How Ian Bonhôte & Peter Ettedgui Collaborate with Composers

Words by Joe Williams

Helping tell a story through music is always a great challenge, but to do so for a true story — where the protagonist endured hardship and displayed courage out-rivalling even his superhero alter ego — is an even greater one. This was what directors Peter Ettedgui and Ian Bonhôte, along with composer Ilan Eshkeri, undertook when crafting the score for their new documentary: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.

Painting a portrait of Christopher Reeve, the man who first brought the iconic Man of Steel to life in 1978 and held that position for four feature film instalments, Peter and Ian’s doc is as intimate as it is grand. Composed of archive footage, recordings and original new interviews with Christopher Reeve’s family, Super/Man chronicles the events of the actor’s casting, his subsequent and stratospheric rise to fame, and the life he led after his infamous horse riding accident in 1995 that left him paralysed from the neck down.

If you’ve seen the directing duo’s previous documentary films — McQueen in 2018, or 2020’s Rising Phoenix — you’ll know that they bring to the medium a very bespoke and distinct type of filmmaking. They like their movies to evoke the sense of epicness and scale that their subjects often possess. Documentaries, however, inevitably involve a degree of responsibility. And, unlike fiction, which has a script and a shoot, the vast majority of a documentary comes together in the edit. It’s with these two elements that Ilan Eshkeri takes centre stage.

Dancing delicately between driving home emotional beats, giving room to those telling their side of the story, nodding to the legendary Superman soundtrack by John Williams and providing the directors with thread to weave the whole thing together, Ilan’s music has to — and expertly does — hit many different buttons at once. We sit down with Peter and Ian to discuss how their collaboration with Ilan came to fruition, how they musically navigate the fact that there are two of them, and what makes for a good documentary soundtrack.

When it comes to collaborating with composers, what’s a quality you generally both look for? —

Peter Ettedgui: From day one of Ian and I working together, we established that music was critically important to us and to our films. Each of our films has more music in it than the absence of it, and that's because we use music to bind together. Documentaries are full of all of these diverse elements; you’ve got different format archives, photographs, interviews and imagery that we create. Music brings it all together, and we really want the music to have a character of its own that reflects the emotional trajectory of the films.

Ian Bonhôte: With our previous documentary, McQueen, we got the opportunity to work with Michael Nyman’s back catalogue in a way that established for us a blueprint of how to work and how to think about music. We then took that process to original scoring, which we did with Daniel Pemberton on Rising Phoenix, and he would constantly send us a draft of what he was working on so we could, along with our editor Otto Bonham, see what worked. We need a composer that accepts that back-and-forth relationship.

“We both work together because we share the same attitude about how important music — and a specific type of music — is to our type of films. ”

— Ian Bonhôte

How do you reconcile any differences the two of you have in terms of musical approach? Does this affect the process of working with Ilan Eshkeri?

Ian: Oh, we almost never disagree on anything. We both work together because we share the same attitude about how important music — and a specific type of music — is to our type of films. This time we were collaborating with Ilan for a second time — we’d already done a TV series with him (Kingdom of Dreams).

Peter: Having that was almost like a road test for all of us so that we knew that he would be the right person for Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.

Ian: A film composer is not just a composer. They are filmmakers. So a lot of the discussions we have are not about what kind of chord progression or key to use, or anything like that, it’s always about, “What’s the emotion that we’re going for in this scene, and where do we need to build the tension and then release it?” We’d already noticed on Kingdom of Dreams that Ilan was fucking brilliant at solving problems. Nothing was ever too big. He’d come back with a solution that sometimes was better than what you had in the original version.

Peter: We use a lot of fiction tropes or fiction themes or fiction elements within our non-fiction work, within our documentary work. So, I feel that, potentially, Ilan likes working with us because we like everything to be cinematic.

Can you recall a moment when Ilan’s music significantly shaped the editing of the film?

Peter: Right at the start, he said: “I think I’ve got an idea for the theme,” and he came back with something that was very gentle — tapped into a different aspect of Chris (Reeves) then perhaps we were expecting. It was led by the piano because he took the idea that Chris was a pianist himself, and ran with that. But the theme — it was lyrical and it was quite lovely — didn’t quite work. We felt that the film needed to have a certain grandeur and a scale that perhaps isn’t typical in documentaries.

He went away and was texting us over the weekend, saying, “I think I’ve got something,” and we received it on Monday morning and the hairs went up on the back of our necks. As soon as we played it, we knew, “Okay, that’s it.” Once you have the theme you have the film! If I think back to my favourite moments in the film, that would definitely be one of them.

Peter: There was a moment when Ilan created a love theme for Dana that was romantic and lyrical, almost a blend of Williams and Tchaikovsky. Otto, our editor, pointed out that when Dana meets Chris’s kids, there should be an element of uncertainty because it’s not just a romance between two people, but the start of a blended family. Ilan adjusted the theme to a minor key, which added a subtle tension that just fit perfectly.

Ian: At times, Ilan wanted to create completely these new cues, but we’d always encourage him to evolve what we already had for consistency. That was really essential for maintaining a sense of thematic cohesion throughout the music, and the film.

How do you balance using cinematic music in documentaries without making it feel overly engineered, or manipulative?

Ian: Filmmaking is always engineered, by nature of it. But it has to feel honest and authentic. When audiences enter a theatre, we want them to forget their worries and be absorbed by the story. That’s where the power of music comes in!

Peter: Some might argue that big, cinematic music doesn’t belong in documentaries, but we want our films to be immersive and impactful. We’ve learned what works for us and our audience.

Ian: What Ilan did on this was just incredible. He recorded strings in Budapest, then added soloists from London for this much, much richer sound — all within a very, incredibly limited budget. He created a sound that just felt so expansive and cinematic. It was amazing how he managed to piece together these recordings and make the music sound like it belonged in a huge film considering how small this production was.