Hans Florian Zimmer
(1957) is a German film score composer and record producer. Since the 1980s, he has composed music for over 150 films. Zimmer was born in Frankfurt am Main. As a young child, he lived in Königstein-Falkenstein, where he played the piano at home but had piano lessons only briefly as he disliked the discipline of formal lessons : "My formal training was 2 week(s) of piano lessons. I was thrown out of 8 schools. But I joined a band. I am self-taught. But I've always heard music in my head. And I'm a child of the 20th century; computers came in very handy. In a speech at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, Zimmer stated that he is Jewish, and talked about his mother surviving World War II thanks to her escape from Germany to England in 1939. He said of his parents "My mother was very musical, basically a musician and my father was an engineer and an inventor. So, I grew up modifying the piano, shall we say, which made my mother gasp in horror, and my father would think it was fantastic when I would attach chainsaws and stuff like that to the piano because he thought it was an evolution in technology."