Klaus Badelt is a German composer and film score writer. He is most famous for his collaborations with the Academy Award winning composer Hans Zimmer.
Klaus Badelt was born on June 12, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany. Badelt started off his career as a composer for TV commercials in Germany. He soon started composing scores for low-budget German movies and acts. He was finally discovered by his Academy Award Winning German compatriot Hans Zimmer in 1998. Zimmer invited Badelt to work with him at his studio, Media Ventures (now known as Remote Control Productions), in Santa Monica, California. Badelt accepted the offer and served as an apprentice under Zimmer. During his time at Media Ventures, Badelt also collaborated with other composers from Media Ventures, including Harry Gregson-Williams, Steve Jablonsky, Ramin Djawadi and John Powell.
Working with Zimmer, Badelt contributed to the score of the box office hit, “The Thin Red Line”, along with John Powell. The score was nominated for an Academy Award the very same year. Badelt also contributed to the score for Ridley Scott’s epic “Gladiator” in 2000, again with Hans Zimmer. In fact the year 2000 was a pivotal one for Badelt; his contributions were included in the year’s greatest blockbusters, including “Mission Impossible II” and “X-Men” (with Michael Kamen). Earlier, Badelt had contributed to the score for “The Prince of Egypt” in 1998, which included an almost impossible task of formulating the voice of God.
Badelt’s collaborations with Zimmer led to contributions to other mega-blockbuster films, including “The Pledge”, “Pearl Harbor” and “Hannibal”. Perhaps Badelt’s greatest and most well known collaboration with Zimmer was for the 2003 mega-blockbuster, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”. Many elements from the score of the first movie were reused for later movies in the series, thus cementing Badelt’s name in the Pirates of the Caribbean Legacy.
Badelt’s own, independent compositions number high into the twenties. He started writing full film scores for Hollywood in 2002 for Simon Wells “The Time Machine” and for Kathryn Bigelow’s “K-19: The Widowmaker”. Both soundtracks were received relatively well and Badelt found inspiration to lead a music company of his own in 2004.
Badelt also wrote the score to the movie starring Al Pacino, “The Recruit” in 2003. He also wrote the score for “BASIC” in the same year, which starred John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. In 2005, he collaborated with Brian Tyler to write the score for the supernatural action thriller “Constantine”. In 2006, Badelt wrote the score to Werner Herzog’s War Drama, “Rescue Dawn”. 2006 was also the year in which Badelt wrote the scores to the highly successful Michael Mann movie, “Miami Vice”, the Wolfgang Peterson Productions Movie “Poseidon” and the Chinese American science fiction movie “Ultraviolet”. Other famous movies that feature Badelt’s music repertoire include “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2007)”, “Dragon Hunters” and “Premonition”.
Klaus Badelt was also invited to write the music for the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. He was also commissioned to write an opera about the First Emperor of China, which is due to be premiered in 2015. His other work which is due to come out in 2015 includes the score for Werner Herzog’s “Queen of the Desert”.