Jack Sparrow, Joker, Shrek: this Swiss artist turns Hollywood heroes into catchy tunes

The biggest stars are the humblest. The most pleasant and sociable, always trying not to be a burden to anyone. Perhaps because their many successes have also given them a lot of self-confidence. After many years in Hollywood, Martin Tillman has come to this conclusion. After years with the likes of Meryl Streep or Anthony Hopkins, who takes his homemade sandwiches to work.

One exception is Tom Cruise, whose self-confidence is definitely too much of a good thing, who is obsessed with requiring everyone involved in his films to put in at least two hundred percent effort. “He comes in, asks a man, ‘How long have you been working?’ ‘Sixteen hours,’ says the man. ‘Wow, great,’ says Cruise, ‘then you can add another twenty.'”

But at first Martin Tillman did not dream of Hollywood at all, first he dreamed of a tractor. He was in school, had an attention deficit, looked out the window and saw the neighboring farm. He thought everything was “very, very sexy”, especially the tractor. He saw himself on the tractor or leaning against the tractor with a cigarette, and in the end he spent all his free time happily in the field, in the cowshed and on the machine.

“And then, about the fourteenth, the whole dream of a future as a farmer collapsed within fifteen minutes.” A friend warned him: “You have to get up at four o’clock, you are not on vacation, you always stink.” From that moment on, Martin devoted himself to his other passion. One that doesn’t stink. The music. Then: classical music. He played the piano and cello, and with parents running a private school, one can imagine that the well-bred middle-class mood for support wasn’t exactly low.

At this point in our zoom conversation, he’s dragging his laptop across the room. At first something glittering and flamed is visible, a bit like the Eiffel Tower in hell. “That’s not a Harley,” says Tillman, “that’s my electric cello.” He then points the camera at a fox-colored, nondescript vintage wooden cello. “It’s Italian, it was built in 1905, I bought it when I was 19 and I used it to record the music for all five ‘Pirates’ movies.”

1905. This makes the cello two years older than the oldest living person in the world. “We’ve only been divorced twice, once it disappeared in an airport for three days, once it was stolen from my trunk in LA, I ran after the thief and said, here’s a hundred dollars in my pocket, I’ll give them to you and you’ll give me back my cello. It’s worked out.” The “Pirates” movies are of course “Pirates of the Caribbean”. Martin Tillman gave his musical motif to Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow. It sounds a little drunk. Pompous yet self-deprecating.

Tillman composed Depp’s musical mask with Hans Zimmer, the godfather of blockbuster sound design. Tillman has worked on the soundtracks of over 100 films, including “Mission Impossible II”, “Shrek”, “Pearl Harbour”, “Bridget Jones”, “The Da Vinci Code”, “Passion of Christ”, “Black Hawk Down ” , “Total Recall”, “The Dark Knight”, several “Spider-Man”, until 2013 he was on the Zimmer team. And how did he get there? Very simple: Zimmer called him and asked if he was interested and if he had time.

And what happened before that? Martin Tillman from Zurich emigrated to LA in 1988 at the age of 24. He knew no one, no one knew him. “LA is an incredibly exhausting city,” he says today, “you don’t go to LA to live, you go to LA to make a career.” And of course you don’t just dream of a career there, but of a world career. Martin Tillman had two options in mind: Rockstar or Hollywood. With a cello. Of all things.

Isn’t the cello actually a fundamental Swiss instrument? Franz Hohler has always played the cello. Sometimes educational, sometimes peaceful, always great cabaret. “And Beatocello!” adds Tillman, Beatocello, the music clown and pediatrician. How do you characterize such a cello? “Human,” says Tillman, “a cello is deeply human.”

A classical cello, like a human being, has a solid body, lungs, vocal cords, whims and a soul. And how is it made? Sad, one thinks in view of Tillman’s cinematic oeuvre, with a few exceptions it is melancholic dark bombast. “That’s true,” says Tillman, “but I don’t look depressed, do I?” No. Although he had reason to.

