Klaus Badelt

Klaus Badelt (b. December 13, 1968) began his musical career writing and producing music for dozens of highly successful movies and commercials in his native Germany. In 1997/98, Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer invited him to move his musical home to Media Ventures in Santa Monica, CA. Since then, Klaus has composed scores on his own film and television projects as well as collaborating with Zimmer and other composers. He has written music for over twenty-five major Hollywood films, with his biggest and most well-known assignments to date being Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator' in 2000, which he co-produced, 2002's 'The Time Machine', a highly successful score both critically and popularly, and the enormously successful Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Employing his background in producing records, and collaborating with a wide variety of recording artists, Badelt's approach generates original scores with an authentic production value, while maintaining the integrity of a film score. He is a composer who strongly favours studio technology and computer-based writing over the traditional pencil-and-paper method, but not at the expense of musicality, and is quoted as saying "I am not a very traditional writer... I try to give each film not only its own tunes and themes, but its very own sound as well... I need my production environment, my computers, my sounds, my palette, and my room, to shine - to get inspired."