The Music of Our Perfect Planet
CineConcerts was very fortunate to speak with Ilan Eshkeri about his score to the new David Attenborough documentary series A Perfect Planet. During our interview we discussed the current trends in film music and the challenges of composing for emotional reality.
Composer Ilan Eshkeri
CineConcerts (CC): For every creator and anybody that’s in any sort of art there's always a moment where they realize something about themselves, you know a path that they must go down because it either makes them feel a certain way or they sort of see a relationship that they haven't felt before and so what was that moment for you when you decided to go from a musician to actually applying it to the moving image for film?
Ilan Eshkeri (IE): That’s a really great question, it’s a deep question, I think. For me I, as teenager, I wanted to be a guitarist in a rock band, I mean, who doesn’t, but I just wanted to work in the music business. I got, through friends of friends of friends, introduced to this composer Ed Shearmur, who was the protégé of Michael Kamen and then very quickly I met Michael Kamen. And I worked for Michael and I went to college but would spend my summer holidays in Abbey Road Studios, recording the score for movies like Lethal Weapon 4.
So, I had this really amazing experience very early on and I had all the right bits of the puzzle for film music because I had learned violin from 4 years old. My mom managed a charity orchestra when I was growing up so I was used to sitting in the back of an orchestra, I understood all of that stuff.
There were other people that were better at music than me, had learned more than I did, but it was sort of in my blood and also I knew about contemporary stuff and I liked computers and very early on in my career it was the point at which, when I started people were still recording on two inch tape and 48 track digital tape and all of that but very quickly, the dawn of Pro Tools and digital audio recording and I was right there, literally building computers and pulling them apart for composers and experimenting with all of this technology.
I was young enough to be pulled into and understand how all of that worked in great detail and so I never really thought about it, it was just the natural path for me and I became a film composer but I’d always, in my earlier years, I had started writing a violin concerto, I had these ideas about a ballet and all of the stuff that I’d, all the songs and all the things I’d done and the bands I’d been in in my friends’ garages and all that kind of stuff got left behind because I was so enamored, and rightly so, with the film industry.
But then the film industry began to shift and in the way that it worked with music and I found that it wasn't quite what I wanted it to be and, also, I found that, I think that a lot of it used to be about artistic collaboration. And now there is that, but you’ve got to search hard for it. A lot of music for film and television, which is very functional, now, I don't know whether this is just me growing older and that it was always that way or—but this is the way I see it. That there’s a lot of functional stuff and I decided around the time my daughter was born, about 5 years ago, maybe a bit more than that. I suddenly thought that, I’d done a few films, worked really hard on a few films back-to-back and I realized that, I was going a good job with them and they were nice enough films, but they weren’t artistically my heart, my soul.
I realized that that’s where I wanted to be, I didn't want to be a perfectionist and brilliant at my craft and there's nothing wrong with that, you know, to be that person who builds incredible furniture, but you’re a craftsman, but I realized I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to be an artist, to display his stuff in an art gallery, right? To take the simile further and so I decided that I would take a step back from all of that and do art-based projects.
So, I wrote a ballet for Sergei Polunin, the one of the most famous if not the most famous ballet dancer in the world, for him and his girlfriend at the time. He’s still the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. And I did a show with Burberry, the fashion label, but these were projects that were either conceived by me or where I had complete creative control and I started doing more and more projects like this where I it was just me doing my thing and then I chose my film projects very carefully, I worked with Ray Fiennes as a director, he gives me a lot of freedom creatively and you know, I like to bring an idea to the table and he's really good at making me stick to that idea in an extreme way.
And now whenever I go into meetings, whenever I take on a project, I go in and I say, and this was the same with A Perfect Planet, I sat down, I went in for a meeting at Silverback and I spoke to Huw Cordey, the series producer and the director of one the episodes and I said, “Look, if I do this, I don’t want to do it the normal way, the way that everyone else has been doing it, this traditional symphonic, big approach. If I do it, I want to do it more intimate, with a band. Of course, we'll have strings, of course we’ll have brass, we’ll do those things as well.
But I want the heart and soul of it come from a contemporary and a pop place which is where a lot of my work is at the moment. And he agreed to that in fact he was really excited by that and so we agreed to work together collaboratively and he really stuck by me, whatever crazy idea I threw at them, whatever approach I wanted to take, I'm not saying everything stuck, because of course, it doesn't and it's still a collaboration, but I'm very single-minded about my artistic endeavor and I'm creatively a lot happier. I might be a little poorer than I was, but a lot happier.
(CC): You're defined as a neoclassical composer, is neoclassical now sort of a group of composers that are really putting their own creative voice in their music for film or TV is that how you would define it?