Four years ago, the love of his life, his wife Eva, died of multiple sclerosis. For years, the certainty of their final separation overshadowed the couple. And they return to Switzerland, to Zollikon, because Eva wants to die in Switzerland. She passed away in the spring of 2019 with the help of Dignitas. Tillman writes music for Eva. And for yourself. The composition is called “Superhuman”, it is longing, radiant, comforting, a rescue attempt and of course it sounds cinematic, with dramatic highlights and moments of redemption. Her performance was postponed for years due to Covid, now the time has come. And four years later, “Superhuman” is much more than a memory: “‘Superhuman’ is joie de vivre in music.”

The concert posters feature the same photo as the “Until We Meet Again” single, Tillman sitting on a graffiti-covered slab on a hill overlooking LA. What’s wrong with the photo? He seems so happy, so relaxed. “It was a moment of absolute freedom, a day when we were still hopeful. At first we knew something was coming, but we still believed the world was okay. A friend of ours took the picture.”

Back to the beginning: a man and his cello come to LA. He starts at the bottom. As a cake courier. He supplies the residential areas with sweets, sometimes also the villas of the stars, Barbra Streisand personally comes to the door. And he works in a recording studio at the reception. One day Meryl Streep comes by, almost falls off his chair, offers to make her coffee, “Oh no, honey, I’ve been making my own coffee all my life, you don’t have to worry about that,” she says.

He plays in a band, in a club: “At first only for a few people, but after a while everyone lined up to hear us, six hundred, seven hundred people.” Tillman records albums with Elton John, Sting, BB King and many others. Elton John is the most blatant perfectionist and hard worker of them all, sleeping on a couch in the studio, demanding everything – and asking Tillman to go on tour with him. But he prefers to stay in LA and go to the movies.

What work has shaped him the most? “Black Hawk Down”. Ridley Scott’s war film about the Battle of Mogadishu in the Somali Civil War in 1993. It took 92 days to shoot in 2001, and another 60 for the soundtrack. “We were countless musicians,” says Tillman, “and we all lived and worked in a huge white military tent for 60 days. We had sleeping chairs available, and every day veterans who fought in the war in the 90s came by and told us what they had experienced and, above all, heard.” The initial assignment was that the triumph of the West should also be heard in the sound, but Zimmer and his musicians were reluctant to do so, they also wanted to give the Somali fighters a voice.

Feudal work situations like this are unthinkable today. Nowadays, importing usually only takes one day. And twenty years ago there were over 2,000 film musicians on call in LA, today there are fewer than 300. “Movie musicians used to have the best union in Hollywood. However, with globalization and digitalization, it has become possible to circumvent the conditions of the unions. Suddenly you could employ an orchestra in Prague and send the files back and forth electronically.”

Martin Tillman turns 59 this year and doesn’t want to go back to the busy city of LA. During Corona he did his work from his bedroom in Zollikon. “I was working more than ever, suddenly there were a lot more productions, everyone wanted to stream at home, which was an absolute advantage for us. And outside of the beautiful moments of silence, it was ten times quieter than usual – with the exception of the birds. But I felt so sorry for all the people who normally make their living from live shows and then lost their lifeblood.”

He is currently writing small pieces for the «Library», the large electronic library of film music in which directors can search by genre and mood. Does that make you rich? “I can afford a very good bottle of wine a week on it, and I always tell young people you need a steady income, no matter how small it is.”

In addition to performances with “Superhuman”, he just revised his soundtrack for 2015’s “Schellen-Ursli”. So elaborate and “made even more pompous”. The film toured Graubünden in March with a live orchestra. Two more performances in St. Moritz have been confirmed for the summer, with performances in Basel in the coming years.

His role model is not Hans Zimmer, by the way, but 91-year-old John Williams, who has just been nominated for an Oscar with the soundtrack of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. “Williams has composed music for ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Indiana Jones’ that many people know better than the movies themselves. He recently told Spielberg, ‘I’m bored, I want to write new music.’ And Spielberg said, “I’m bored, I want to write new music.” , ‘Oh God, then I have to make another movie.'” Maybe one day he will too.

“Superhuman” by and with Martin Tillman will be shown on May 5 and 6 at Theater 11 in Zurich.