INDUSTRY INSIGHTS WITH SCREEN MUSIC CREATORS

How Antonio Gambale composed Esty’s beautiful music in Unorthodox

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

Unorthodox is one of the boldest character tales in recent Netflix history. Inspired by Deborah Feldman’s 2012 autobiography, and filmed mostly in Yiddish, this miniseries follows the life of Esty — a young woman raised in an orthodox Jewish community who flees her arranged marriage. Leaving her family and Brooklyn home behind her, Esty travels to Berlin to explore her identity and passion for music.

Music is certainly at the heart of Unorthodox, underpinning the relationships and dreams of Esty (played by Shira Haas). And Australian-Italian screen composer Antonio Gambale was tasked with helping to share this story through music of his own.

In this long read, we chat with Antonio about how he paved the way for a gripping and deeply emotional character story in the miniseries Unorthodox.

At the time of writing, Unorthodox has earned Antonio two Emmy nominations: Outstanding Main Title Theme Music, and Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited Series.

Antonio, it’s such a privilege to be able to chat with you about Unorthodox — a moving miniseries that’s been released on Netflix in 2020. How did you first get involved in this project?

Thanks, it’s a pleasure to chat with you too. I actually first heard about the show through a friend who lives in Berlin. A couple of summers ago, I was with her on a summer holiday and she was waiting to hear back if she was going to start working with Anna Winger, who is the co-creator and showrunner of Unorthodox. Before the holiday was over, she got the call, so she went back to Berlin to start working with Anna and her team.

About six months later, she called me about a new show they had for Netflix in pre-production and thought that my style and profile as a composer was really well suited. So she asked if I wouldn’t mind being included in the pitch for the show.

I was sent a briefing package with some scene excerpts from the script and an overview document for the kinds of things they wanted — and did not want — for the score. All the composers were asked to take a swing at any or all of the scenes, just to demo the kind of music we might write for such a scene. They also were interested in hearing some ideas for character themes and what the opening titles music could be. Funny story: the theme I made in demo form for the opening titles ended up being almost exactly the same as what we used in the show, with just a little extra rework once the titles sequence was finalised.

A short while after, I got a call from our director who told me she’d been listening to the music on loop while reading the scripts and couldn’t imagine the show anymore without this music. That’s pretty much how I found out I got the job.

An underlying theme in this series is the power of music: it’s the force that drives the main character through her journey and self-discovery. With music also being your own raison d’être, how closely connected did you feel with this project?

Interesting question — I’m not really sure I ever thought about it this way before. It’s absolutely clear that music is a cathartic and liberating element in this story; it’s written right into it at the script level. I’m just not sure if I made a personal connection with the story on that level, at least not immediately. I think I was more aware of connecting with the characters for who they were and what they were going through than with the idea that music was a liberating force in the story.

Esty is such a compelling character, and her journey to make a life for herself on her own terms with so much resistance is something that really resonated with many people, myself definitely included. Music has always been such a given in my life that it never has really been a means of escape for me in any real sense, not in the way it is for Esty. But now that I think about it, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it, I think this aspect of her story did connect with me too, and certainly influenced the way I worked on the score.

Talk us through the styles of music you incorporated. How much research did you undertake prior to creating the score? For instance, did you listen to traditional Jewish music to inform your composition, or was it more a result of your own experiences in screen music — composing each scene to respond to the plot and characters, and cues?

One of the main directives from very early on was that the creators didn’t want a score that was trying to sound Jewish at all. From the outset, the intention was always to fill the Jewish part of the show with a lot of very carefully selected authentic source music. The show creators and music supervisor worked closely with a cultural consultant — he is actually also an actor in the show — who is from the Satmar Orthodox community himself. There was never any question that the musical universe of the show was going to be peppered with plenty of authentic source music, so there was no need for the score to try to do it as well.

We also wanted our show to feel contemporary and not alienating to people who know nothing about the community and culture in the show. One of the great things about Unorthodox is that it managed to connect with audiences all over the world. A great many people saw themselves in the story, even despite coming from a completely different culture. I think if we had taken a very conservative and traditional approach with the score, we might have alienated people rather than open up the world of the show to them.

One of the great things about Unorthodox is that it managed to connect with audiences all over the world

The main challenge was making a score that fit comfortably shoulder-to-shoulder not just with the music from Esty’s orthodox community, but also with the other key styles of source music in the show — classical and contemporary electronic. All three of these influences leaked into the aesthetic I aimed for, to create a style of score that was its own thing but had a natural place in the show.

I also wanted it to be the kind of music that makes you think, but not music that tells you specifically what to think. There’s so much emotion and character journey already very evident in the script and the performances, so the music just needed to support this in a sophisticated but subtle way; helping to accentuate the emotions, but never trying to tell you what to feel.

This was also a very character-theme-based score. I wrote themes for most of the main characters, and this always gives you a kind of internal logic to use when deciding which direction to take for a scene. It also lets you shift perspective on what point of view the scene is about.

