Ahsoka bringsStar Wars animation into live action in the biggest and best way yet. The eight-episode series, written entirely byStar Wars RebelsandStar Wars: The Bad Batch creator Dave Filoni, is something of a culmination of Filoni’s nearly two-decade tenure as aStar Wars story shaper; Filoni even co-created the character of Ahsoka Tano for the 2008 animated filmStar Wars: The Clone Wars.Ahsoka draws from Filoni’s wealth of past work, even as it looksbeyond the knownStar Warsgalaxy—literally and figuratively—in ways of which one imagines his former mentor, George Lucas, would be proud.

Another veteran ofStar Wars: The Clone Wars involved inAhsoka is longtimeStar Wars animation composer Kevin Kiner. Kiner has contributed more music toStar Wars as a whole than any other composer by far, having written music for over 200 episodes ofStar Warsanimated series. Over the last decade or more, Kiner has also worked closely with his son, Sean, and daughter, Deana, who wrote and performed some of the most memorable musical moments in the series.

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By Thomas Bacon

Kevin, Sean, and Deana Kiner spoke withScreen Rant about “de-geeking” their own music, expanding the musical language ofStar Wars, and more.Note: This interview was conducted during the 2023 WGA andSAG-AFTRA strikes, and the show covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions. This interview has also been edited for clarity and length; a full version can be found on theScreen Rant Plus YouTube channel.

Kevin, Sean & Deana Kiner Talk Ahsoka

Screen Rant: Kevin, pound for pound, you must have done more music forStar Wars than anyone, which is wild to think about.

Kevin Kiner: Probably by double. I think the closest guy would be Gordy Haab. I did a panel with him five years ago, four years ago, and I had done over 100 hours, and he wasn't even [at] 50 yet. And I've been going for another four or five years. We did five hours for Ahsoka alone.

What’s also crazy is that you have this wealth of music you’re able to pull from for the show, but there are so many viewers who have never seen an animated project. Does that affect how you approach bringing in old music versus composing new stuff?

Kevin Kiner: The short answer is no. What is affected is, we try not to play the themes exactly the way we play them in Rebels. They are the themes from Rebels, but we try to move them forward, we try to quote them in a clever way, or something like that. So it's not just Ezra’s theme… I forget what I can talk about. Six has aired?

Yeah. Thrawn’s there. Ezra’s there.

Kevin Kiner: So, yeah, I pretty full-on play his theme there. That’s one of the few times I play Ezra’s theme, and that was so freaking awesome.

Deana Kiner: It really comes from great guidance from Dave Filoni, who was really helpful in giving us that insight of when we would use somebody's theme. He would be like, “No, this isn't the time or place for this; they're in a different spot. You need to understand they’re on a different part of their journey; they're not the same person that they were 11 years ago. Their environment is different. Their emotions are different. They're going through a different thing.” It was really helpful to have that, because we would definitely fall into that.

Kevin Kiner: He had to de-geek us. We’re like, “Let’s do Sabine’s theme!” and he's like, “No, not right now. Play her emotions; that's your job.” Then, we're like, “Oh, yeah. I've only been doing this for 40 years; I should know that.” But we're so geeked out about using the themes.

Sean Kiner: The needs of the scene were the prism through which we would push the themes and the melodies and things. So the theme and the melody weren't the priority--the story was.

I almost would have thought it was the other way around. For instance, when “Burying the Dead” plays in episode five, I didn’t know if that was a Dave Filoni thing where he was like, “This would be really cool there,” or if that was you all. That’s interesting.

Deana Kiner: That was actually a terrifying scene to approach because Dave had this music that he had written the script to, and he had that concept for the whole episode. We were like, “How do we just one-up a legendary piece of music? What are we going to do?”

Kevin Kiner: And thank God Dave is one of the few people we’ve worked with who doesn’t get crazy temp love. People will put, on almost all projects now, temporary music. It can be from wherever; it can be from a big movie [like] Prometheus or something. They don't use too much Star Wars music, but there's always temporary music. And that can be a problem with some directors because they've cut the thing so many times that they’re in love with that piece of music. But Dave doesn't get that.

