Wonder Woman 1984 and
Hillbilly Elegy as co-composer.
But just as Howard was wrapping production on the film an adaptation of J.D. Vance s best-selling autobiography starring Gabriel Basso as Vance, Amy Adams as his drug-addicted mother Bev, and Glenn Close as his grandmother Mamaw the pandemic hit. Then, Zimmer himself caught COVID-19. I got sick as a dog and the heavy lifting really fell more and more to Dave, he recalls. But this wasn t a problem because Dave will never let you down.
And he didn t. While some critics have savaged Howard s film a look at Vance s escape from the endemic poverty of his Appalachian family to Yale law school as overwrought and melodramatic, the music is more subtle. Instead of reaching for hillbilly clichés no banjos here Fleming and Zimmer went for a more stripped back score. Vance s heroic journey is accompanied by the strings of British violinist Ben Powell and, giving it the needed grit, the inimitable slide guitar of Grammy-wi