(MOVIE) MUSIC MAN HANS ZIMMER'S THEMES ADD DEPTH AN FLAVOR TO BIG-SCREEN TALES.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

SANTA MONICA - When you walk into composer Hans Zimmer's space-age studio, your eye might first go to the oversize book of Helmut Newton's photography opened to some outlandish image, or to the high-tech guitar of chrome and plastic barely recognizable as a musical instrument, or to a pair of macabre lamps from the set of ``Hannibal.''

Then there are the things you would expect to see - rows and rows of black boxes with switches that must have something to do with the recording process, numerous CDs and books on shelves, and an electronic keyboard facing a flat-screen monitor.

Finally, there's something you may not notice - the ``billion-dollar chair'' as Zimmer describes it. Actually, it's not much of a chair, just your standard-issue office model with arms and wheels, now beaten up by years of use. Zimmer's affection for it - and you know this because, of all those things in his studio, this is what he has taken the most pains to point out - comes from the fact that he has composed the scores of all the films he's worked on during the past decade-plus sitting in that chair.

And a billion dollars is hardly an overstatement when you think of the grosses on the highly acclaimed and successful films that Zimmer has scored, among them ``Rain Man,'' ``Driving Miss Daisy,'' ``Black Rain,'' ``Backdraft,'' ``Thelma & Louise,'' ``Days of Thunder,'' ``A League of Their Own,'' ``The Lion King'' (for which he won an Oscar), ``Crimson Tide,'' ``Broken Arrow,'' ``The Rock,'' ``As Good as It Gets,'' ``The Prince of Egypt,'' ``The Thin Red Line,'' ``Gladiator'' (for which he recently won a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Academy Award) and ``Hannibal.''

On the screen this day is a scene from the upcoming projected summer blockbuster ``Pearl Harbor.'' The German-born composer quickly takes it off, laughing that we're not supposed to take photos of that. There is an easygoing manner about Zimmer despite the fact he's in a high-pressure, big-money business, where you're often the ``producer's enemy because you're going to try to push your deadline'' to get it right.

Settled in his chair, he's clearly comfortable. As he talks, he puts his feet up on the console or plays a few notes on the keyboard to demonstrate something - the captain of his musical ship.

Considering his success, does he still get nervous when he plays a theme for a director?

He answers with a question: ``Is there a term bigger than sheer blinding blistering red-hot panic?''

At least, he says, he doesn't faint in front of producers anymore as he did on ``Black Rain.'' Zimmer credits director Ridley Scott, who used him for ``Gladiator,'' ``Thelma'' and ``Hannibal,'' for being his champion on that film when the producers weren't happy with him.

A very visual director, Scott puts a high premium on the scores for his films, saying that music ``works on your unconscious and emotions the way speaking and pictures don't.''

In Zimmer, he has found someone who matches his own visions. ``I love working with Hans because his music is so idiosyncratic,'' says Scott. ``The music I imagine while I'm filming is somewhat off-center, and Hans will always come up with something that gives the movie its own identity.''

Zimmer remembers going to England to watch Scott shoot the opening battle scenes of ``Gladiator,'' ``which is just guys hitting each other over the head in the mud.

``It was a strange experience. Here I am traveling down the road in the middle of winter through this forest, and the car veers off the road and suddenly we've left the 20th century behind.''

But what was even more disconcerting to Zimmer was the opulence of the Roman emperor's tent with its ``amazing furniture,'' which seemed out of place on a battlefield. After Scott explained to him that the emperor had been away from Rome for 15 or 16 years and that he would have brought all his comforts with him, it got Zimmer to thinking about what we consider civilized and beautiful. ``It's all built on the blood and guts and savagery of one tribe subjugating another.''

Wanting to find a way to put that into the film, he thought of Vienna in the 19th century and decided to do all the battle scenes as ``waltzes turned upside down.''