Sean Kiner: As Dave always says, “That wasn’t written for our story.” It means something else for a different context, and he wants something that’s written for the story. He’s great about that.

You mentioned “Burying the Dead”, and he recognized both that we had used “Burying the Dead” and “The Siege of Mandalore”. We’d made nods; it wasn't even that we had lifted anything. We made oblique references to it, but he instantly got it when we were playing it for him. And that was very cool to experience.

Sean and Deana, I don’t know how old both of you were when you started collaborating on these projects, but I imagine you’ve both had a lot of personal growth as Ahsoka, Ezra, Sabine, and these characters have grown in the shows. Has that colored at all how you think about writing music for them?

Sean Kiner: I think it's been over 10 years now that I've been writing music with Kevin. The Rebels stuff was some of the earliest, [where] I started to really sink my teeth into composition. It very much feels like this was the start of everything for me, and it's really been an honor to return to it in this form, in live action.

Deana Kiner: Technically speaking I grew up on Star Wars, too, or around Clone Wars as well. That came out when I was probably 14 years old or something, so I've grown up with these characters and these themes. I think I have to acknowledge that I have a nostalgia built into my job, and it's having to acknowledge it and be like, “Okay, but we need to grow these characters. We need to progress things. We’re in a different place. We're trying to accomplish a different message and different emotion.” A lot of it is just hearing what I want to do and being like, “Okay, this is what I should do.”

Kevin Kiner: A perfect example of that is what these two did with my Ahsoka theme. That has its roots in Tales of the Jedi, where we did the birth of Ahsoka episode, and then the three episodes about Ahsoka. They came up with a variation of the Ahsoka theme which is now the beginning of the end credits of Ahsoka. It’s a variation of what was in Tales of the Jedi, but it's taking that melody… and we do just play the melody later on in the end credits, but at the beginning, it's a variation of that theme, and it's a new take. It has this groove in it, which we call a Ronin groove. It's a Ronin motif.

Sean Kiner: It's her Ronin melody, and it’s supported by the Ronin motif.

With “Igyah Kuh”, the one that Sabine is listening to in the premiere, do you feel like that’s a piece of music that you could have done inStar Wars in the George Lucas days? Or is that kind of a result of how you all, and people like Ludwig Göransson and Nicholas Britell, have expanded what it means to sound likeStar Wars?

Deana Kiner: I think it's absolutely been expanded. For such a long time, we really focused on making sure that those kinds of source music or cantina songs sounded as alien as possible--very unusual, very different. I think it's really nice to have gotten to a place where it's just like, “Oh, we can just make, like—

Kevin Kiner: --straight-up punk, or straight-up rock.”

Deana Kiner: Yeah. It's fantasy. We can play with it and explore, and that was a big part of it. Initially, with that piece, we approached it with a very like, “This needs to sound alien. This needs to sound unusual and different,” [mentality]. Then we realized, “Oh, we just need to kind of make this a banger.”

Kevin Kiner: And you know what? I firmly believe that people will be listening to Led Zeppelin and The Ramones in a galaxy far, far away.

Sean Kiner: That being said, George Lucas is the consummate experimenter, so I’m sure he would have been open to it.

Kevin Kiner: I mean, he threw a CD of hip-hop stuff at me in my first meeting with him. Maybe it was the second meeting with him, I don’t know; it was 2006 or 2007. I’ve told the story a number of times: he wanted to get that into Clone Wars. There were, like, eight people in the room, and they’re like, “This is a terrible idea. Don’t—” George walks into the room, and everybody’s dead silent, so it was on me to tell George this is a bad idea. But that’s just how he was.

I had to do what he said, so I did it, but I also had something in my hip pocket that kind of had a combination of some of those hip-hop sounds and rhythms but had the orchestra in it. I had to play him, first, the one that he asked for. It was a weird situation [because you don’t want to] do something that's a bad idea and get yourself fired, but the boss asked you to do this bad idea. I say bad idea, but he just loved to experiment.

