From Mathematician to Film Composer: An Interview with Nainita Desai

CineConcerts was very fortunate to talk with award-winning British composer Nainita Desai, about her background in mathematics, use of unusual instruments, and her passion for promoting world music through her scores. Nainita’s musical foundations are rooted in world music, which informs her experimental, multi-instrumental and creatively diverse approach. This, coupled with experience with sound design and technical innovation, informs Nainita’s powerful and immersive scores. Her creative process involves deeply-researched collaborations to find those voices that are not usually heard, and sounds that are truly unique.

Working at the forefront of a new wave of emerging artists, RTS and BIFA nominated composer Nainita is a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, and is the International Film Music Critics Association Breakthrough Composer of 2020. She has scored countless BAFTA, Oscar, Emmy acclaimed productions. The PRS placed Desai at No 2 in their Top 10 female writers whose work was most used in Film & TV through 2018. She has also been awarded Best Original Music at the Music+Sound Awards 2019 and Naturvision Film Festival 2019.

Take a look at the interview below.

CineConcerts (CC): I would love some information about your background and your education specifically, you were studying mathematics before you started writing music?

Nainita Desai (ND): I studied Indian classical instruments as a child, but I also learned the violin and the piano, so I had a very broad based musical grounding. I wanted to be a performer when I was younger, I had my own pop bands at school, sang in choirs, and played violin in the school orchestra. I embraced all styles of music which is absolutely crucial for being a film and TV composer these days, I need find something to connect with in every genre of music I come across, and to be open-minded.

CC: So although you had the musical background you still went for a mathematics degree?

ND: When I was a teenager, there were restrictions at school selecting what area of study to focus on, and unfortunately I couldn’t choose music. What I ended up studying was actually something else I was good at, which was numbers! So I ended up doing my degree in mathematics. But music and film were also always passions of mine, I used to take short courses and evening classes in photography and 16 mm filmmaking. I was a huge film buff and I was the film critic for the student newspaper, I would get invites to premieres and private screenings and cover them for the university student paper!

I was also a bit of a geek, I was very into technology and computers. I bought synthesizers and set up my own home studio, I just couldn’t conceive of having a career as a composer being a real possibility. But I was just really into sound and music technology, I was programming drums and synths, and embracing it all.

At University I did a thesis on the wave equation which sounds terribly nerdy, but it led me to actually meet Peter Gabriel. He came to the university and saw what the students were working on. I showed him a bit of software I had been writing, and I must have impressed me because told me to look him up when I finished my course! Of course I didn’t.

CC: Where did you go from there, after you finished your mathematics course?

ND: I was still really into film sound and sound design, so I got a scholarship to go to the National Film and Television School, one of the best film schools in the world. I became a sound designer on big feature films, doing dialogue, foley, sound effects editing and creative sound design. I was working in big teams, and that was a fantastic way for me to gain an understanding of the world of film and sound. I did that for a couple years working with directors like Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci, and other European filmmakers but after a while I found that it wasn’t creative enough for me. I then remembered what Peter said, and I looked him up!

I actually sent a handwritten letter to his recording studio, a fantastic place called Real World Studios. They received my letter they actually called me up and asked if I wanted to come down and visit them. I started working as Peter’s assistant as a music engineer, and got to work with many of the best producers, artists and engineers such as Bob Ezrin, Dave Botrill, Sinead O’Connor, Billy Cobham, Nigel Kennedy, and Papa Wemba which gave me a great foundation. Then, working in freelance music engineering I worked with other artists I admired like Tori Amos but again, working on other people’s music reminded me how much I wanted to write my own music.

I never lost sight of that dream, and eventually a music supervisor I was friends with said, ‘Look, I am supervising a TV show and we are looking for new composers, would you be interested?’ I took the bull by the horns, as no one at that point had paid me to write or compose music before! I took on the challenge and taught myself how to write to picture. Twenty years later here we are!

CC: What was that first TV show you composed music for?

ND: It was the Lonely Planet series, based on the off-the-beaten-track travel guides. I was very much into world music because I’d worked with a lot of world musicians at Peter’s studios, so it was a really natural fit. It eventually became Globe Trekker on the Discovery Channel. The company liked the work I was doing, so one project led to another. Those were the first stepping stones.

CC: Now you compose for TV, film and video games, not just nature documentaries. Do you approach each category in a different way?

ND: It actually depends on when I get brought onto the project. In an ideal world, I get brought on very early, I’ll work away from the visuals, and it’s more of an exploratory journey with the filmmaker, and the editor. I will have lots of discussions with the director and come up with a concept and also serve their vision.

I know that a lot of composers say that you should have your own musical voice, and after having worked on so many different types of projects I have a certain way of approaching it. That’s what I relish the most, that immersive journey, trying to get to the core of the story and understanding and representing the hidden side of what’s not being told on screen.

CC: Do you think that your approach has something to do with your background in mathematics or your work as a sound designer?