He wrote the music before the film was cut and gave it to editor Pietro Scalia, who help matched the music to the visuals. The result is a breathtaking sequence, operatic in the grand sense. And if you don't get the waltz thing, just count - 1-2-3, 1-2-3 - and suddenly it's there.

The 43-year-old Zimmer's habit of turning things upside down started early. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, the composer says he had the obligatory piano lessons as a child, but never got past the first two weeks. ``I think the piano teacher gave up on me because there was no way I wanted to learn what he wanted to teach me. ... I couldn't understand why anybody would want to teach you other people's music.''

Since his parents considered television uncultured (he saw his first opera at 3), music became a refuge and Zimmer kept ``banging away at the piano anyway.''

``I was a willful child,'' he says, and that willfulness got him chucked out of nine schools ``because I was usually sitting in class thinking up tunes.'' Finally, he ended up in at a school in England because his mother had lived there during World War II. The climate agreed with him. He had a headmaster who liked rock 'n' roll and who took the students on field trips to see the Rolling Stones and David Bowie.

Zimmer's first success came when he moved to London in the late '70s and became a member of the Buggles, helping to create the band's ``one-hit wonder that ruined a whole generation'' - ``Video Killed the Radio Star'' - which signaled the beginning of the MTV era. But Zimmer never really wanted to be in the rock 'n' roll spotlight. ``I was a really bad guitarist,'' he admits.

All along, though, he had been involved with computers and electronics.

``I had a vision of how electronic stuff can work because of my dad, who was an inventor, so technology was just something to be abused and pushed to its limits, seeing if you can make it blow up.''

The equipment was so costly back then that Zimmer says he had to make it work. ``It completely changed the way I thought about music, because suddenly I could - in my own peculiar way - be my own symphony orchestra,'' he says.

But he needed ``real people to create real music.'' Eventually, he got a call to work with film composer Stanley Myers (``The Deer Hunter''), who taught him about orchestration. He credits Myers with seeing him through the rough spots on his learning curve. And film composing was exactly where Zimmer wanted to be ever since he saw ``Once Upon a Time in the West'' as a kid and heard the score by Ennio Morricone, who happens to also be nominated for an Oscar this year.

``The idea hit me that images and sound can make something unique that doesn't really happen in the real world,'' he says.

What Zimmer appreciates about being a film composer is that he never has to repeat himself, unlike rock stars.

``If you look at the very beginnings of my career in this town, the films I did - 'Black Rain,' 'Rain Man,' 'Driving Miss Daisy' - they were very different. Who am I - the guy who writes 'Driving Miss Daisy' or the guy who writes 'Crimson Tide' or 'Thelma & Louise' or 'Thin Red Line' or 'Gladiator' or the comedy guy in 'As Good as It Gets'?''

Actually, Zimmer is all of them. Part of writing, he says, is putting yourself inside the character - whether it's Raymond Babbit in ``Rain Man'' or Dr. Lecter in ``Hannibal'' (``a twisted sense of aesthetics''), and that can be tough.

``I take these characters home with me, which makes it a bit hard. Good writing always happens at the very edge of some very dangerous personal ground.''

He tells the story of how, after his wife saw ``Gladiator'' for the first time, she hit him on the arm, saying she now understood why he had been in a bad mood.

Now he struggles with ``Pearl Harbor.'' (He's already thrown out 3,000 bars of music). But Zimmer has been down this road before. He remembers playing a theme for Scott once, knowing it was ``truly appalling'' and the director not saying anything. So he told him to come back the next week. After hearing the new (and better) theme, Scott said to him, ``You know, it's amazing how inspiring a little fear can be.''

So while Zimmer is hopeful about another Oscar (``because my idols have actually gone and said, 'You've done OK this year' '') and he still has his ``billion-dollar chair'' (``it's molded to my butt''), you get the feeling he'll never be completely comfortable.

``The success and failure rate within each project varies,'' Zimmer says, ``but there is no perfect one. Otherwise, you might as well stop writing.''

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Photo: (color) no caption (Hans Zimmer)

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer