Starting to come near to two hundred musical dives in all manner of musical genres from drama (“Crossfire”) to video games (“Immortality”) and television series (“The Man Who Brought Cricket”), Nainita Desai is no better than when musically documenting people pushing themselves to extremes to touch the heavens or recesses of the earth. Segueing through creative depth chambers that have taken the English-born Indian musician from math to sound editing and design and finally composing, Desai has created her own sonic world of flowing organic and electronic melodies, as integrated with her own self-built instruments.
20211022 GENT 48ste FilmFestGent : Nainita Desai (Photo by Bas Bogaerts)
The result of Desai’s recent works are soundscapes that puts listeners into equal parts mesmerizing awe and the life-or-death suspenseful feeling of these extreme sport Icaruses getting too close in their flight to their respective suns. With any number of documentaries on her playlist, Desai received a Primetime Emmy nomination for evoking the ranges of a Nepalese climber attempting to summit the world’s highest mountains in his self-set timeline of seven months with Netflix’s “14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible.” That Desai has reached a personal high so far with a Primetime Emmy Nomination said much about her enveloping, environmental soundtrack that made you feel every dangerous step up and its corresponding feeling of awe at being on top of the world.
Now Desai’s unique musical atmospheres envelop the world of free diving, in which seemingly superhuman divers descend, and ascend dozens of feet in a single, life-holding breath. As directed by documentarian Laura McGann (“Revolutions”), “The Deepest Breath” chronicles Italian Alessia Zecchini and Irishman Stephen Keenan, one young woman relentlessly pushing herself to the record-breaking limits, and the other older Irishman who turns his own deep-diving talents into saving others. Given a bond beyond trust, McGann’s gorgeously made “Breath” employs real footage and skillful recreations to chronicle a sport perhaps most familiar to viewers through Luc Besson’s 1988 film “The Big Blue.” But here the endless blue holes, streamlined figures jetting to the bottom and the constant peril of life and death take on a whole new power.
Desai’s all-enveloping score sings the body aquatic with a similar grace of beauty and danger. Female voices befitting the sirens of the deep swim with neo-classical melody, enveloping electronic production values, and ticking clock danger that merges with the moments of quiet where only heartbeats and waves are heard. It’s music that not only captures the depths and the determination to go to the physical limit of endurance but perhaps most importantly to hear two people in a lyrical, high-pressure dance with the most unexplored areas on earth – creating a score that’s lyrically transcendent as it plunges downwards to the limit of endurance.
Why math at first on your career path? And do you think it came into play when constructing your own instruments?
I’ve always been drawn to film music but didn’t realize it was a career I could embark on. I remember borrowing an old vintage VCS3 synth from school when I was 13 years old and that got me into synthesizers, sound synthesis, and subsequently into music engineering. Being academic and enjoying math, plus being under peer and cultural pressure to have a ‘normal’ stable career, I ended up with a degree in math and then a post-grad thesis on the wave equation, studying acoustics, psychoacoustic, and music psychology and music tech. I was fascinated by Brian Eno’s work in generative music, Delia Derbyshire, and how she used math in her music at the BBC Radiophonic workshop. I was influenced by Michael Brook and his work with the infinite guitar, sound design, and mangling found and natural sound. I’d record sounds everywhere I went with a portable DAT recorder. I then got into Skip Lievsay’s work with the Coen Bros films. I had a curiosity about the narrative power of sound. That interest eventually landed me my first paid job on a feature film as an assistant sound editor on “Little Buddha” directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.
When given a documentary, do you musically see it as such?
It doesn’t matter what the genre is. It’s all storytelling. Documentary is particularly nuanced and sensitive because you have real human beings and need to tread carefully with how the subject matter is treated. With the music, the lines are fairly blurred between scores for docs or drama for me. Some docs I work on are very cinematic in the way they look and the story can unfold like a drama. Musically I sometimes approach it thematically and the process can be very similar so there’s not much difference.
Documentaries have been a major part of your work since you segued into composing. What draws you to that genre, particularly ones dealing with people confronting nature, whether they’re in the Arctic, walking with elephants or fending off shark attacks?
I believe that to be a good film and TV composer you have to understand what it means to be human. You have to be a bit of a psychologist and have a curiosity of the human condition and be empathetic. I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked on a few incredible true-life stories on my past few projects, where I endeavor to understand the psyche of what makes people do what they do and understand human emotion characters and relationships. That really interests me. Real stories can be so much more impactful and powerful than made up ones! Regarding nature, I’ve always had a deep-rooted interest in the natural world, that connection humans have with the world around us. The biggest questions we are confronted with at the moment are about climate change and working on wildlife shows and films about the environment is my way of contributing towards creating awareness of what’s happening to our precious home planet. That being said, I love all forms of storytelling and love to be whisked away to other fictional worlds.
Talk to us about your Emmy-nominated score for the mountaineering documentary “14 Peaks.” Though it’s about a completely different environment, do you think its story of an extreme climber serves as a precursor for “The Deepest Breath?”
Both films happen to be about individuals who are extreme sports athletes. However, I didn’t see or think that at all when I got “The Deepest Breath.” There is a parallel love story in “The Deepest Breath” and how we go about telling the story is very different between the films. With “14 Peaks” I was inspired by the cinematography, the landscape but also “Nims” (Nirmal Purja). I wanted to show what it means to be human. Nims is driven, fearless, fun and inspiring. Working closely with the director Torquil Jones over 6 months, the musical brief was to utilize a symphonic sound palette. There are 14 mountains to summit, and each mountain had a different musical challenge. Each mountain’s theme covered different emotional challenges that the team experienced from heroism to tragedy to nail biting tension. Strings played a large feature because they can handle the grandeur of the region but could also be brought down to a singular element for emotional connection. Nims had a special bond with his mother, so I translated that intimacy into a violin solo when they reunite in the film’s emotional climax. I explored creating drama and tension using unusual rhythms with the orchestra and ethnic percussion that’s insistent and drives Nim’s journey forward relentlessly. It was important for me to highlight the Sherpas and the region by integrating Nepalese plucked stringed instruments. The orchestral strings are played with a raspy, raw quality that evoke the brutal danger and ethnicity of the region. We recorded the score at Abbey Road studios which was challenging during the pandemic and the enforced social distancing of the musicians in the room when we recorded the score created an airy acoustic ambience of its own that complemented the altitude of the mountains in the film!
On that note, does “The Deepest Breath’s” score’s very subtle feeling of electronically being “world music” draw on what you learned during your time working with Peter Gabriel?
I got to work with the best engineers, producers and musicians of that time at Real World studios and music from other cultures has always been embedded in my DNA from having Indian classical music as a kid. Whether it’s working with orchestras or musicians from other cultures, it’s just a combination of sounds that evoke emotions and moods in us, so I just keep an open mind. One thing I learnt at Real World was the ethos of capturing the magic of a performance quickly, so it is fresh and exciting, and how to be open-minded and nurturing with a musician’s contribution to your music. How to bring out the best in a player when collaborating can make or break the success of how your music connects with audiences – it’s all about the feeling and not always about technical perfection!
Free diving champion Alessia Zecchini
Given your own prolific rise as a composer, could you identify with Alessia’s determination?
Composing is like an extreme sport in itself! You have to have extreme stamina, perseverance, dedication and determination. I don’t have records to break like athletes though; I’m just ‘competing’ with myself in that every project I take on poses a new set of challenges, technically, creatively or logistically. I sometimes push myself or get pushed to beyond what I thought I was capable of! In that regard I am learning about myself too and what my own limits are with every project. Working in a highly competitive industry you have to have bucket loads of self-belief and have the mental strength to cope with the rigors of working in the industry. It is similar to any profession or Endeavor.
How would you describe your own connection to the ocean, especially as you’d done work as a sound designer for the climate change short “When the Tides Went Down?”
By sheer co-incidence I’m currently working on 3 projects that have the ocean and underwater worlds at the heart of the shows. They are all very different genre wise but as a Piscean I have a strong infinity with the ocean. “When The Tides Went Down” is a very dystopian look at our potential future and sadly, we’re getting closer and closer to that vision of our environment.
Tell about working with “Deepest Breath” director Laura McGann on your musical approach?
The score was written over the period of a year working very closely with director Laura McGann and though the music evolved throughout the edit in a very organic way, we still retained the initial concept of ideas we conceived. We wanted to weave together the parallel stories of Alessia and Stephen and their personal journeys, the thrilling danger of the sport whilst also capturing their nascent relationship against a stunning underwater backdrop. I was interested in capturing all that musically, but also, it’s about Alessia, and the joys of following her journey, her successes, her inspiration, her hopes from the positive bond when Stephen, her safety instructor sets up his diving center in Dahab, off the coast of Egypt.
Laura was wonderful to collaborate and work with because she would send me these long Spotify playlists, and we’d spend hours discussing via WhatsApp and Zoom what she liked about the pieces, what approach we would take, what we were trying to capture story-wise, and emotionally for the characters. So, we split it into two different sonic palettes for our two lead characters, Steven and Alessia, to reflect their inner motivations and personalities. Overall, the sound palette was a small string ensemble with piano, voice and electronics.
Alessia is this young, energetic, vibrant Italian woman who’s a champion free diver, we decided that her sound would really be based around a female voice, but because the whole film is based on free diving and breath, using the air in your lungs, the approach I wanted was to use the voice in a very breathy way. So, that was fun. And there’s a scene earlier on the film, where she’s twelve years old, learning to free dive and being a champion swimmer, so I use the voice of a twelve-year-old girl in the music score just for that one cue.
There are a couple of other tracks where you have very light fast breaths used in a percussive way for the high-energy dramatic dive moments. With Stephen, this young man is finding himself. He’s on a personal soul-searching quest and there’s a lot of energy, wonder and drive to his personality. So, I used a minimal, sort of a chamber string approach, with the cello as his sound. Halfway through the film, Alessia and Stephen finally meet, and there’s this wonderful moment where they connect and fall in love, so both their sounds come together and it intertwines into a love theme, like a call and response kind of feel with the voice and the cello coming together, which is really, really special. And then, there are other moments in the film where you have Alessia’s freediving rival, Hanako, this Japanese woman who is very dynamic and exciting and she has her own dynamic theme.
What do you think the movie’s combination of recreation and actual footage lends to the score, as opposed to it going for completely real approach?
There are aspects of the story telling where they didn’t have the footage to explain some of what was going on so there are a handful of reconstruction shots. Then there is some beautifully shot imagery by Julie Gautier who is a free diver herself and her imagery was incredibly inspiring for me. It really helped me bring out the poetic, meditative side of free diving. The opening title imagery of crashing wavs in slow motion created almost like stop frame photography was a great creative challenge. I could hear the force of nature with the thundering drums and the intimacy of the sole human diver played on the solo viola.
Tell us about the violin and piano-driven classical “chamber” element of the score.
The very first theme that was written was Stephen’s adventure theme. Stephen’s sound is the cello, so it naturally evolved into a chamber sound. I generally don’t like to veer towards the default use of piano based scores but sometimes you just have to give into what is working.
Free Diver Stephen Keenan
How did you want to capture the element of the time it takes to do the dives?
The very first dive in the opening of the film is played out in real time with no music. We felt it would be much more effective that way. Your heart is almost in your mouth as you see this scene played out. It was a brave move to do that and not smother it with music. The music for the competitive dives through the rest of the film are paced so that they get more exciting as we progress. We used a real heartbeat at times and then other times we used percussion to mimic the sound of a real heartbeat, all blending together into the cues.
On that note, scores that fuse sound design with melody don’t tend to be very musical as such. How do you think you’ve been changing that with scores like “The Deepest Breath?”
I love melody! It’s a very important device in scores for me, but I don’t get asked to write tunes very often. Laura wanted a contemporary sounding score. We actually had a lot more electronics and beats early on in the score but as the edit evolved, we wanted more emotional warmth, and strings and melodies found their way naturally into the score.