ND: I do. I think that having studied mathematics, it’s not the actual math so much, but it’s informed how I will structure a piece of music, or approach or even with my studio setup. Everything has to be laid out in my studio and my computer very neatly in order to allow for the creative chaos of composing to go on in my mind and allow for that free rein of creativity. There is this innate sense of balance to every piece of music that I write and the way I structure it, and math has a role in that for me. I gravitate towards complicated time signatures and studied tabla where you may play one rhythm but speak another time signature – like rhythmical multi-tasking!

With sound design, sometimes music will lead, and sometimes music may dominate depending on the storytelling. Everything has its place in the storytelling of the overall shape of the film’s soundscape.

CC: When you were young what kind of movies did you like that inspired you to become a film composer eventually?

ND: I was really influenced by children’s TV, there are always a lot of theme tunes that would grab my attention. There are a couple of UK science fiction shows like Tales of the Unexpected and my dad introduced me to science fiction so I was a huge Star Trek fan. I used to watch old reruns of the original Star Trek with William Shatner and I loved the theme. I used to get terrified when the spaceship went across the screen. I thought it was going to come out of the screen and hit me.

But what really grabbed me were themes and film scores that had strong melodies like John Barry’s James Bond scores or Ennio Moriccone’s spaghetti westerns, and of course modern classics like Jaws and E.T. Those melodies that really had the power and the ability for film to transport me to another world and move me emotionally. I just didn’t realize but it was the music that moved me.

I used to collect film scores as a teenager, and I would go to my local library which had a really good vinyl collection of film scores, so I used to borrow film scores and just immerse myself and transport to the world of the movie through listening to the music. Films such as The Conversation, Peter Greenaway’s films including The Draughtsman’s Contract, Chinatown, David Shire, Trevor Morris, Lalo Schifrin, Michel Legrand, John Barry were all big influences.

CC: Although the number is growing, there are still relatively few women who work in film composition. How do you see your current place in the industry?

ND: I tend to look at myself from the inside out, not from the outside in. I don’t think of my gender when composing. I just had to forge my own path to ultimately become a film & TV composer though I may have gone around the houses a bit to get there!

The only female role models I had were women like Kate Bush or Laurie Anderson and Bjork, and they are not film composers but artists who were really pushing the boundaries and at the edges of what they were trying to achieve with their creativity. Their body of works really resonated with me and I aspired to have careers like them.

But in terms of film and TV I had a lot of male role models. To be a film and TV composer you have to be ready to embrace technology, and composing music and technology was never really seen as a “female” profession. Men mainly tended to embark on degree courses like electronic engineering and physics, and you needed to be a geek and nerd to get to get into music engineering. That put off lots of women but things have been changing!

Slowly we have seen more women breaking through. Technology is accessible by all now and I think it’s because people are realizing we need more diverse voices. We will have richer storytelling and a richer creative world whether it’s through music, dance, film or books, by having lots of diverse voices telling stories. What I do is not about gender or stereotypes, it's about storytelling. Women can write action music as well as any man can, and music is universal and genderless, it’s a creative expression.

CC: Can you talk about your experience composing For Sama a little bit? What was it like to work on such a personal documentary?

ND: For Sama, is one of the most unique films I have ever worked on. I was involved on it through the 18 month edit from a very early stage, and was a very immersive experience. It's about a woman in her early 20s who filmed and documented the Syrian uprising. She filmed about 500 hours of footage documenting everything going on around her, where she meets and falls in love with her husband, and they have a child, Sama.

I wrote over 80 themes in the first phase of the edit. It's a very powerful film and amongst the darkness there is also humor and lightness. The original brief from the director was to write a rich Hollywood cinematic score because on one level the music had to capture the angst and the fear and the tragedy but also the hope and feeling of pathos in the film.

As the edit progressed about 3 or 4 months there was a pause in the edit. The film wasn’t quite working for the directors and they had to find the true heart of the film. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the true voice of the film was this intimate relationship between a mother and child. So the film became a love letter from Waad (al-Kaetab the film’s co-director) to Sama, to explain to her why she stayed in Aleppo so long and why they eventually had to leave. When that happened and the whole edit changed my music no longer worked to the film, The film changed narrative direction and as a result there was a lot of soul searching to find the musical heart of the film. We were stripping the music back so that it didn’t over manipulate the audience or dominate the scenes which were very powerful.

I brought in a Syrian violinist who was a refugee living in Italy. His playing was very gritty and edgy and it represented the landscape of this broken city and the true heart of Aleppo.

The film is about what it means to be human in very extreme situations that are thrown at you so it’s quite emotive and it really hits to the core of you as a human being. Because the music is so subtle and minimalist, sometimes it's almost a part of the soundscape. I was fusing and blending minimalist music in with the bombing and the shelling, and the explosions that are going off on screen, and sometimes you don’t know what’s music and what isn’t.

I have never experienced working on a film where the person in the film has actually directed it so that was totally unique and I felt this huge responsibility on my shoulders to do justice to the film and do justice to Waad’s life story. It became a very intimate score in the end, but also its a film about life and love and humanity. The way that this film is crafted is like a feature film, taking you on an emotional roller coaster of a journey.

CC: How did you initially meet Waad, and start working on the project?

ND: I was recommended by the sound designer who I had worked with before. The co-director Ed Watts was looking for a composer, and he sent me a few scenes to give me an idea of the raw footage, which was really harrowing and powerful.