A good example is the flashback scene where Esty and Yanky were home alone the first night as a married couple, completely awkward around each with no idea how to behave or what to do. We chose to base the music for his scene on Yanky’s theme, not Esty’s, even though her perspective is usually the main one in the show. By doing this, we were able to emphasize that she was out of her element — that she was now in Yanky’s world. By this point in the show, we’d already had many Esty scenes with her theme music, so its absence here helps to underline a feeling of disorientation.

We made these kinds of decisions for quite a few scenes in the show.

You composed and produced this score in two locations: Paris and Berlin. Tell us a bit about why you had travelled between these locations during this project, and how they influenced your work. After all, Berlin is the place the character Esty runs to, in order to find herself and pursue her musical dreams.

Yes indeed, this was really mostly down to practical realities and logistics. I live in Paris and so that’s where I started working on the show, initially.

For Unorthodox, the show creators did not want to use any [pre-existing] temp music at all — a rule that we stuck to. I wrote some themes and exploratory material while the shoot was still underway. I was able to watch all the rushes from every single day of the shoot from the comfort of my own studio in Paris, using a secure online video sharing service Netflix provided. It’s a useful way to see how the show is starting to look, but you also have to be careful not to watch too much because it can be misleading. It gives you some good insights, though, and does help you start getting a feel for the characters as they are on screen.

The Berlin part came in quite organically. I was already going there regularly to spend a few days revising the spotting and going over feedback on cues with the team. Eventually, our post-production coordinator floated the idea that I could come to Berlin and stay there for a couple of months for the last stretch of post production.

They found a small studio space I could set up to work in, just around the corner from the final mix studio and the edit rooms, and the production team found me a lovely loft apartment in Kreuzberg, one of my favorite Berlin neighborhoods. Being in Berlin for the final few months was about getting the whole team together in one place so we could easily interact and work together.

There’s something invigorating about ‘taking the show on the road’ and setting up camp close to the rest of post

I’m quite a fan of this style of working — there’s something invigorating about ‘taking the show on the road’ and setting up camp close to the rest of post. You’re out of your homeland comfort zone. For me that really enhances the vibe of working on the show. Especially in this case, being in the city where most of the story takes place. It’s not always compatible if you have a lot of gear that you really need or want to use in your own studio. But you can still make it work. It’s also pretty easy to record musicians you usually work with remotely, something I did quite a lot on this show.

Esty’s character in the series is so complex and fraught with the internal struggles that come from pursuing freedom at the expense of family. On a practical level, how did you score the evolution of her character — first portrayed as repressed or trapped, before turning into a young woman with the bravery of choosing her own life path?

I think there are two main opposing forces in Esty’s character that I really aimed for when coming up with her theme: fragility and strength. She is, on one hand, such a small and physically unimposing person, but at the same time she slowly reveals herself to be much stronger than at first meets the eye.

Once I’d written a theme I liked, just on the piano, I started exploring sound palettes to emphasize these features. I tried playing the melody of her theme using homemade samples of cello, violin, and viola played with no vibrato whatsoever. Solo strings are curious, because they can sound very small and intimate, but also powerful and resonating if you bow them heavily or let an open string ring out.

After all the processing, it didn’t really sound like strings anymore but whatever it was, it was Esty’s theme sound

I layered up some of these sounds and pushed this resonant quality even further using long, rich reverb. There was something entrancing about the effect. The complete lack of vibrato had a kind of emotional power that’s nothing like ’emotional’ playing with expressive vibrato, and I really liked it. It felt raw, uncontrolled but also stoic and dignified at the same time. It also had a haunting quality to it, with something of a vocal character as well. After all the processing, it didn’t really sound like strings anymore but whatever it was, it was Esty’s theme sound.

Once we started using her theme in the show, a few things became apparent. The first time we really hear it is in the scene where she arrives in Berlin and takes a taxi ride from the airport to the city. There’s so much emotion on her face in this scene. On the one hand, she knows she got away so there’s some relief. But there are also so many unknowns, and the iconic landmarks of Berlin as she drives past are also a reminder of where she is — a city that has a very dark history she has heard about all her life. In this context, it’s the haunting quality of her theme that really comes to the fore.

Later on in the first episode, she’s taken to the lake with the new friends she just made to go swimming. Again, there’s a lot of emotion to read in this scene, not just in Esty. When she decides to walk into the water, but can’t quite bring herself to take her clothes off in public, we see her new friends realising they just assumed she was like them. But now it’s clear that she really comes from a totally different world than what they know. And on Esty’s side, this whole scene is like taking her first steps towards liberation, until she finally makes it into the water and gets rid of the wig she’s been wearing this whole time. So in this context, we pick up on different aspects of her theme entirely. The stoic vibrato-less strings feel less haunting here. Instead, they connect with and support a growing feeling of Esty’s strength and determination coming out.

And so on throughout the show we continued to use this same principle with themes — essentially the same theme each time, but using context and adaptation to feature a different facet of the music, depending on what the emotional thrust of the scene was.

For example, the theme I wrote for the connection between Esty and her grandmother Babby is used in many different ways too. It’s heartbreaking when Babby hangs up on Esty when she calls her alone at night in Berlin. It’s warm and loving when Babby is trying to calm Esty down and asks her to show her the wedding dress again. And it’s poignant and symbolic when Esty hears the heartbeat of her baby for the first time at the ultrasound clinic, when it becomes real for her that she soon will be a mother too, like her mother and grandmother before her.

