As a boy in post-war Germany, Hans Zimmer attached a chainsaw to the family piano, horrifying his mother and delighting his engineer father, who saw a technological evolution. This episode follows the two-time Academy Award winner from a childhood shaped by his Jewish mother’s 1939 flight to the United Kingdom and the early death of his father, through roughly one week of formal piano lessons, to the revelation of Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon a Time in the West.

The story moves to 1970s London, where Zimmer played synthesizers with The Buggles and appears in the Video Killed the Radio Star video, co-produced a single for The Damned, and paid his rent for years with the Going for Gold game show theme. From his partnership with Stanley Myers at Lillie Yard studio, the episode tracks his breakthroughs on Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy, the remotely coordinated choral recordings with Lebo M for The Lion King, the Remote Control Productions workshop model in Santa Monica, and his successful fight with the Academy over collaborative credit on The Dark Knight.

• Why Zimmer used steel drums to represent Raymond’s inner world in Rain Man instead of Americana strings
• His argument that the sampler on Driving Miss Daisy didn’t sound like a piano but behaved like one
• How a South African police record from The Power of One kept him from recording The Lion King choir in person
• The sliding cello note for the Joker and the stretched Edith Piaf brass that became the Inception horn
• Scoring Planet Earth II, designing warning sounds for BMW electric vehicles, and the Armenian duduk in his Oscar-winning Dune score