Alessia and Stephen
“The Deepest Breath is particularly captivating because you don’t know if either Alessia or Stephen will survive their record-breaking quests. Given that, how dramatic did you want to make the score?
The culmination of the emotional climax of the film is this twelve-minute diving sequence, filled with tension. So, we did the reverse, instead of going big with the music, we tried to make you lean in and draw you in, so you have an immersive experience, so we brought in lots of subtle sound design elements within the music. It’s quite sparse and you hear the sound of the heartbeat. There’s a lot to tell the in the sequence of events that happened so making it as immersive as possible was the approach for us.
I don’t want to give away the ending, (though you can easily google the real story to find out what happened!), but it’s quite dangerous and filled with tension. It’s a very emotional end sequence, which was, again, a big challenge to write, to treat the characters with respect and dignity and be uplifting at the end as well. I want to take the viewer on an emotional roller coaster of a journey and this film gave me so much potential to do that for the bigger more thrilling moments of the dive to the euphoric moments.
How did you want to capture the tragic nature of the score? Or do you think there is one to this story?
We wanted to end the film on an emotional high. The end is tragic, but I walk away from this film loving life and living life to the full. “How could one life touch so many people?” is one of my favorite lines in the film. There is true heroism and altruism in the film so musically the end is bittersweet we wanted it to be uplifting musically, ascending to an angelic climax without falling into cheesiness – I hope!
The awesome cult film “Hackers” which you worked on as a sound designer has just received a release on the 4K format. What do you think about the endurance of the movie, particularly when it comes to its soundtrack.
I love that movie! I created custom sounds for the using Roland samplers and my first Mac Quadra 650 computer. It became a bit of a cult movie with such a cool soundtrack. I remember when I was working on it, it was the coolest thing. I used to read Mondo 2000 magazine and was really into cyberculture. “Hackers” embraced that zeitgeist so it’s great to see a lasting legacy. I was a huge fan of The Prodigy, Orbital, Massive Attack and Leftfield. The soundtrack was bold and ahead of its time that set a bit of a precedent in the use of contemporary tracks in films at the time.
Do you think there’s a common theme that runs through your documentary scores?
I actually try to choose very different types of stories to tell and not repeat myself musically as I get bored musically and like new creative challenges. “Villeneuve-Pironi” was contemporary, orchestral. “Bodyparts” is quite jazz and vocal influenced. “For Sama” is intimate and emotional. “The Reason I Jump” is experimental blending my love of found sound. “Persona” is an HBO feature doc that’s purely electronic synth driven. They all have different conceptual approaches but if there’s a common thread, it’s about authenticity and finding a truth and the underbelly of a film that’s at the heart of every project.
Nainita with The Vienna Orchestra
What’s up ahead for you?
I’m working on a video game for EA Originals that will be out next year which I’m really excited about; we’re recording at Abbey Road, Vienna and Africa ! For film and TV, I’ve just wrapped on a series for James Cameron and the BBC and a wildlife series for Apple TV that will release soon. Season 2 of “The Tower,” a police crime drama has just launched in the UK and came out last month on Britbox in the USI have an action-adventure series in the works, an art installation that launches in California and a few feature documentaries for 2024.
Do you personally see the appeal of extreme sports? And do you think these films and scores will inspire younger viewers to go on their own explorations, and perhaps extremes ones at that?
If you’re asking, would I ever do it myself? Absolutely no, not for me! But I totally understand why people do it. I really enjoy doing my research when starting a project reading around the subject matter soaking up YouTube videos. I do believe we have a morbid curiosity of watching other people putting themselves in extreme situations from the comfort of my own homes but at the same time films like this are inspirational; even though I don’t embark on the actual extreme activities myself, it gives me a glimpse into other worlds and what drives other people to do what they do. It can be a transformative inspirational awakening for someone and change someone’s life forever. That’s the power of film.
Watch “The Deepest Breath” on Netflix HERE. Nainita Desai’s score will be surfacing soon on Lakeshore Records
Visit Nainita Desai’s website HERE
Special thanks to Kyrie Hood and White Bear Publicity