ComingSoon Senior Editor Spencer Legacy spoke with Ahsoka composers Kevin Kiner, Deana Kiner, and Sean Kiner about composing for the Star Wars series. The trio spoke about making music for George Lucas and Star Wars‘ roots in Japanese cinema. The season finale of Ahsoka debuts on Disney+ tonight at 6:00 p.m. PT.
Spencer Legacy: How did you begin to write music for Star Wars?
Kevin Kiner: It was an audition process at the beginning of The Clone Wars. I got a call that they were doing this and that I was one of the people auditioning. I believe there were either four or five people that were called to do this, so they flew me up to Skywalker Ranch. I didn’t meet with George for that first time — I met with Dave Filoni and they showed me the first 10 minutes of what would later become the movie. It was not always planned to be a movie. It was just planned to be Episode 1 of The Clone Wars. He said, “There you go. Score that and I’ll talk to you in a few weeks and we’ll see how it goes.”
He gave me a little bit of direction. One of the things was, “George doesn’t want to hear a lot of John Williams’ themes in this. He wants it to be new and fresh. He’s thinking of a lot of percussion.” All these things. So I went back, didn’t sleep for days, scared to death. I was blocked, I was scared, I was horrible. [Laughs]. But finally figured something out and I got the gig. I do know a couple of the guys who auditioned against me, and I was in really good company and it’s really an honor that I got the gig. I believe it’s because … in 1979 or 1980, I purchased this book — the original score.
Now you can’t get it. It’s in blue and it’s different. You can see how torn up mine is and I’ve written all my notes all over it. I analyzed it in my own way, what I thought John Williams was. I’ve been studying that since 1980. It was very opaque to me at first. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m a film composer and television composer is because I heard Superman, I heard Star Wars, I heard Indiana Jones, and I’m like, “How is he doing that?” So it was really important for me to dissect it in the score. Anyhow, that’s how I got it.
You mentioned that George didn’t want the John Williams themes to be too prevalent. Is it more challenging to honor the sound of Star Wars and the melody of it while still creating your own music in that universe than it is to just do completely original work? What’s that process like?
Kevin Kiner: Absolutely more challenging. I’ve been doing this a long time — 2006 is a few years ago. [Laughs]. So now, it’s more natural. If you dribble a basketball every day, you get pretty good at dribbling. Put me in front of speakers for 15 or 17 years and I get better at it. These two grew up with me learning that and I think I passed on some of that. We still will analyze — not so much these days — John’s themes.
We have this thing where we sort of want to study with the master’s master, and that would be Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Sergei Rachmaninoff or Igor Stravinsky or whatever. John, every day — I know for a fact — is playing through a classical score on his piano every day. So we try to do that as well.
Sean and Deana, what was it like growing up around that kind of creativity and around that Star Wars universe way before Ahsoka?
Sean Kiner: Well, I grew up around Star Wars even before he had gotten the job. I grew up loving it, so when I heard that he was starting to write on it, I was very, very excited. It was neat to be able to come in and hear what he was doing and watch what he was doing.
Kevin Kiner: We went to all the midnight showings, I took them.
Sean Kiner: Yeah, that’s right. We got tickets for Meet Joe Black just so that we could see the Phantom Menace trailer, because that was the movie where the first Prequels trailer was playing. So we went into the theater, watched the trailer, and then walked out before we watched the movie, talking about the trailer. I was raised with a love of Star Wars in my heart.
Kevin Kiner: Yeah, Star Wars geekdom is pervasive in the people who work on Star Wars. Dave Filoni dressed up as Plo-Koon way before he got the gig. It really doesn’t get any deeper than that, you know? [Laughs].
Deana Kiner: I had so much nostalgia built into work. It’s been very interesting, having to approach it with that in mind and be very aware of, “Oh, okay, this is what my geeky, nostalgic self really would like to do, but let’s figure out a way to approach this in a more progressive way from a new place.” And, “How can we grow this without just being attached to the past?”
Kevin, you mentioned George Lucas and Dave Filoni a few times. What’s it been like, over the years, to work with George and Dave? Has that relationship just continued to grow over the years?
Kevin Kiner: Yeah. So first of all, I think Dave and I are the only two people to study under Yoda, and it’s pretty cool that we have that DNA going through us. Dave and I have a connection that’s difficult to describe. It’s I almost like finishing each others’ sentences when we’re talking about music. We have these things called spotting sessions where we look for the first time. Well, I’ve screened it the night before and we all have, but with Dave, we’re looking at, say, an episode of Clone Wars or Ahsoka — whatever it is, and they’ve put temporary music in, whether that music is from Prometheus or whatever — it’s from the editor. The picture editor is just putting some temp music in there.
It’s a good starting place because you can either say, “Oh, I don’t like this at all,” or, “I like this rhythm that this temp track has those kind of things.” So I’m about to say, “Oh, that’s a cool trombone lick in the temp,” and Dave goes, “Hey, there’s a nice trombone thing going on.” And I’m like, “Oh, I was about to say it, or I will say it,” and he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I really like that.” He’ll rewind it and he’ll go, “Right there, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, right there.” [Laughs]. So we kind of like the same things.
Deana Kiner: Dave is a lot more musically literate than so many people that we get to work with. He is so well-versed in the classical composers that we find ourselves drawing from so often. It’s so easy to talk to him about what his influences and his inspirations are for the moment and what he’s trying to accomplish.
Kevin Kiner: His father took him to operas when he was young.
