Rick Beato asked Hans Zimmer what his process was for writing a score.
Hans told him, “I try to avoid reading the script.”
“Not because I’m against screenplays, but because I want to know what’s inside the director’s head.”
They’ll go for dinner, have a bottle of wine, and Hans will ask the director to tell him the story.
“Because then I know what is important to him in the story. He’ll leave out all the secondary stuff that isn’t important.”
With that, he gets his sense of tone.
He gets to the heart of the story and why it’s being told.
It’s not always obvious from the script.
You may think Interstellar is a story about gravity, black holes and intergalactic travel.
But the heart of the story is about what it means to be a father.
That heart comes from the director. In turn, Hans uses his to create music:
"If I play you a piece of music, that’s when you can truly look inside me."
This makes me think about our work to get to the heart of what’s truly important to clients and prospects.
If you’re like me, you’re increasingly tempted to hand off more to AI.
But AI can’t have dinner with your client.
It can’t look them in the eye and feel the room change when something you or they said struck a nerve. Exposing the fear that’s keeping them up at night, the frustration that’s looping around their mind, the true motivation behind their decisions.
AI can transcribe a conversation and pull out themes and patterns in minutes. It can synthesise those patterns into observations you hadn’t considered. It can map those observations against copywriting frameworks and tell you exactly what to write.
But it doesn’t have the intuition and taste that you have woven into your consciousness.
And it’s this intuition that will help you get to the heart of what the market wants truly wants more than anything else.
Please, give AI as many mindless tasks as you can. It’s brilliant at quantitative work.
But don’t outsource dinner.