Eric Serra has scored several movies for French director Luc Besson including "La Femme Nikita", "Leon", "The Big Blue" and "The Fifth Element". "Leon" for example has to balance complete innocence with violence and corruption. "The Big Blue" is an unusual film and Serra's music features synth-type sounds, percussion and some acoustic instruments including saxophone in places suggesting the undersea world of whales and dolphins. This and many of his earlier soundtracks have been a collection of pop-oriented songs and instrumental tracks, and this talent may have been learned or inherited from his father Claude Serra who was also a song-writer. However, Eric Serra is also more than comfortable providing traditional underscore too.
It's not every film composer who has the opportunity to score a Bond film. Perhaps the huge commercial success of "The Fifth Element" qualified Serra for this opportunity to move into the Hollywood mainstream with "Goldeneye", but his song-writing background may also have been a contributing factor as it has with previous Bond composers. However the producers felt that for some scenes Serra departed too far from the accepted Bond traditions, so for example in the Tank sequence composer John Altman composed a replacement cue in the Bond style updating John Barry's arrangement of the theme - Altman mentions this in this Bond Documentary. Serra has now moved into the management side of the music business forming a joint ventures with the Recall Group to release a range of quality film soundtracks.
Eric Serra has released a solo album of pop music called "RXRA", and also has an official web site at www.ericserra.com.
Soundtracks albums are available for a number of Serra's films including the following:
Here are some CD covers signed by Eric Serra. Our thanks to Petr Kocanda for permission to use his collection of autographed CDs. Click any thumbnail below to see the image full size in a separate window.
mfiles home