[7] In 1982, he took a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Jazz Improvisation with Gary Burton and Film Scoring with Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin.

[17][18] Lohner contributed music to Broken Arrow, The Thin Red Line, and Gladiator, and provided additional composing on The Ring and Spanglish, which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score.

Regarding his music for the drama Love Comes Lately (2007), which was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, Screen International wrote, “a pleasant score with befitting Central European echoes adds to the congeniality of the proceedings.“[22] Often regarded as a “Hollywood composer” in the German media,[23][24][25] Lohner does on occasion work in his home country, having scored movies by Bernd Eichinger and Til Schweiger among others.

[5][35] Their artistic partnership, known as Lohner Carlson, was influenced by their collaboration with composer John Cage, which includes the art film One11 and 103 (1992)[36][37] directed by Lohner, “a 90-minute black-and-white meditation on the waxing and waning of light.”[38] Gramophone magazine called the production “a splendid project carried out with dedication by all concerned” and noted the “remarkable quality of these uniquely pure visual images, studies in light ranging from total black to total white.”[39] Lohner paid homage to Cage posthumously with the “composed film” The Revenge of the Dead Indians,[40][41] featuring artists such as Dennis Hopper, Matt Groening and Yoko Ono.

[44][45] Composed from their archive of hundreds of hours of footage, the installation was “a multi-facetted mosaic of films […] focussing on humanistic issues;”[46] it showed interviews as well as landscapes on eleven monitors, with an equal emphasis on speech, pictures and sounds “in a new, free form of presentation,” thus generating “a type of global talk.”[47] Subsequently, Lohner and Carlson’s Active Images developed, first shown at the Galerie Springer Berlin in 2006.

The images are shown on a series of high resolution video panels and provide a poetic and elegant glance at seemingly normal scenes.

He has directed more than 100 short films and over 40 feature-length documentaries and teleplays, many of them portraits of influential contemporary artists such as Dennis Hopper, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gerhard Richter, Karl Lagerfeld, Brian Eno, and Abel Ferrara.