2023 Composer of the Year Ludwig Göransson Fueled Oppenheimer’s Explosive Drama

Liz Shannon Miller
·8 min read
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The post 2023 Composer of the Year Ludwig Göransson Fueled Oppenheimer’s Explosive Drama appeared first on Consequence.

Our 2023 Annual Report turns its attention to the world of film with the announcement that Ludwig Göransson is our Composer of the Year. Keep it locked here as our annual report continues throughout the month as we highlight the best music, film, and TV of the year. See it all here.

Listen to Ludwig Göransson’s Oppenheimer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) via Apple Music.

In the world of film, most composers start work on a project during the post-production phase. But when Christopher Nolan began shooting 2023’s Oppenheimer, Consequence Composer of the Year Ludwig Göransson had already composed two or three hours of music for the film.

That didn’t mean his job was done, though. Far from it, in fact. “When he was shooting scenes, sometimes I’d get an email or a phone call from Chris and it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re shooting the scene now, and I noticed that this piece of music that we talked about for this theme ends with the down note. Can we end it on a more heightened positive ending, or add a couple more minutes?'” Göransson tells Consequence.

It was all part of the long process towards making one of the year’s most compelling film scores, a violin-driven ode to scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), whose greatest discovery would shake the world literally and figuratively. Nolan, a famously detail-driven director, worked intimately with Göransson on the music beginning early in the process, because as Göransson says, “He is constantly thinking about the music when he is shooting. It’s playing in his head.”

Göransson’s road to Oppenheimer might not begin where you’d expect: His first professional job as a composer was the cult favorite TV comedy Community. Working on a show famous for its experiments with genre meant that not only was he able to record with a full orchestra — something that “was out of the norm for a lot of sitcoms, a lot of TV show music,” he says — but “it was almost like being a student, and my teachers were Dan Harmon and Joe Russo. Dan would have these very in-depth realizations and bring up music from different movies — a lot of very in-depth musical references that I had never heard about.”

His rising profile from Community helped Göransson expand his connections with music supervisors, music editors, and showrunners, eventually leading to work on shows like Happy Endings and New Girl. However, while Göransson was making strides as a TV composer, moving into film was a challenge: “If the show creators were going to go on to make a big film or something, they would hire a film composer, not a TV composer.”

Fortunately, years beforehand, Göransson had formed a relationship with Ryan Coogler, having first met the future Black Panther director while they were both students at the University of Southern California. Göransson had composed for all of Coogler’s student work and early short films, so when it came time to add music to his 2013 breakout Fruitvale Station, the filmmaker called up his longtime collaborator.”It was a no-brainer for me to do that movie, even though at that time it paid me less than an episode of TV,” Göransson says. “The important thing was my relationship with Ryan and getting a chance to score a completely different drama. That was my way into feature films.”

Göransson would go on to work on all of Coogler’s movies to date, with Black Panther earning Göransson his first Oscar nomination — but it was a different Coogler film that perhaps led to Göransson working with Nolan. Along with his wife/producing partner Emma Thomas, Nolan came to the Los Angeles premiere of 2015’s Creed, and asked Coogler afterwards who did the music. “Ryan told me the story like the day after, and I was obviously very flattered that Chris Nolan would even ask the question. Obviously he must’ve liked it. But I definitely never thought that we would ever work together, although I was a huge fan of his films, and the music in his films.”

A few years later, Nolan reached out “kind of out of the blue” to ask if Göransson wanted to meet. “I obviously said yes. Our first meeting was about, I think, five or six hours where we just talked and listened to music. And by the end of that meeting, Chris was like, ‘Hey, do you want to come in tomorrow and read the script for my film?'” That film was the 2020 thriller Tenet.

When director and composer reunited for Oppenheimer, Nolan gave Göransson few directions, but one was that the violin should be “the voice of Oppenheimer. I thought that was very interesting, because Chris was talking about how neurotic Oppenheimer’s character is, and how the violin can mimic those same emotions just based on the performance of the player. You can go for something completely very beautiful and romantic and stable to something horrific and erotic within a split second.”

In addition, Göransson was able to play with the violin’s ability to be both an individual instrument as well as part of an ensemble: “There’s a scene in the movie when he has his first class, and in the beginning there’s this one scientist coming in, and you have one nonviolent violin. And then there’s a group of four people coming in and you have four violins, and then you have the whole string section.”

From a composition level, two scenes proved the most daunting for the composer. The first was Nolan’s request to create a piece of music that would emulate Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” for a montage — an intimidating task if you, like Göransson, happen to think that it’s “one of the best pieces of music ever written.” (It didn’t help that his young son was obsessed with the composition, thanks to its use in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.)

In addition, Göransson found the scene immediately following the Trinity test to be a challenge, because it involved Oppenheimer making a victory speech while not feeling very victorious. “He’s starting to have this kind of breakdown, panic attack; that really shook me up when I read it in the script — how surprised I was about his feelings there. I had never imagined that he would feel like that, and it took a long time to dissect and understand the complexity of his emotions during that scene.”

Finding his way into those emotions proved the true test: “The only way to do it for real is to try to connect with it yourself. Those moments were difficult and uncomfortable, to try to understand how he was feeling and get those emotions like that.”

In fact, Göransson says “that was the last cue we did for the film — probably the last day at the dub stage — because I had so many versions. I was obsessed with the immense horror that he would feel in the first iterations, but what cracked the code was to bring back a deeper emotion of despair, combined with the horror.”

To do this, Göransson actually invoked an earlier theme, from when Oppenheimer and his brother are in Los Alamos, stargazing. “The first time we hear that cue is when he’s looking up at the stars and he’s just imagining, if he could combine his work with Los Alamos, the magic that would come out of that. But then the magic that came out of that was that they killed 300,000 people, and that’s when he realized that. So I thought it was very interesting, to draw from that.”

After completing Oppenheimer, Göransson took some time off to travel with his wife, Serena McKinney, an accomplished violinist who played the solo violin portions for the Oppenheimer score. “We spent a lot of time together on this project — it felt like a very personal journey. Emotionally, it was a lot, and it was also a lot of music,” he laughs.

Yet all of it works in synchronicity with Nolan’s filmmaking. Take a track like “Trinity,” a nearly eight-minute piece of music that accompanies the intense build-up to the Trinity test. “We started with a small group and then it’s building until the whole string ensemble is playing. It’s hard to do today, to play with the dynamic in that way. Because normally, listening to music or watching a film, everything’s always cranked up the whole time. You know, compressed to maximum, to keep your attention. But Nolan’s storytelling, it tells the story as it gradually builds. And that’s more difficult to do than something that is loud the whole time.”

Continues Göransson, “I think the way that Chris Nolan uses music to create this momentum throughout the whole film… He’s an incredible storyteller, in the way he uses music to propel the story.”

Ultimately, that’s why Göransson’s Oppenheimer score is so compelling — not just for how it pushes the story forward, but how it remembers the value of quiet.

Oppenheimer is available now on VOD.

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2023 Composer of the Year Ludwig Göransson Fueled Oppenheimer’s Explosive Drama
Liz Shannon Miller

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