An Interview with Nainita Desai

Nainita Desai is an award-winning composer for film, television, and video games. She came to composition after earning a degree in mathematics, followed by work in feature film sound design and music engineering. Desai won the “Breakthrough Composer of the Year” from the International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) in 2020, along with the “Discovery of the Year” award from the World Soundtrack Awards in 2021. She has composed scores for acclaimed documentary feature films such as For Sama, The Reason I Jump, 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible, and The Deepest Breath, along with television drama series The Tower, Funny Woman, Crossfire, and recently Nautilus. She recently started scoring video games and wrote the music for Call of Duty: MW2 and Immortality, followed by Tales of Kenzera: Zau in 2024. An elected member of the film committee at BAFTA and the London committee of the Oscars Academy, she regularly gives talks and masterclasses and sits on the juries of such awards as the Ivor Novellos and the Emmys.

The series Nautilus […] deals with the building of the Nautilus submarine that Captain Nemo commands, his origins and backstory, and the adventures and story of the crew. How did you find yourself involved with this project?

It came through the scoring of a feature documentary I did for Netflix called 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible. By some coincidence and serendipity, the wife of one of the producers [of Nautilus] was watching 14 Peaks and said to her husband, “Watch this. I think the music’s really great. Wouldn’t it be cool to have something like that for Nautilus?” So, they reached out to me, and that began a four-month journey of securing the project. I put together a reel, and 14 Peaks is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the breadth and variety of music I had to write for [Nautilus]. They were spending a year filming in Australia, and I had a Zoom with the producers while they were shooting out there. I had various producers and the lead director on the call; they sent me some scripts, which I was very, very excited about. In many respects, this is like a composer’s dream for me. There aren’t many opportunities to score a project and story of this nature. It’s based on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the iconic novel. I grew up loving it and was influenced by many of these fantastical tales, like Sinbad and Clash of the Titans and Ray Harryhausen films. They were part of my childhood, watching them on screen as reruns when I was 6 or 7 years old.

STILL FROM NAUTILUS

I put everything into this project in terms of wanting to score it, and there were lots of ups and downs on that journey. I wrote a suite, then had an initial meeting. They liked the ideas I had, describing various ideas and musical concepts that I had for the score, and they said, “Well, we’d like to hear your ideas!” I went away and wrote a suite of music, incorporating my vision for a theme for the Nautilus and a few other themes, like the love theme, a theme for the crew, a theme for Captain Nemo, the Dreadnought battle theme. They got back to me and said, “Well, okay, your ideas are really interesting, but there’s one thing that’s missing: we don’t hear a theme for Nemo himself.” Nemo has this dark past, so I went away and wrote a few more pieces and ideas for Nemo, and then waited a couple of months, and eventually, I secured the project. That began another 18-month journey working on that show.

What was it like, in terms of getting to not only compose all these themes, but getting to develop them and transform them across essentially 10 hours of the series?

I wrote a couple of thematic suites, where there’s a real breadth of emotions and dynamic range. You’ve got action, you’ve got fantasy, you’ve got a lot of special effects and creatures. Almost every episode has a monster-of-the-week approach to it. Then there’s the emotional drama, the romance, the comedy, the swashbuckling adventure. We knew what we didn’t want, and we knew what we wanted in a very basic way. We knew we didn’t want to hash Pirates of the Caribbean. This is an adventure on the high seas. They’re on the submarine, and they’re traveling all around the world. I certainly didn’t want to emulate anything reminiscent of Pirates of the Caribbean, so it meant staying away from those 6/8, 6/4 rhythms that instantly put you into pirate mode. [singbs] What they did want, and this is something that I don’t get asked very often, is to write melodies. They wanted a thematic score. For me, it was taking all these melodies that I’ve never had the opportunity to write, because people want textural scores or synth/electronic scores, and take all those melodies that I’d saved up in my memory bank and bring them out on this project.

The main theme was the Nautilus Theme, and coming up with a positive, fantastical, strong, bold melody was something that came fairly quickly. It came while writing the suite, and that’s something that we developed further for the first episode. But when it came to scoring that, there was something missing. I’ve been haunted by certain composers’ music and themes throughout my whole life. And one of them was Jerry Goldsmith’s theme from the original Alien. There’s this flute motif, flute ostinato, [sings] right at the beginning of the film, and that was not a direct influence, but it has stayed with me through my whole life. It’s like a bit of an earworm. And that was a kickoff point for me for this, because I wanted to create something that was a total contrast to the positive major theme. I wanted something that had a sense of mystery about it because Nemo is this dark, mysterious character. That theme was also evocative of the underwater world, this magical, mystical world. The Main Theme was originally section A, and I needed to go into a B section. And what I did was reverse them around: the main theme became the B section, which you hear lots of variations of all the time, while the A section was inspired by this mysterious flute ostinato motif from Goldsmith. It’s very different to that, but there’s just a tiny hint of Jerry Goldsmith vibe there; it goes from major to minor to major, so it’s got this ability to be quite versatile. I take these two sections and pull from them throughout the whole score.

