Two-time Academy Award and four-time Grammy winner Hans Zimmer has spent more than 40 years crafting the soundtracks of our favorite movies. IndieWire asked if he's ready to retire.

“Are you kidding me? I've played all my life. Why would I stop playing?” he responded.

Hans Zimmer: Retirement? I don't know her.

“Why would I stop living a playful life? Why would I stop trying to, you know, invent things? Why would I? I mean, there are good reasons because, as soon as I sit down and there is the blank page and I'm supposed to write something, I'm like ‘Oh my god, I have no idea how to do this,” he continued.

“After two weeks I want to phone the director and give him a number of a composer who can, but somehow this dichotomy of wanting to do something new, it's the truth,” the composer added.

Zimmer has 245 credits on his IMDB page just as a composer. He won his first Oscar in 1995 for The Lion King and his second in 2022 for Dune: Part One. He also crafted the music for Interstellar and The Dark Knight trilogies, and shows no sign of stopping, much less slowing down.

Much of that is due to Zimmer still hunting for “a piece of music I have not written that I think is really good, but I don't know how to get to it.” It seems that he won't retire until het gets to that piece.

He spoke at The Whitby Hotel in New York City Thursdauy, March 14, and said that he doesn't listen to a lot of music when he's writing “because I can't listen to somebody else.”

It's not about avoiding unintentional plagiarism. It's about finishing what he's working on.

“I can listen to the worst piece of music and I can call it a masterpiece, because it's finished,” he said.

Zimmer's most recent work is Dune: Part Two. He said he's currently working on writing music for the third movie, Dune: Messiah. However, it may take some time as director Denis Villeneuve said he wants to take a break from the sand for his own “mental sanity.”