If my father had done that, I would’ve probably been upset. I was into Led Zeppelin and rock and stuff, but he loved it. I know he has a marvelous relationship with his father to this day. So he won’t say a minor or major or any, any of those technical terms, but he knows when he hears something and what he likes about it. For Thrawn’s theme back in Rebels, he suggested using an organ — that was his idea. We wouldn’t have thought of that because an organ had never been used in Star Wars, that I know about.
Sean Kiner: As far as I know, yeah.
That’s cool. It really sells the character too, so that was a really great choice.
Kevin Kiner: It was brilliant.
You’ve also done the sound for Ahsoka, with Volume 1 currently out. The series itself really pays homage to the original roots of Star Wars and Japanese cinema. How did you go about incorporating those roots and that feeling into your score for Ahsoka specifically?
Kevin Kiner: I would let these guys answer that, because they had a lot to do. The reason I’m a better composer now than I was 10 years ago is because it’s not just me anymore. I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I’m super involved, but they bring in really, really cool ideas. The people they grew up with … they grew up with anime.
Deana Kiner: I mean, you’re the one that actually showed us Kurosawa. I was fairly young,
Kevin Kiner: Right, we went to New York or San Francisco and picked up some DVDs.
Sean Kiner: We also picked some up in Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Whenever we ended up over there, sometimes we’d pick up a new DVD. So we watched Yojimbo and Seven Samurai and Ran pretty young. We kind of returned to those influences, both for Ahsoka and for Tales of the Jedi, which was an experimental arena where we got to try and make up some variations of Ahsoka’s theme with more of a samurai bend as she develops into this mature, older warrior. Then you can hear it on the soundtrack in the end credits, that very first bit of the end credits that starts with her ronin motif. Then her ronin melody, which has Ahsoka’s theme that Kevin wrote however many years ago baked in there. But it’s kind of dancing around it and it’s got kind of the DNA of those old classic samurai films baked in.
Kevin Kiner: They sat down at the piano when we were doing Tales of the Jedi and came up with that samurai ronin vibe that’s being played in the cellos. It was something we started in Tales of the Jedi and we knew we wanted to further it in Ahsoka. One of the cool things about having the soundtrack out is you can hear a lot of those elements that you might have missed because there’s dialogue or lightsabers and things like that. I’m so proud I’ve been listening to it in the car because we’re doing interviews and I want to be able to talk about specific cues or things like that. I’m more proud of this than anything I’ve ever been involved with. It’s a good listen, in my opinion.
What piece of advice would you give to any aspiring composers?
Kevin Kiner: So this is what I tell people — learn the gear. Learn the computer, because that’s the way things are done now, even though we’re scoring Star Wars in a very classical way. John Williams, he writes on pencil and paper — he is quite literally the only one who really does that. Maybe not quite literally — there are probably a couple other cats, but it’s just not done that way anymore. Han Zimmer, Danny Elfman, John Powell — you name it. Whoever it is, they all write on the computer and you have to know how to make things sound good on the computer, because if you’re just starting out, they’re not going to give you a 70+ piece orchestra at the Newman scoring stage in Los Angeles. I didn’t get one for 40 years. [Laughs]. These two are very lucky.
I keep telling them how lucky they are and they know it, but you’ve got to make it sound good out of the box. Also with Dave Filoni, we make it sound good out of the box because we’re really screaming through those sessions for budgetary reasons. It’s like $60-70,000 for a three hour session with an orchestra in LA, so what’s that? $400 a minute or so, whatever that is. So if you’ve made a mistake, it’s a little bit of pressure. You just cost Disney or Lucasfilm a couple thousand bucks, and they get upset about that. [Laughs].
So we mock things up really accurately so Dave really knows what it’s going to sound like. It sounds so much better once the orchestra plays it, so there won’t be notes on that date because we’ve given him a really good idea what it’s going to sound like.
Sean Kiner: My advice for aspiring composers is something that we have to tell ourselves constantly, as long as we’ve been doing this. The advice is to focus on the scene, what the scene needs, and the story. It sounds so simple, and yet we all got into this because we love music and we love film scores, and it’s so easy to get swept up and carried away by where the music takes you. But you have to be realistic about the times where the music takes you away from where the scene needs to be. So focus on story, I think, is my best advice.
Deana Kiner: I think all I’ve got is, “Don’t forget why you love music.” That’s surprisingly easy to forget.
Kevin Kiner: It’s a “forest for the trees” kind of thing, isn’t it?
Deana Kiner: Yeah. It’s just something that you have to remind yourself — be able to bring yourself back to hard moments and remember why you love what you’re doing.
Kevin Kiner: Yeah, if you don’t love it so much. My wife gets mad at me because I say music is like a drug, you know? I have to have it. It’s legal, so it’s okay. [Laughs]. I actually can’t do anything else. I mean, I could — I was pre-med and I was going to go to med school and I dropped out of college, but I had good grades and stuff like that. I’d be a terrible doctor because I have to do music because it’s just what I have to do. If you are not like that, go be a doctor to go follow something else, because the rewards are not always that great. The hours are insane.
We are very fortunate to have a marvelous collaboration with a good human being. Not everybody who works in this business is as nice as Dave Filoni, so you go through projects where it’s pretty brutal and you get some very frank people that say, “That sucks.” And then you have to go back to remembering how much you love music after you’ve been slapped upside the head. [Laughs]. So you better love it.
Deana Kiner: Oh, last piece of advice — go listen to the Ahsoka soundtrack. There’s some really good stuff on it. [Laughs].