SHAZAD LATIF AS CAPTAIN NEMO IN NAUTILUS

Then, there’s a theme for the crew, which has its own vibe to it; there’s a theme for every episode’s monster or central arc. For example, you’ve got Episode Three with the battle between the giant squid and the whale. The giant squid theme has a slight touch of 1950s old Hollywood about it. And so does another theme for the crinoids, these metal insect bugs. You hear a touch of [1950s Hollywood] there. Later, you hear the Rings of Fire. You look into the Rings of Fire, and the submarine is diving into this other world, almost like a volcano, diving to its death and destruction, and you hear this “classic” theme coming out. For me, I wanted to remind people of Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans, and Sinbad, or even King Kong. It’s not a direct connection to those scores, but it harks back to my impression of those films from my childhood, and bringing in those types of Hammer horror, old-fashioned brass melodies. That was something that I wanted to bring into the score, which you don’t hear these days. Nautilus is inspired by the old Victorian novels, so it was great to bring that in, and then have a sense of modernity as well.

The team wanted a big, sweeping orchestral score, but they wanted it contemporary at the same time. I am using electronics in a subtle way here or there. Since they’re travelling all around the world, every episode is like a mini-feature film. You’ve got one episode where they’re in the Arctic Circle playing cricket on the ice. In another episode, they visit this English rajah who has his own tropical island. Then you go to the Valkyries in Scandinavia, which I had so much fun with, and then, of course, a whole episode devoted to the discovery of Atlantis. I remember watching The Man from Atlantis as a kid. That was so fun! So, all these themes came out when we go to the Arctic and meet this badass Scandinavian-female warrior tribe. I brought in these Scandinavian soloists who play traditional Scandinavian instruments such as the nyckelharpa, the Hardanger fiddle, and a bit of the hurdy-gurdy as well. With Atlantis, I wanted to evoke this lost mystical underwater city that’s rediscovered by the crew, so I’m using epic choirs for the first time; this big choral sound, as well as a touch of the theremin, which is associated with old 1950s B-movies. “Atlantis” has a sweeping theme that’s evocative of Lawrence of Arabia or Sinbad; it’s slightly exotic. Benoit is the character in the show who is the scientist and explorer, and it’s his life’s dream to discover Atlantis, so the theme of Atlantis and Benoit’s character are connected and fused together.

I plant seeds of themes in early episodes that come to full fruition and completion later. You have something like this with Atlantis, when Benoit’s in a library in Episode Three or Four, and he opens this big dusty book that he finds, and there’s a map of Atlantis. When you think of slightly fantastical themes, there’s a beautiful theme that John Williams wrote for Raiders [of the Lost Ark] on the flute, I think, and that idea is something that I wanted to bring into the theme for Atlantis, which is this: [sings]. In fact, I think it’s Marion’s Theme from Raiders. I wanted to evoke that slightly mysterious, evocative, romantic feel for the theme for Atlantis and for the Love Theme that we have with Humility. For Captain Nemo himself, there is a love theme that I plant seeds of earlier on in the series. It’s not very often I get to do that, but I was trying to map this structure out thematically through the whole series like a jigsaw puzzle. And sometimes, if I wrote a theme for a character or for an idea later in the series, we’d go back to an earlier episode, take that theme and plant it in a couple of other places elsewhere, so I’d rewrite a cue earlier on in the series and come back to it. There’s a series of connecting branches and networks through the show, and of course, the most important theme is the Nautilus Theme that you hear at key moments. Every episode also has a 10-minute action sequence, which is really intense, with big climactic finales, so they would take a long time to write.

The last two episodes, […] those were two of my favorite episodes, and as I was watching the Valkyries one, I was thinking, “Oh, yeah, there’s the nyckelharpa. There’s the Hardanger fiddle. This is perfect.” In that final episode, as you were talking about these long, 10-minute action sequences, in this one, it happens more closely to the beginning of the episode than to the end. I remember watching and listening to this and just thinking, “Oh, this is just a dream to get to score.”