Deana Kiner: One of his strengths is just constantly surrounding himself with incredible collaborators. I mean specifically with Dave Filoni, but also with Matt Wood in sound design; he's constantly finding these people who are incredibly artistic, and it’s just such an honor to even be considered.

Kevin Kiner: Obviously, he has really good taste in composers.

Are there ways in which you were drawing from previous themes in ways that were even less obvious than tweaking them a little bit? Someone was saying the scenes with Sabine’s Howler reminded them of the Loth-cat or Loth-wolf music, and I think with the Purrgil [scene at the end of episode 5, that was compared] to “Journey Into the Star Cluster”.

Kevin Kiner: Totally unintentional with that one, for sure.

Deana Kiner: For those instances, specifically, we actually find animals in Star Wars to be really, really important, and to really help establish an atmosphere and convey to the audience what kind of magic the Force is, and how important nature is in general. I think why those start to sound kind of similar is because we take that approach to it, where it's like, “This is magic. Animals are magical, even when they're just normal, and just hanging out. They're just magical.” It’s just our approach to that aspect of the Force.

Sean Kiner: The hyperspace jump with the Purrgil--with the space whales--that actually grew organically out of a piece in the end credits. The end credits started off at half the length, I think, that it ended up being. It kept getting longer and longer, and we kept getting to add more and more to it. Then, when we finally got the graphics and things, we really liked the energy of this “traveling through the stars” aspect of how the end credits looked, so we wrote this kind of celestial motif. It wasn't intentional for it to become anything in the show, but we ended up liking it so much that it ended up being a recurring motif, and it ended up playing prominently with the whales.

Kevin Kiner: As a composer, you don’t always hit a home run. Nobody does. And when you recognize that you have hit a home run with something, such as that motif that Sean’s talking about… I was definitely like, “We’ve got to use that again. It can't just only be in the credits; it has to be in the show.”

I’ve been trying to keep my own nerdiness at bay, but I want to ask about Thrawn; I’ve been a fan of Thrawn since the Expanded Universe books back in the day.He’s such a complicated thinker, and such a deep thinker, and the theme is so simple. I’m curious how you chose that to represent him.

Sean Kiner: Back in Rebels, the way Thrawn’s theme came about was that Dave actually suggested that we try writing it on an organ and having organ in Star Wars. That was very exciting, and we went back and listened to a lot of classical organ pieces. The energy behind it is basically, “What if Moriarty existed in a universe with no Sherlock?” and how scary that would be.

He also sees himself as kind of a hero, though. He appreciates art and he appreciates culture. He's a complicated guy, so we didn't want it to be entirely [minor], so there are elements of major-ness wrapped up in his theme. But in terms of his introduction now [and] the growth and development of his theme, which I suppose we'll have to wait to talk about until later… Deana, do you want to talk about his intro scene?

Deana Kiner: This kind of comes back to that thing where we were so fixated on having his theme play right there. We were like, “Thrawn’s theme. Let’s go.”

Kevin Kiner: With the organ…

Deana Kiner: [We were doing] all the arpeggiations and everything, every aspect of it, and having it develop with the scene. But then as we went over it with Dave, he was like, “This piece is playing the music. We need to be focused on the moment and the scene.”

Sean Kiner: And the point of the scene is not the music.

Deana Kiner: Exactly. So, when we came back to the drawing board, we were like, “Especially since so many people have not met this person, we need to tell you, ‘This is a really dangerous, bad guy’. We need to add weight to it. We need to inject fear into just hearing that one note.” That's how we kind of developed [it]. We started to distort the organ; we found different ways to make it way more atmospheric to match the presence of his ship and make you feel the presence of this destroyer.

Kevin Kiner: I think a lot of it was baked into the scene already. This is a thing that we always struggle with, because John Williams set up the musical world of Star Wars in that it is music that, by its nature, draws attention to itself. It is not subtle, usually, it moves a lot, it has a lot of melody, it has a lot of counterpoint, and he's always doing different things. So that is part of the DNA of Star Wars, and we have to have the DNA of Star Wars in [it]. But there are times when we overwrite, and, again, this is Dave being able to point out what those times are and tell us, “Don't do that right here.”