(IE): Ah, maybe. It does say that on my Wikipedia, I only noticed it recently, but I don't know if I’d describe myself as neoclassical or whether post minimalism. I feel that there's a lot of
labels for the kind of work that people are doing these days. I find that there’s something across all art at the moment where we seem to be looking at the past and taking many different elements from the past and combining them into something new because everything’s been done, right? We’ve been through all the kinds of classical music, completely deconstructed harmonies. Jazz did its whole thing, from writing tunes to being completely deconstructed in about 40 years. So, Pop songs, every conceivable king of pop song has been written. So, we’re left now with, “What are the kids listening to?” Yeah, they’re listening to new stuff but all art from all time is available to us all the time on the internet. So that is creating a new thing where there’s a mixing up of different things in different ways that no one ever imagined possible and that excites me.
So, I find that I draw from different products, that I draw from different things that feel appropriate to me. I don't know how to describe that. Certainly, what links my work is a love of narrative and I love to tell stories and that’s very important to me. And education and passion for the planet and trying to feel like I'm doing something more than just creating for creation sake.
(CC): How did you get involved with A Perfect Planet? Obviously, you're very passionate about the environment and it’s a supercritical topic right now. Is that what made you jump on board? Or was it how the narrative was structured to give you more composing creative freedom?
(IE): I think it was exactly that. It was what I said before about having creative freedom which they were very generous with and very brave with, of course it’s a very brave choice. It's much easier as a direct to keep control of your thing, to say, “just do this, make it like this,” right? But if somebody comes this to you and says, “Listen, I've got an idea and this is the way I'm going to do it and you need to trust and go with me otherwise, I don't want to do the job.” That's a leap of faith. So, I’m very grateful to the people who trust me to do that.
But then on top of that—this is my fourth David Attenborough project. I did one about the Natural History Museum in UK, I did one based in the oceans, and I did a virtual reality one where David got to talk to a 3D model of himself, it was amazing. And this is my fourth one so in a sense I’d already scratched that David Attenborough itch, you know? I mean, not to be complacent, not that I wouldn’t always want to work with one of the greatest humans, in my opinion, on the planet, but there needed to be the right thing about it.
So, what was important about this one is the way that it is trying to show the audience how the planet is constructed perfectly for life to thrive on it, whatever form of life that is. How there are these forces that work together perfectly, that allow us to exist. And then what we're doing wrong, how we’re affecting it, and what we might be able to do to try to improve that and that, to me, is such an important message because we really do need a paradigm shift in thinking here.
I thought about this even before the program, I’ve done this with my 5-year-old, I’m teaching her this bin's for recycling because it's plastic and this one, etc. and I’m teaching her this. I’m 43 years old, when I was growing up if this was even in a conversation somewhere it was extremely niche. I didn’t grow up with anything like that. And so, what I believe, and this is also my interpretation of what David Attenborough is saying in all these interviews at the moment, if we teach the next generation about all of these things and if we get them to understand that the planet isn't just there to provide us with stuff for us to consume, but that we’re actually part of the system of the planet and that we need to play our role and be part of that system.
If we can teach them all of that through recycling, through growing a vegetable patch, through not wasting, through sustainability, through an understanding of the climate then this generation, these children, they’ll be the next scientists that are solving those problems. The next politicians solving those problems, the next businessmen investing into that. And that is how we will manage to continue to exist.
(CC): In these types of documentaries about the planet, you see the perfect systems, you see how magnificent volcanoes are, and the oceans in these ecosystems, but there's also a touch of fragility. Because this balance can be destructive very easily and you see it when birds get eaten, etc. Especially when watching the first episode, the music sort of danced around with that emotion that you feel, seeing how brutal the wild is. When you're seeing a big, magnificent volcano, you're not necessarily seeing or listening to it an epic massive 80-piece orchestra blare music, you're hearing these sort of soft, sort of repetitive triplets.
(IE): Yeah, it’s an arpeggio moving around and the whole idea was that this is a celebration of the planet. This is a positive thing that you know, there’s so much talk about climate and doomsday climate stuff. And it’s real and we do have to take this on board and be worried and act on it. But often what it doesn’t take into account is human ingenuity.
What I think the filmmakers wanted to do, what I definitely wanted to do with the music is celebrate the planet. Look at this incredible place, this beautiful place that we live and even rebranding volcanoes—volcanoes aren’t the bad guys. They create the minerals, they create land, fertile land. We couldn’t possibly exist without volcanoes; they create the balance in the atmosphere.