It was! That was very difficult piece to write though, because it’s so long. I think the key scene in that is something like seven and a half minutes long. You’re oscillating between their plotting and planning their big climactic revenge sequence, which was evocative of a Sherlock Holmes Victorian caper. They’re all in costume, they’re all undercover, and you’re cutting between different characters and what all these different people are doing throughout the whole sequence in different locations with mini stories going on, and so the music had to tie it all together. The whole thing with Episode Ten, is that they’re up against it, timewise, so there’s this ‘race against the clock’ feel to it, so the ticking-clock tension element is running through that whole scene bringing it all together, and I’m taking you on this roller coaster of highs and lows as different plot lines are happening. I don’t want to give a plot spoiler away, but it’s really exciting to work on that and then bring in touches of the themes here and there as well. You get the Nautilus Theme coming in, you get Nemo’s theme, you get Humility’s Theme, and that was a lot of fun to write.

How important to you was it that the protagonist of this series was Indian? Did that make a difference at all, in terms of your excitement about the series?

Yeah. Initially, I thought, “Okay, are we going to write music that has touches of ethnicity to it and Indian music,” and we didn’t. We basically stayed away from that, apart from one little portion in Episode 1, because this is otherworldly overall. We’re going to this fantastical world. They’re all real places, but we don’t name these traditional seas, countries or territories. I brought in unusual instruments. I don’t like to fall into clichés. Because I don’t have a degree in music, I’m not falling on the canon of classical music when writing big orchestral scores or the traditional ways of doing things when I was writing these themes. I’m doing it in terms of just evoking the right feeling, so with Nemo and the Indian element, there are a couple of flashback moments that happen when you find out about Nemo’s past. He’s hallucinating and goes into this dreamlike state, so in those flashback moments, that’s where I’m bringing in a touch of his family and his wife and daughter represented by a touch of the Indian santoor, which is this zither-type instrument, and also the female voice, which I sang on; I was pulling from my Indian heritage when I sang those little bits and pieces.

Incidentally, you can visit Disneyland Paris, which originally had the Nautilus experience going back to the 1970s or the ‘80s, based on the original James Mason film. They decommissioned it, but because of the show, they modernised and updated the whole experience. I got to take the themes from Nautilus, so that the music you hear in the experience is the same as the music in the show. It all ties together and is a lovely family experience for kids to learn about marine wildlife.

FOSO SENSORIO © 2025 BRUCE MUNRO. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SERENA MUNRO

You have an art installation upcoming that is located in California, and that is called FOSO?

Yes. FOSO, F-O-S-O, which is an acronym for Fiber Optic Symphonic Orchestra.

What does it encompass? How did you end up doing this?

The majority of my work is film and television, and now video games as well, and I was approached by Bruce Monroe, a well-known artist that creates light installations around the world. He reached out and commissioned me to write a 30-minute work for this art installation. It’s an abstract, large-scale, outdoor installation of an entirely light-responsive orchestra. You have 32 two-meter-high, five-meter-diameter light columns, and each one represents a ‘musician.’ It roughly forms the layout of an orchestra, so each musician, each little section of the orchestra, is represented by a column of light. His idea for it came from the Australian washing line called a Hills Hoist. It’s this washing line that, if you plant it in your garden, it grows and has spiral rings around it, and you put your clothes on it to dry out in the garden. What he’s created is something that’s inspired by it. It’s made up of lots of fibre optic lights and is quite stunning to look at, very contemporary, very modern. There’s a control system which scrolls through this spectrum of colours synchronised to the score. It’s in this place called Sensorio in Paso Robles, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco in wine country. It’s in acres and acres of land with these beautiful fields of light, and other light installations. But for this particular one, you can just sit under the night sky, have a glass of wine, and experience the whole thing displayed in front of you, or you can walk inside and immerse yourself in this imaginary orchestra. If you want to hear some of the first violins, you can walk up to the pillar of light that is playing out just the violin stem. Each pillar has a set of speakers attached to it, and from each speaker, there is a different stem of music playing. I have 16 stems of music, each one separated into the orchestra: the first violins, second violins, cellos, violas, percussion, piano, electronics, voice, and woodwinds, brass, all stemmed out. It’s like walking and meandering inside an orchestra. Because I supplied the MIDI information and the audio stems, different sound frequencies are associated with different colours, so everything is synchronised to the music, so you have these amazing patterns of light and colour all synced in time to the music.

“’Tessellation’ is my kind of breaking-out-of-my-shell work, a voyage of self-discovery for me.”

