A Conversation With Composer Ilan Eshkeri On His SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE Score

When Shaun decides to take the day off and have some fun, he gets a little more action than he bargained for. A mix up with The Farmer, a caravan, and a very steep hill lead them all to the Big City and it’s up to Shaun and the flock to return everyone safely to Mossy Bottom Farm.

SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE powers through visual puns, sight gags and rollicking plot twists to arrive at a hard-won realization: there’s no place like home.

As there is no dialogue from any of the characters, the music plays such an important role in the movie. That’s where the fantastic, colorful score from composer Ilan Eshkeri comes in.

Complete with the Shaun the Sheep theme, lively cues, and songs, including the award-friendly “Feels Like Summer” song, Eshkeri score is a wonderful soundtrack for a very funny film.

Eshkeri’s recent film work includes STILL ALICE, for which Julianne Moore won an Oscar, Kevin Macdonald’s BLACK SEA starring Jude Law, 47 RONIN starring Keanu Reeves, and the Oscar nominated THE INVISIBLE WOMAN, Ralph Fiennes’ second outing as a director. Ilan continues to write the music for SIMS, one of the world’s largest video game franchises. Other films include Oscar winning THE YOUNG VICTORIA, KICK-ASS and STARDUST.

Amongst his awards and nominations are a BAFTA for THE SNOWMAN & THE SNOWDOG, an Ivor Novello for THE YOUNG VICTORIA, a Wildscreen Panda Award for the score to David Attenborough’s NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM ALIVE, an International Film Music Critics Association ‘Best Original Score’ for STARDUST and a ‘Discovery of the Year’ from the World Soundtrack Awards for his first film score, LAYER CAKE. Eshkeri is currently commissioned to compose a ballet, and is completing his score to AUTOBAHN starring Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Nicholas Hoult & Felicity Jones.

Read more on what the British composer and songwriter had to say about his latest score.

WAMG: In seven years, Shaun has gone from being this little TV series to a global phenomenon. It’s been quite extraordinary. Fans will love that the theme music from the TV show can be heard throughout the film. Was the melody an obvious cue?

Ilan Eshkeri: I always thought that doing Shaun without Mark Thomas’ Shaun theme would be like doing Bond without the Bond theme.  The fans, me included, know it and love it. It’s part of the world and the enjoyment of Shaun The Sheep so it would be disappointing if it wasn’t in there. I felt it was especially important to use it on the farm at the start because the film begins in the world of the TV series. As it expanded into a larger world I brought in other instruments and as it needed to become more cinematic I brought in the orchestra.

WAMG: How did you approach the score to musically tell the story of this loveable little hero without dialogue?

Ilan Eshkeri: I think it’s important to take the characters seriously. They may be sheep and dogs but their struggles and emotions are every bit as real as ours. If you don’t take them seriously on an emotional level you can’t get the audience to empathize with them. I also didn’t hold back for the children. Where music is concerned they respond to emotion in the same way as a grown up. I gave the characters strong melodies and distinct instruments. The directors and I also had this idea that characters from the farm should be played with acoustic instruments and those from the city with electric instruments; so, Trumper is an Electric Guitar, Slip an Electric Piano, Bitzer an Accoustic Guitar. I think this helps support the narrative.

WAMG: “Le Chou Brule” is a funny track and went perfectly with the restaurant scene. It has a Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton feel to it – right down to the piano player. What made you go with the music that combines slapstick and deadpan themes?

Ilan Eshkeri: That scene more is an homage to the silent era, so the reference is deliberate. I looked at a lot of Keaton and Chaplin films to try and get the feel for it. It was enormous fun to write, but difficult to perform because of the sheer speed of it, nevertheless the musicians had fun playing it which I hope comes out in the music.

WAMG: As Shaun is being hauled off to jail, the track for “Gaol House Blues” couldn’t have been more spot on, right down to the harmonica, and received a lot of laughs at our initial screening. How much discussion did you have with directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak for that particular scene?

Ilan Eshkeri: They said from the start that they wanted it to be like a scene from any famous prison scene, The Shawshank Redemption, The Silence of the Lambs, so it seemed clear what to do. The harmonica was hard to get right but was performed brilliantly by Tim Carter, who is in fact the guitarist from Kasabian.

WAMG: Tell me about “The Baa Baa Shop Quintet” song where the other sheep are trying to cheer up Baby Timmy? How did the melody on that adorable scene come about?

Ilan Eshkeri: It’s the sheep singing the title song “Feels Like Summer.” The idea is that the song is from their past and is comforting to Timmy, so when the cassette breaks, Shaun tries to whistle the song and the rest of the sheep come in baa-ing it. We tried lots of different ways of doing it. More sheep like, less sheep like…we spent many hours laughing in the studio. We had to finish it early on so that the animators could animate the mouths to the recording of us singing. You can see me singing on it in the making of the music behind the scenes video.

WAMG: Your previous scores – STILL ALICE starred Julianne Moore, a potent drama about Alzheimer’s disease and how her family deals with her illness and the submarine thriller BLACK SEA set on a claustrophobic vessel. Did you write these prior to SHAUN and how do you shift composing gears between all these different types of genres?

Ilan Eshkeri: I wrote Still Alice during Shaun the Sheep, which I worked on for more than a year. It was very difficult to shift gears because when I write I take on the emotions and then express them through music, so that gear shift was tricky. I don’t know how I did it, it took a while and I can remember thinking, “how am I going to do this? Have I taken this too far this time?” But then it just happened. I guess that’s the magic of being a creative artist. Black Sea came after Shaun, although there may have been some overlap. It wasn’t emotionally as intense as Still Alice, so even though it was a completely different style, it wasn’t as difficult to take on.

Q: Among the many blink-and-you-miss-it sight gags including a Silence of the Lambs homage involving an imprisoned cat in a restraining collar that licks its lips like Hannibal Lecter and a Wolverine movie homage involving The Farmer at the hair salon. There are a lot of jokes that run through the film. What was your favorite part in composing for the movie?

Using the Brahms’ lullaby for the sheep jumping over the fence was a musical gag that I came up with. I’m really happy with that. There are lots of other small musical quotes. In the Panto Horse chase Trumper ends up skiing and I quote the theme tune from a well known British skiing show and at the end of the film when the Pigs are watching TV you can hear the theme from Aardman’s first ever programme called Morph. There’s quite a few musical gags, and although most people won’t ever notice them, they give the score a fun spirit, and that’s important for the film as a whole.

The soundtrack is available now: http://www.amazon.com/Shaun-Sheep-Movie-Ilan-Eshkeri/dp/B00XV31TO4/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1439432467&sr=1-1&keywords=shaun+the+sheep+movie+soundtrack

Read our review HERE.

SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE is in theaters now.