakoi: Love Is Hard for Otaku (2020).