I’ve spent my whole career serving storytelling for film and TV, and games and helping to tell other people’s stories, and with this project, this score gave me the opportunity to create my own narrative. The only brief I got from Bruce was that I should make full use of the symphonic orchestra, and that the piece of music should begin and end with the orchestra tuning up, and that was it. I could do anything I wanted within those parameters, but I [initially] had no idea what to do, because I’m so used to being given a story to write for. Bruce was very happy with the music I was writing, but for me, I’m so used to doing changes, and working to directors’ briefs, and working with producers, execs, showrunners and directors, I was a little lost initially, “Well, what do I do?” So, I became my own director, and I made life very difficult for myself. [laughs] The album is called “Tessellation.”

“Tessellation” is my kind of breaking-out-of-my-shell work, a voyage of self-discovery for me. I spent two-and-a-half years working on it, in and amongst my other projects, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because when I compose, it’s quite a torturous process for me. I have a degree in mathematics, and I’ve always loved the beauty of numbers and been inspired by nature and fascinated by this intersection between art and science and technology. All those influences found their way into this work. As a child, I also studied Indian classical music and percussion, and that’s deeply rooted in mathematical and rhythmical principles. I took the essence of all these influences from my formative years that have, in some shape or form, influenced me my whole life.

I’ve also been fascinated with the relationship between colour and sound, and emotion. The cinematographer Vittorio Storaro who used to work with Bernardo Bertolucci a lot, also did the lighting for Little Buddha, The Last Emperor, and The Sheltering Sky. He’s known for ‘painting with light’, and his work had a profound influence on me growing up. I’m also integrating the mathematical principles of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio. I know those have influenced composers, such as Bach and Mozart, and other composers since then, but for me, numbers and circular patterns are found everywhere in the natural world, from the micro, where they’re present in the structure of leaves and patterns of a snail shell, to the macro, as you find them in the spiral arms of galaxies, and the patterns of some constellations and stars. These circular patterns are the fundamentals of the Fibonacci sequence, so I took those ideas and integrated them into some of these pieces: the influence of numbers, the influence of my love of Indian classical rhythms, I also love these rhythmical ideas in flamenco music. You hear touches of Spanish and Indian classical rhythms blended with Asian sliding strings into some of the music, but it’s also very symphonic as well, so all these ideas find their way, in some shape or form, into this work. I’ve divided it into nine movements, nine pieces of music across 30 minutes, and I take you on this roller coaster of an emotional journey. I’m so used to having visuals from film and TV, so while I was composing, I’d be constantly thinking about the layout of the installation and these columns of light, and how these colors and patterns would influence each other, and how the music would feed into that, so I used these streams of syncopated rhythms, weaving in and out at times, but there’s a lot of melody present as well. I’m trying to make full use of the orchestra, not everything blasting out at the same time. Sometimes you have intimate moments that just grow and grow and grow. You have these dips, and highs and lows within the composition, so there’s a wide dynamic range.

We need to talk about Secrets of the Penguins. This is an upcoming series on the National Geographic Channel. Is this executive-produced by James Cameron?

Yes, that’s right. […] I scored Ocean Explorers last year, which is a series that he was exec producer on, actually, so that was a nice coincidence that I got to work on Penguins as well for him.

SECRETS OF THE PENGUINS. CREDIT: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/BERTIE GREGORY

This is another lengthy time span that you had with this particular music. If I remember correctly, this was about a year and a half that you spent with Secrets of the Penguins. Is that correct?

Yeah. I love being brought on board projects quite early. It gives me time to conceptualise and think about things. Even if I’m not putting pen to paper, I can still come up with ideas, but the hard work, I think, the bulk of the actual writing process lasted over a year, on and off. It got quite intense towards the end.

Are you able to tell us a bit about the series, since it has yet to premiere?

About 20 years ago, there was a pioneering nature film made called March of the Penguins. That score was written by Alex Wurman, and the voiceover narration was by Morgan Freeman, the ‘voice of God’. [laughs] I remember that score being iconic and beautiful, and that film was about emperor penguins in the Antarctic. And now, 20 years later, it’s a kind of a sequel, but it’s a three-part series. And instead of just visiting the emperor penguins, we’re seeing penguins all around the world, and uncovering secrets of natural behaviour of these penguins that have never been filmed and witnessed before. We’re familiar with emperor penguins from the original March of the Penguins film, but some of the animal behaviour uncovered here is astonishing. I tend to get brought on to work on quite dark subjects; a lot of gritty true crime, dark subjects, so this project was a joy to work on because ‘who doesn’t love penguins?’