He says it in a very nice way, and Dave is so amazing with his theory of everything in Star Wars. He'll talk for an hour about something that has nothing to do with what we're looking at, but, in a way, it's good that he talks for an hour about that because it gets you into his mind and into the real actual thought of Star Wars. That scene was really, really important. It was important to Dave, and it was important to us, so it went through a few iterations before we found the right balance between not attracting attention to ourselves and supporting it.

What would you say is the biggest difference in terms of composing for this versus composing for the animated series?

Kevin Kiner: I think it's mostly the time we have to polish things. We have a live orchestra in LA; it's the same orchestra that plays on whatever big movie is out. These are the best people in the world, and they're super, super enthusiastic about our music and about Star Wars.

Sean Kiner: They didn't get to see any of the picture, but at the end of 105, when the Vader theme played, after they stopped playing, there was a gasp. They all started talking to each other. [Also] returning to the question, we got [that] live orchestra for every single episode.

They would come up to us after the recording and just talk about the music, and we developed a relationship with not only the people, but also the people's abilities, and we got to know what their strengths were. It inspired us to write for them in subsequent episodes. We hadn't written the whole season when the first episode was recorded, and so then, we were like, “I really want to write something for the lead viola player,” or, “I want to really write something for the concertmaster.” That was a really neat dynamic, and that was very different in the show as opposed to the animated stuff.

I know better than to ask for favorites, but are there new motifs, themes, or any ways that you were able to do something different on the show that was particularly fun or exciting for each of you?

Deana Kiner: I learned how to play flute for it.

No way.

Kevin Kiner: Deana’s playing all the exotic flutes.

Deana Kiner: Not all of them. There was some stuff where we need a for real, for real professional.

Kevin Kiner: All that opening exotic flute stuff, which is different on every episode, is all Deana playing it. I’m, I don’t want to say amazed because that implies that I didn't think she had those abilities—

Deana Kiner: I think I just hit an incredible moment of inspiration where I was like, “I want it to sound like a bunch of flutes playing.” I tried to implement it, and I was like, “Oh, that's cool,” and it just kind of built from there. The longer the season went on, the [more] different kinds of flutes I started experimenting with and learning how to play. I’m still pretty rough at playing, but I played to my strengths, which I've really learned how to do. I'm very happy with the way that so much of it has turned out. With the Howler, I’m playing that alto flute as the Howler is walking, then walking back, then leaving, and then walking back. It was so fun to play with different melodies.

Kevin Kiner: For me, there are three new themes. There are probably more than three, but my favorite--it's tough. The Baylan theme is frickin’ great. I'm really very attached to Baylan’s theme, as well as Morgan's theme. When we first see Morgan, it has a real Williams sound to it, and yet it's new. So those are the ones I really dig.

Sean Kiner: Yeah. With Baylan, for me, it was neat to be able to do that kind of piano sound in Star Wars. It’s, big, bombastic, it’s got a classicism to it. We used this Rachmaninoff voicing to play a variation of this melody called Dias Irae. It's this ancient medieval thing that has been associated in film and storytelling with death and the end of things, and then we put it in the orchestra with a kind of heavy metal sensibility. All those things came together in a really nice way.

Deana Kiner: We’re so happy [with] the way that it plays with Shin’s theme in particular. The way that we get to have their interaction, musically, is so cool to play with.

About Ahsoka

Ahsoka follows Ahsoka Tano, former padawan of Anakin Skywalker as she investigates a growing threat to the New Republic, Grand Admiral Thrawn. With help from her allies from the days of the Rebellion, Ghost crew members Sabine Wren and Hera Syndulla, they will hunt for this familiar threat while also searching for their friend, the lost Jedi Ezra Bridger.

TheAhsoka season finale will be released on October 3 on Disney+.

Source:Screen Rant Plus