Thank you, Antonio. I’d like to ask you a bit about your education, now. You studied at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and your experiences there have certainly set you on a path to career success. Of your time studying the Screen Composition course, what sorts of practical experiences did you undertake to build your portfolio?

AFTRS is quite a special school, and I consider myself lucky I had the chance to go there. Interestingly, I wasn’t the only AFTRS graduate on Unorthodox. The costume designer on our show also went there, and we were even in the same year. I didn’t find out until after the project was completed because our paths didn’t cross.

I went to AFTRS at an interesting time. It was actually the first year there was ever a film music composition course offered. I think one of the most productive things we did in my time at AFTRS was called Masters Collaborative Workshops. Aside from just the usual film school activity of coursework and making actual films, usually shorts, we had this extra component as well. The idea was that instead of everyone just studying their own field and forming groups to make student films, we also had a rotating schedule where each department spent some time with another department. So there would be editing students doing workshops with set designers, composers sitting in on classes with scriptwriters, and so on. The purpose was to help demystify areas of production that traditionally don’t know much about each other’s work.

I think music composition is one of the least-known parts of film making

I think music composition is one of the least-known parts of film making. It’s quite common to talk to people who work in any other film department and find out they really know nothing about how it works at all. So it was a good initiative of the school to run a program like this and try to help us learn more about disciplines other than our own.

You’ve worked on some huge projects beyond Unorthodox — and they seem to span the world over: the Taken franchise, Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster, and a season of Kaboul Kitchen, among many others. What would you say has been the biggest contributor to you building a global profile in your industry?

Yes, I’ve been lucky to get a lot of experience on some big productions. Most of these opportunities came about from when I worked with other composers who were hired for these films. Most notably was Nathaniel Méchaly, who I worked with for at least 10 years. It’s a pretty common path in our industry, to pay your dues working in the team of another composer — whether it be as an assistant, a programmer, a music editor, a cowriter, an additional music composer, or a combination of any of these.

In my case, I had the opportunity to take on these roles in many films and series that ended up being huge hits around the world in several different genres. It’s an excellent way to be right at ground zero and learn how large-scale productions really work through observation and participation.

As your working relationships evolve, you take on more responsibility and learn the ropes to a much deeper extent. For example, with the Taken franchise of films I worked on with Nathaniel, I started working as his assistant and doing some programming. But several years and projects later, I was working very hands-on with him on the music, and was credited as score producer by the final film in the franchise.

I think some of the benefits of working your way into the industry through this kind of path are fairly self-evident. You get to know music supervisors, composer agents, producers, and so on. You also have to be quite a Swiss Army knife in terms of skills. When supporting a composer on a very stressful and fast-paced project, the faster and better you can get things done and solve unforeseen problems, the better. You learn a lot about how the work actually gets done that nobody talks about unless you’re actually there. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true there are some things that film school, or school in general, never prepares you for.

It’s also great for getting to know people in the industry — not just in a sense of meeting them at events or functions, but in highly charged and stressful work situations where the chips are really down. You forge stronger relationships that way, and people like music supervisors, producers, directors, and so on build trust in you from seeing you deliver in these situations.

It was through this work and these relationships that I started getting scoring work in my own right, both in the industry here in France but also on international and United States productions.

Congratulations on your successes so far! Do you have any parting words you’d like to share?

One thing I’d definitely like to do is give a shout-out to everyone in our industry dealing with the tough times we’re having now due to the pandemic.

I don’t think it’s being overly optimistic to say that things will bounce back, but it’s also not dishonest to say that there are likely to be more consequences to our industry when the economic payback starts to bite, too.

I think it’s important to dispel the myth that the arts are a dead-end street for handouts. Our industry is nothing of the sort.

It’s been encouraging to see some — not all — governments around the world take steps to protect the industry and the people who work in it. But I’ve also heard some unfortunate negativity too. For example, on talkback radio recently I heard a caller bemoaning any amount of public money being used to prop up what they saw as an essentially elitist, non-essential industry [in the arts]. If asking that person to imagine a world with no films, no TV, no theatre, and no arts at all doesn’t get through to them, then I’d like to ask them to think of economics instead. Millions of people around the world are directly employed in our industries, and millions more indirectly. These millions spend their money and help the economy turn just the same as a teacher or a doctor spending theirs. I think it’s important to dispel the myth that the arts are a dead-end street for handouts. Our industry is nothing of the sort.

But I’m optimistic that attitudes are changing in this regard. Everyone who clung on to Netflix during lockdown like a lifeline won’t soon forget how important access to culture is. It enriches your life and gives you ways to connect with your community and raises topics to discuss. Just like literature, film and TV help us make sense of life in a way that just having enough pasta and rice in your cupboard cannot.

Despite the current hump, I’m confident that the future of the industry is pretty bright. At least here in Europe, production has already started up again with some limitations, so things are already starting to look up.


Images supplied.