Éric Serra

Éric Serra (born 9 September 1959) is a French musician and composer. He is a frequent collaborator of film director Luc Besson.

Éric Serra was born in Saint-Mandé. His father Claude was a famous French songwriter in the 1950s and '60s, and so Éric was thus exposed to music and its production at a young age. His mother died when he was just seven years old.

In the early 1980s, Éric Serra met director Luc Besson and was asked to score his first film, Le Dernier Combat (1983). Serra has scored all of Besson's directed films to date, except Angel-A (2005) (scored by Anja Garbarek), and several that Besson has written, such as Wasabi.

In 1995, Serra was chosen to compose the score to the James Bond film GoldenEye, and produced a much more modern-sounding avant-garde soundtrack than had been used in previous Bond films. It met with mixed reviews from film critics. While Serra's score has been seen by some as highly innovative, many Bond fans have criticized it and often highlighted the lack of the classic, instantly recognizable Bond leitmotif originally created by Monty Norman and John Barry. The GoldenEye producers later hired John Altman to score the tank chase sequence, which incorporated a traditional arrangement of the Bond theme.David Arnold would succeed Serra as Bond composer until 2008.