His studio in Santa Monica, California, has an extensive range of computer equipment and keyboards, allowing demo versions of film scores to be created quickly.

[11] 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 the UK in 1939.

[15] He worked with the Buggles, a new wave band formed in London in 1977 with Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley.

[17] In 1984, both Zimmer (on keyboards) and Cann (on drums), were invited to be part of the Spanish group Mecano for a live performance in Segovia (Spain).

[17] One of Zimmer's most durable works from his time in the United Kingdom was the theme song for the television game show Going for Gold, which he composed with Sandy McClelland in 1987.

[19] Hollywood director Barry Levinson was looking for someone to score Rain Man, and his wife heard the soundtrack CD of the anti-apartheid drama A World Apart, for which Zimmer had composed the music.

On the strength of this work, Walt Disney Feature Animation approached Zimmer to compose the score for the 1994 film The Lion King.

[32] Zimmer's score for Tony Scott's 1995 film Crimson Tide won a Grammy Award for the main theme, which makes heavy use of synthesizers in place of traditional orchestral instruments.

The nine-minute cue at the climax of the film, "The Journey to the Line", uses a recurring theme based on four chords, combined with a "ticking clock" motif that has been featured in a range of subsequent scores composed by Zimmer.

[33] The piece has been used in numerous trailers and video games, and has earned the nickname "the forbidden cue" due to the tendency of film makers to use it as a temp track for dramatic scenes.

[34] In the 2000s, Zimmer composed scores for Hollywood blockbuster films including three Ridley Scott films, Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down and Hannibal (2001), followed by The Last Samurai (2003), Madagascar (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Simpsons Movie (2007), Kung Fu Panda (2008), which he co-composed with John Powell, Angels & Demons (2009), and Sherlock Holmes (2009).

He composed the theme for the television boxing series The Contender and worked with Lorne Balfe on the music for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which was his first video game project.

[36] Zimmer also collaborated with composers Borislav Slavov and Tilman Sillescu to create the score for the video game Crysis 2.

[37] In October 2000, Zimmer performed live in concert for the first time with an orchestra and choir at the 27th Annual Flanders International Film Festival in Ghent.

[22] During the scoring of The Last Samurai in early 2003, Zimmer was approached by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with whom he had worked previously on Crimson Tide, Days of Thunder, The Rock, and Pearl Harbor.

Bruckheimer had finished shooting Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl but was unhappy with the music composed for the film by Alan Silvestri and wanted a replacement score.

[42] Zimmer is noted for his work on the scores of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008), which he co-composed with James Newton Howard.

[20] For the soundtrack of The Dark Knight, Zimmer decided to represent the villain of the Joker by a single note played on the cello by his long-time colleague Martin Tillman.

[44] Zimmer succeeded in reversing the decision not to nominate The Dark Knight in December 2008, arguing that the process of creating a modern film score was collaborative and that it was important to credit a range of people who had played a part in its production.

[46]For the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, Daily Variety reported that Zimmer purchased an out-of-tune piano for 200 dollars and used it throughout the scoring process because of its "quirkiness".

[47] For the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Zimmer and director Guy Ritchie incorporated authentic Romani music, which they researched by visiting Slovakia, Italy, and France.

[54] Zimmer described himself as "devastated" in the aftermath of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting, which occurred at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises: "I just feel so incredibly sad for these people."

He recorded a track entitled "Aurora", a choral arrangement of a theme from the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack, to raise money for the victims of the shooting.

[55] Zimmer co-composed the music for the television series The Bible, which was broadcast in March 2013, with Lorne Balfe and Lisa Gerrard, and the score for 12 Years a Slave, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in March 2014. Zimmer composed the Tomorrowland Hymn for the Tomorrowland festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in July 2014.

[56] Zimmer composed the music for the 2014 film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 alongside "The Magnificent Six", which consisted of Pharrell Williams, Johnny Marr, Michael Einziger, Junkie XL, Andrew Kawczynski, and Steve Mazzaro.

[57][58] Zimmer composed the music for Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar, which earned him another Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

In an interview with BBC News in March 2016, Zimmer said that he was retiring from composing the music for superhero films, saying of Batman v Superman: "This one was very hard for me to do, to try to find new language".

[60] Zimmer composed the main theme for the 2016 BBC nature documentary Planet Earth II, presented by David Attenborough.

[86] During the 2024 Austrian Grand Prix, Zimmer announced he will be scoring F1, a film starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski.

He dedicated the award to his publicist and long-term friend Ronni Chasen, who had been shot and killed in Beverly Hills the previous month.