And so, it was all a celebration and I needed to write a theme that, for me, often with these series you watch them and they go from thing to thing to thing and that’s great…but for me, I wanted to have a sense of planet Earth, of mother nature of Gaia, whatever you want to call it. For me it needed a theme that you kept coming back to. It’s sometimes on the piano, it’s sometimes on those arpeggios on the cello or the strings, often it has a choir and vocals singing with it because that seemed to express the idea quite well. It's the only time you get that combination of instruments and so you remember. With an animal character, you come out, you see the planet and you get this music so it’s really anchored thematically in this music that the audience can hold on to.
Then the title piece “A Perfect Planet” which is used for the front titles and end titles, versions of it, but the title piece on the album, which is a 3-minute song without words, that was the thing that I wrote that expressed all that beauty, all that hope, all that possibility.
I really wanted it to be accessible. So, it starts with these very simple chords on the piano that even a child could play and it repeats this melody over and over again, but it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and mostly because voices join in. We got lots of amazing artists on board: Tim Wheeler from the band Ash and Tim Carter, the guitarist from Kasabian played drums on it, and this young up-and-coming folk singer called Daisy Chute. All these different people but then these choirs. Also, a bunch of children's choirs as well from schools and we were really lucky, we got right in there at the right moment before the dangerous bits of the pandemic when we were able to record some of them.
And everyone whose been involved with it has been really inspired, especially the children, who we weren’t allowed to tell them what it was until very recently when the press found out about it. When the kids found out about it, they were so inspired, so excited to watch the program, they gave the program so much more.
The other thing that gave me the idea was, when I was writing this piece of music originally—and writing a simple melody is always by far the hardest thing to do—but my daughter started singing it around the house. That gave me the idea that, if she’s five and she can sing it then maybe we can get some school kids to sing it. These kids were so inspired and we couldn’t tell them what they were doing at first. But we had several schools sing it and when we told them they there were so excited to be a part of this thing and so they'll watch this program with a lot of attention and hopefully they'll learn something from it.
So, I'd love to make this as inclusive as I can because I feel like there’s an opportunity here to inspire people through music towards some kind of change. I get that that’s a very lofty ambition, but we’ve all got to try and do our bit.
(CC): To go into the mechanics of actually scoring for documentary, do you compose with the narration or do you just see the images and compose to that and then they stick the narration over that? It seems very different from video games and film and much more complex.
(IE): When they send you a film, they haven't finished editing it, the commentary is largely there and it’s done by the director typically. And the way the I approach this, I'm not sure that I would advise everybody to try doing this, I decided to write each sequence—because each sequence is a story in their own right. So, I’d look at each sequence and this one has got these ants and they’re doing this thing and it’s a bit like a heist movie. And this one has got these two whales and it’s sort of like a sad love story—so it was like doing forty short films. Very challenging.
But the bit that I wouldn’t advise doing is, I wanted, as I said at the start, to approach this in a more contemporary way, so I wrote every single piece like it was a pop track. In terms of, you know, a verse, chorus kind of structure—very melodic. And then I stuck it up against the picture and the narration and I’d be led by the environment. Is it hot, is it cold? What are these animals going through, what is their story? What kind of animals are they, what kind of sounds would you use for that?
I’d go away and come up with my own thing and then I’d put it up against the picture, but also the pace of it. The pace that the creatures are moving at, which informs the pace of the editing and informs the pace of the music, but also informs the pace of the narration. When putting it up against all this, and for me, I wanted to try to change the music as little as possible. So, I only changed it where I really, really had to, to make it fit with the picture or the narration, but for the most part I didn’t change it much at all.
And then, towards the end, David does his narration and, I believe, not all the time, but often I think he gets to hear the music as he’s doing the narration. He’s so experienced and professional and so he gets the rhythm and the pace and sometimes he changes it and he says the things he wants, and he’s got a lot of knowledge to bring to the table of course. So, it comes back a little bit different and there were times when I had to tweak things. But for the most part, it just all came together rather nicely.
(CC): There’s a moment of high tension in the first episode, where this hyena is chasing this wildebeest calf and it grabs the calf while the voice over says that only 1 in 10 survive—and you raise the tension with what sounded like a Tibetan throat singer or some very deep vocal—am I right or am I way off base?
(IE): That’s a technique by the French horns, they call it “stopping” the French horns. You write it by putting a plus sign on top of the notes and the horn players stick their hands right up the bell of the horn and, I don’t know what they’re doing up there, but it makes it sound like that. And what's interesting is that sound becomes not very powerful but more deformed somehow the lower you get, but not very powerful.
