Pirates of the Caribbean

Klaus Badelt (born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1968) is a German composer, best known for composing film scores. Badelt started his musical career composing for many successful movies and commercials in his homeland. In 1998, Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer invited Klaus to work at Media Ventures (Remote Control Productions today) in Santa Monica, his studio by that time co-owned by Jay Rifkin. Since then, Klaus has been working on a number of his own film and television projects and has also collaborated with other former and present time Remote Control composers, such as Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell or Geoff Zanelli.

While collaborating with Zimmer, Klaus has contributed to the Oscar-nominated scores for The Thin Red Line and The Prince of Egypt, as well as writing music for many well known directors including Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Terrence Mallick, John Woo, Kathryn Bigelow, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, Gore Verbinski, and Steven Spielberg. Klaus co-produced the score to Hollywood Box office hit Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, as well as writing portions of the score with singer/composer Lisa Gerrard. Having contributed music to Gladiator, Mission: Impossible 2 and Michael Kamen's score for X-Men, Klaus was involved in the three most successful movies in 2000. Klaus also collaborated with Zimmer on other successful titles, such as The Pledge, and 2001 blockbusters Hannibal and Pearl Harbor.

Klaus Badelt scored Dreamworks' remake of the classic The Time Machine, which earned him the Discovery of the Year Award at the World Soundtrack Awards 2003. He has scored dozens of movies including K-19: The Widowmaker, The Recruit, the Australian biopic Ned Kelly, the Chinese film The Promise, Poseidon, Premonition, TMNT and Rescue Dawn.

Arguably Klaus’ most famous work to the general public is Disney’s hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Badelt's work on the film is notable not only for its popular success, but for how quickly the score came together. After director Gore Verbinski fired veteran composer Alan Silvestri, Zimmer's team was brought in for a replacement score. Badelt served as "music supervisor" and worked with seven other composers (Ramin Djawadi, James Dooley, Nick Glennie-Smith, Steve Jablonsky, Blake Neely, James McKee Smith, and Geoff Zanelli) to produce the score.

Based on various interviews it is today argued that most of the score has been indeed written by Hans Zimmer himself.