Producer talks to MTV News about collaborating with award-winning composer Hans Zimmer. By Jocelyn Vena. This Sunday, super producer Pharrell Williams and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer will show the world what they’ve been cooking up since the December announcement they would join forces as the musical consultants for the 84th Academy Awards. “You know, Hans called me and he said that [Oscars Producer] Brian Grazer had asked him to come on as a consultant and effectively score the music or whatever,” he explained to MTV News. “And Hans was like, ‘I can’t do that. … I’d do that if like I had, like, Pharrell.’ [Grazer’s] like, ‘OK, get Pharrell on the phone.’ That’s the story he told me. I got the call from Hans and he told them he wanted to do it with me, and so I pleasantly accepted and we’ve just been working ever since.”
While Pharrell wanted to keep the collaboration as top-secret as possible, he did give some insight into what the two have in store for the big night, which will be hosted by Billy Crystal. “Well, you’re gonna have to watch the show and see, we can’t give it away. That’s what’s so funny about interviews. They always want to know what you’re about to do,” he explained. “It’s like some of us love you know music and art that blindsides, comes out of nowhere with a crazy impact. And then sometimes you talk about things because you want to warm up the feeling before the huge impact.
“But this is another one of those things where we keep things under wraps,” he continued. “But it’s cool; it’s interesting; it’s very different. Definitely there’s an homage to the tradition of how the music was done traditionally. … [but] we’re different, and when given an opportunity and it’s our opportunity, Hans and I agreed we just would do it from the perspective of people who love music and love making music and respect it, giving back to what gave us so much, which is music and film.”