So, you need to amplify it a little bit. And also, there’s something about the way it's ringing, if you do two notes very close together, like a minor second or a second, like on a piano a black note and a white note together. It gives it their weird vibration and it’s quite an uncomfortable or uncanny sound, it’s not a very familiar sound.
That whole sequence is all orchestral, it was a decision, but it was one of the only pieces that is all symphonic all the way through, but it was just so, sort of, Out of Africa. I couldn’t help but try to make an homage to John Barry, you know.
(CC): Is it difficult for you to compose to these scenes that are very emotionally traumatic? Is it difficult to not make it too scary, how do you find that balance?
(IE): I remember wrestling with that more in the past and I guess just years of experience or being an old hack or however you want to describe it. I find that balance quite easily, but it is a learned skill because you're right, it needs to have the right tension, but you don't want to frighten the children. That is quite tricky and also, the way to build that tension and to release it, that’s just the craft, I guess, that you learn as you as you go along.
(CC): Composers are master emotional manipulators with their music.
(IE): Yes, that is true, but the bit about it that’s slightly less cynical is that you have to really take those emotions on board. It’s why I don't do horror films; I did do one and you take all this stuff on board and you try to take the emotion. “How would I feel if I was in this situation and then how do I express that emotion?” And I feel those things quite deeply and they stay with me, so as a result, I don’t like to do horror films. I think you need to be very empathetic to be a good film composer.
[Caution: Spoilers for episode #1 of A Perfect Planet below!]
(CC): Speaking about how empathy really helps inform the creation of the music. Is there a part that you struggled with thematically because of the emotion in the scene, whether it was sad or joyful? I’m thinking specifically of the baby flamingos towards the beginning, as the wildebeest calf escaped, but some of the baby flamingos don’t.
(IE): I think that with the flamingos, I think it’s quite a cleverly made sequence because it is pretty dark, it’s quite upsetting. But the last bit of that sequence you see one of the flamingo chicks escaping, so in a sense, it does have a happy ending.
But the filmmakers, they struggle with this all the time. You know, how much can you show, how brutal can you be because you want to educate the audience but you don't want to scare them off. That's a real balance and it's a real balance when talking about climate as well.
I'm wrestling with those kinds of ideas all the time and trying to find the right balance and the answer is that, in the end, you try different things out and it's just an aesthetic.
It's just a feel, you watching you go, “That feels about right.” Or no. We have plenty of conversations about that, with me and the directors, me fighting for things that are like, “You can’t play this as scary. This is beautiful.” You could play it scary, but that’s not what we want to tell the audience.
As filmmakers, and I consider myself a filmmaker too, collaborating with the other filmmakers in our different areas of expertise. We have these conversations all the time about how best to represent what we're trying to say to the audience.
(CC): What’s next for you? I imagine that you've got a lot of projects coming your way. Is there anything you can share about what’s coming up?
(IE): No films at the moment. Like I said, films and TV are few and far between for me these days. Before lockdown I’ve been writing for a show called Space Station Earth, which is a show that I’ve written with the European Space Agency, which is our version of NASA. It tells emotional journey of 6 astronauts, the British astronaut Tim Peake and five of his European fellow astronauts. We did one show of that in Stockholm for 10,000 people.
I was terrified because I thought they all might leave half way through, but they stayed through the whole thing and they loved it and it went very well. We were hooked in to do a whole load of shows, festivals, and of course Covid put a stop to all of that. We’ve secured date for our shows again, but I’m not allowed to say exactly when yet but I’m really excited to be working back towards doing that live show, doing that tour. It connects really well with all of this because it’s all about how we see, how human beings see the planet and how they change when they leave the planet.
There’s not many of them, only five hundred and something astronauts, people that have ever literally been off the planet and looked down on it. All share a similar, a universal emotion that they find very hard to express in words. So, I decided to take on the challenge of trying to express that in music and also creating a backdrop of images that supported that whole idea.
(CC): Any advice for young composers out there?
(IE): I would say do work in as many different disciplines as possible. Do everything you can. I think to try and focus on one thing, to just write games, to just write films, is perhaps not really the modem way.
My career now is ballet, theatre, it’s live shows, pop songs, film, television, video games. Work across all disciplines and also write an album. When I started up it wasn’t possible to afford to buy the equipment, I would have needed to be able to write my own album. Now, you can make an album on your phone. So, make stuff, put it out there, and do as much as possible.
There’s no secret bit of genius advice in that, I'm afraid, it's just all hard work, but there’s so many wide and varied opportunities these days to do this kind of work. The technology makes it so accessible. I think there's no reason not to create a voice for yourself in a very confident way at a very early part of your career.