In terms of the music and the conversations I had with the producers, there are these core pillars that we wanted to get across musically. In terms of emotion, we always wanted to have warmth and positivity, even when there are moments of threat or loss, I had to focus on bringing out an element of hope. There’s also a sense of maternal and paternal love, and you see that side of the penguins. They’ve made Secrets of the Octopus, Secrets of the Elephants, and Secrets of the Whales. We were going for something a little bit different here, a bit more modern, so in terms of the music and choice of sound palette, we have orchestral elements, but the size of the music matches the size of the penguins. We didn’t want a big, epic orchestral score here; it needed to be more chamber-sized and intimate. I’m using violin, viola, and cello, but I’m also using the human voice. That’s something that the producers wanted, but we didn’t want a big choral epic choir sound either. We wanted something that would match the quirkiness and the body movements of the penguins. So, the human female voice is great, but we use it in a rhythmical way. Some of the stories and body movements are very comedic. They’re very quirky creatures, and the music needed to have a sense of oddity about it. But going back to what I said earlier, I don’t like conventions and clichés, so we had to work hard at trying not to Mickey Mouse the music and score every movement that the penguins do; otherwise, it just becomes like a Tom & Jerry cartoon.

SECRETS OF THE PENGUINS. CREDIT: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/BERTIE GREGORY

So, that was a challenge on this. The music had to appeal to a family audience. We didn’t want to scare kids away, so it’s warm, it’s endearing, and it’s comical. You just watch them waddling around, and the comedy is already innate in the scene, visually anyway, so that was lovely. They live under some of the harshest, most brutal conditions in the world, with 100-mile-per-hour winds and minus 50 degrees in the Antarctic. They are so hardy, tough and resilient. Initially, I scored the epic vastness of the Antarctic, and that was a mistake. I said, “Well, actually, what we should be doing is scoring the penguins, not scoring the environment,” and that was the key to unlocking the score here, which is why I went for something more intimate. You want to experience it from the Penguin’s perspective, and that was the nut that I had to crack and not score the desolate vastness of the brutal landscapes.

There’s an amazing sequence near the beginning of Episode One. The scene has gone viral and has had something like over 173 million views on social media. These little three-month-old chicks all work together. They’re not solitary animals, they herd together. There’s a leader, and he’s leading the chick colony along the ice; they have to work hard to make their way to reach solid ice, but they go down the wrong path. They end up walking on the edge of this cliff, and it’s terrifying. It has a 50-foot drop, and this is the first time that these chicks are going to swim in the ocean. They’ve never come across the sea before. We’re using these unnerving glassy bell sounds to bring out the cuteness of the chick, but also, we’ve got violins playing these swirls and tremolo textures to bring out the feeling of threat, and then you suddenly see these killer whales underneath them. You think they’re just waiting for these chicks to jump into the water so that they can have them for breakfast, but luckily, the killer whales don’t notice them and they swim on. So, you’ve got all this tension and danger ebbing and flowing in this epic scene, and then suddenly they all reach the edge of the cliff, and it’s absolutely terrifying. The music builds to a climax, and the leader chick jumps 50 feet into the water. Penguins are hundreds of thousands of years old. They have wings, but they’re designed not to fly. Penguins swim, but when they jump off the cliff, they are flapping their wings as though they want to fly, bringing out this ancient instinct. They land in the water, and the music suddenly stops. You hear this little plop of penguin falling into the water… and the music picks up, because suddenly, all the other penguins follow suit and they jump in, and when that happens, the music explodes into this beautiful, warm, victorious, majestic theme.

There are a couple of themes [in the series]. There’s one theme for a solo chick, which you see at the beginning of Episode One. The chick is on its own, and you don’t think it’s going to make it across the elements and across the harsh winds. It’s smaller than all the other chicks because its parents have gone off and it’s slightly lost, but it finds its way back into the colony. And there’s a sound that we use that appears through the whole series, this little sonic mnemonic, little motif, which has a flute-like quality to it, but has a bendy quality to it. It sounds like a chick calling its mother. It’s very cute, warm and heartbreaking at the same time.

There’s a main title theme that’s also peppered in a few key moments throughout the score as well. There are other locations such as the Galapagos Islands to Southern Africa, South Georgia, and the Northern Antarctic, so there are lots of locations Penguins inhabit. There are these penguins called rockhoppers when they go to South America. They’re called rockhoppers because they have this unique ability to hop everywhere they go instead of waddling. They hop and jump, and they live by the rocks, so they’re called rockhoppers. In terms of sound palette, we created this quirky, percussive theme for these gentoo penguins and rockhoppers where we’re banging stones and rocks, brushes and leaves together, because the music is born from the environment where they live on the edge of these little cliffs and rocks. Little touches of authenticity like that were important. When we go to South Africa, and see the penguins of the Southern Cape, we’re using tuned mallets–marimbas and vibraphones. I’m using touches of marimbas and also the hand drum. So, those find their way into the score to give a slight nod to the region where they are.