Legendary film composer Hans Zimmer has scored a lot of car chases in his life — “maybe too many,” he admits to The Post. But the most unbelievable sequence he’s ever watched came not from one of the “Batman” movies, but a now-viral scene from the nature documentary series “Planet Earth II,” which shows a dramatic, two-minute pursuit of a marine iguana hatchling by snakes.
“I don’t think there’s anything that beats that scene as far as excitement goes,” Zimmer says. “I’m going, ‘This is the best car chase no director has ever shot’ … You have these unbelievable forces against this tiny, defenseless baby. It’s extraordinary.”
The “Iguana vs. Snakes” video — with Zimmer’s tension-building soundtrack — has racked up more than 9 million YouTube views since being posted in November. The scene appears in Saturday’s US premiere of “Planet Earth II” at 9 p.m. on BBC America.
The seven-part series, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, was more than three years in the making, including 2,089 shooting days and 117 filming trips through 40 countries. It serves as a follow-up to 2006’s popular first installment of “Planet Earth,” for which Zimmer was not the composer. So when he was asked, along with co-composers Jasha Klebe and Jacob Shea, to do the music for the sequel, he channeled the lessons he learned scoring another animal-centric project, “The Lion King.”
“[On] ‘Lion King,’ I am sitting in front of the screen and supposed to write about fuzzy animals, and I have no idea how to do this,” Zimmer says. “The more I got into it, I realized of course it was a story of great drama, and there was a way a human could completely and utterly be immersed in this and feel empathy and all those things. That’s the point of view I approach anything on.”