When I went for our first meeting in the edit suite, I actually thought that Waad had died in the film. I wasn’t expecting to meet her but there she was, on the floor of the studio, laughing and eating ice cream. It was quite an emotional moment for me!

**CC: Untamed Romania is another project you have worked on recently, can you tell us a little bit about your work on that?**

ND: That was a very different type of score. It’s about the wildlife of Romania. As a child one of my heroes was David Attenborough, and one of my dreams was to write music for the BBC Natural History unit, who are the world’s pioneers in wildlife programs. I was very fortunate that I was not only able to meet him eventually, but I also got to work on the TV shows and wildlife films that he presented. What the Natural History Unit does is so important, spreading awareness and positive messages about protecting our planet, caring for and appreciating the natural world we live in.

So Untamed Romania really celebrates the natural history world of Romania. The brief from the team was something that I don’t get asked to do very much these days, which was to write melodies. They wanted a rich, lyrical, orchestral score, so it was a great opportunity for me to bring out all the melodies that I have saved up over the last ten years! I got to work with a 75-piece symphony orchestra as well which was a real joy. We actually got to record the orchestra all together in a big concert hall.

CC: That is amazing, recording the orchestra together does not happen very often anymore!

ND: It’s getting more and more rare to be able to have the whole orchestra in one room at the same time performing a score, so I’m very fortunate to be able to do that on Untamed Romania. The director wanted a thematic score and to have character themes for the various animals including a theme for a family of bears. We them over the course of a year over the four seasons, from a cold inhospitable winter to melancholic autumn, and a sprightly spring through a hot languid summer.

When you think of Romania there is a fairytale quality, wolves, Dracula, forests, and the filmmakers also wanted me to bring that out in the score.

CC: Did you use any instruments in that score that you wouldn’t commonly use?

ND: Normally I do actually, but for Untamed Romania the producers wanted a very ‘western’ orchestral sounding score.

The film I was just working on, The Reason I Jump, is very experimental, I was working with found sound and using experimental techniques – an approach that I didn’t take on Untamed Romania. On The Reason I Jump I use the human voice a lot and it’s quite a unique score. The film is about the world of non-verbal autism and the characters in it don’t speak, so I gave them a voice through the score.

Another project with uncommon instruments was Darkness Visible, a psychological horror film set in India. I used instruments like the Sarangi, an old Indian classical short necked fiddle, a guitar viol which was made for me and is based on a renaissance instrument called the Viola da Gamba, which is like a cello but fretted like a guitar. You actually bow it, not pluck or strum it. I also used a Halo, which is a handpan. I have a wall of acoustic instruments from all over the world so I like to take the unique, acoustic sounds they make and manipulate them taking them out of context so when you hear them you don’t really know what you are listening to.

Another film with uncommon instrumentation was The Enemy Within, about a Japanese World War II pilot who crashed off the coast of Ni’ihau in Hawaii. The director wanted a blend of Japanese influence blended with Hawaiian music. I thought there was no way I would write music for hula girls. But it was a serious thriller, so I did a lot of research and I found a Hawaiian slack guitar played on acoustic guitar. I also brought in Japanese influences like the shakuhachi flute and the koto which is like a Japanese zither. I felt as though I was going back to my roots with Peter Gabriel and world music. I love to find something that I have never heard, find the expert in their unique styles and have them show off their wonderful instruments – making the ‘invisible’ visible!

CC: That’s amazing. It also must be so interesting to meet the people who are keeping these uncommon instruments in use.

ND: Yes, I have to tell you I did a series that was set in the Arctic circle and so I did a lot of research into the music of the Arctic, which was a project in itself. The traditional music of Northern Norway is made by the Sami people who are like the Norwegian version of the Eskimos. The Sami people don’t sing in the way we normally sing, they Yoik with their throats. They make sounds a little like Inuit throat singing but about the sounds of the environment and the animals around them, like the wolves and eagles, and all the creatures of the forest. I searched high and low to find a Sami Yoiker.

Eventually I found a man who lives in Tromso the most northerly town in Norway, and it took weeks for him to get back to me, as the communication is so slow where he lives. I invited him to come to London to do a session for me, and I remember I picked him up from the airport.

When he arrived he was so freaked out, as he’d never seen so many people in one place at the busy airport. His contribution was utterly unique to the tracks that I was writing. I love searching out musicians from remote corners of the globe and opening them up to my world and also learning their culture and musical worlds. There is this great exchange of creativity that’s so enriching.

CC: It seems like you really feel it’s important for these kinds of musicians to be part of telling their own stories.

ND: Absolutely! I did a feature film called The Confessions of Thomas Quick about Sweden’s most notorious serial killer. We were looking for a song for the end credits, and I decided to write one with a singer I had discovered the year before, Eivør, she comes from the Faroese Islands which are these tiny islands south of Iceland in the Atlantic Ocean. She has got the most incredible voice. I wrote this song for her voice and which was just an amazing experience. It’s just really great to be able to bring these musicians out to the world.

FeaturesAndrew P. AldereteApril 27, 2020Nainita Desai, Interview, archive