Klaus Badelt (born 12 June 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is a German film composer, known for his collaborations with Hans Zimmer, helping to write scores for dozens of critically acclaimed films including The Thin Red Line, The Prince of Egypt, Gladiator, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Independently, he is known for his work on Hollywood blockbuster films such as Equilibrium, K-19: The Widowmaker, Basic, and TMNT, and for his work in French cinema. Badelt was born in Frankfurt, West Germany. He started his musical career composing for movies and commercials in his homeland. In 1998, Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer invited Badelt to work at Media Ventures in Santa Monica, California, his studio co-owned by Jay Rifkin. Since then, Badelt has been working on a number of his own film and television projects such as The Time Machine and K-19: The Widowmaker. He also collaborated with other Media Ventures composers, such as Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell, and Zimmer; and mentored several others like Ramin Djawadi and Steve Jablonsky. While collaborating with Zimmer, Badelt contributed to the Oscar-nominated scores for The Thin Red Line and The Prince of Egypt, and wrote music for many well known directors including Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Terrence Malick, John Woo, Kathryn Bigelow, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Werner Herzog, Sean Penn, Gore Verbinski, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg. Badelt co-wrote and co-produced the score to Hollywood box office hit Gladiator, directed by Ridley Scott, along with Zimmer and singer/composer Lisa Gerrard. Having contributed music to Gladiator, Mission: Impossible II and Michael Kamen's score for X-Men, Badelt was involved in the three most successful movies in 2000. Badelt also collaborated with Zimmer on other successful films, such as The Pledge, and 2001 blockbusters Hannibal and Pearl Harbor. One of his more famous and popular scores was for the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. In 2004, Klaus founded his own film music company, Theme Park Studios, in Santa Monica. Since then, he has scored films such as Constantine, Poseidon, Rescue Dawn, and TMNT. Among Badelt's most critically celebrated scores are the Chinese fantasy film The Promise and DreamWorks' remake of The Time Machine, the latter of which earned him the Discovery of the Year Award at the World Soundtrack Awards 2003. He also wrote the music for the closing ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and was commissioned to write an opera about China's First Emperor, to be premiered in 2015. Klaus worked on the soundtrack for The Promise for almost 6 months. The song which can be heard in the movie's end credits is an ancient folk song in China, and very few people can still sing it. For that, Klaus traveled almost two weeks in China to find someone who was able to sing the whole folk song in order to rearrange it for the score.