‘Oppenheimer’ exclusive featurette: Composer Ludwig Goransson on ‘pushing the boundaries’ of the score with violins, synthesizers [WATCH]
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“’Oppenheimer’ is a visual masterpiece. I felt like this movie was pushing the boundaries in so many different fields, so I wanted to see how we could do that with music as well,” shares Ludwig Göransson on his approach to scoring director Christopher Nolan’s epic film. Both creatives offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the explosive story of the Manhattan Project and its director J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) came together in a new video that Gold Derby is debuting exclusively that combines interviews, film footage, and clips of the composer in the studio. Watch the “Oppenheimer” exclusive featurette above.
Nolan confesses that he had “no preconceptions about the music for the film.” The only clue he gave the Oscar-winning composer of “Black Panther” about the “soundscape” for the movie was “basing the score on the violin.” For his part, the musician notes, “There’s so much in the performance of the violin. In seconds, you can go from something beautiful to something completely horrifying.” The director agrees, adding, “There’s a neurosis to the sound in a way that I think fits the highly-strung intellect and emotion of Robert Oppenheimer very well.” The video boasts extensive footage of the dozens of string musicians in the studio recording the score.
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But Göransson did not limit himself only to a robust string ensemble. Nolan says that he wanted to balance the “handmade feel using real instruments” with “synthesizers that Ludwig can manipulate so expertly.” As an example, the composer cites the first scene in the film featuring Los Alamos, the site where the architects of the Manhattan Project constructed the atomic bomb. He explains, “The way I was thinking about the music there was almost to think you’re on a different planet, and that’s also why the music tonality changes from this organic palate to the alienistic score.” The Emmy winner for “The Mandalorian” also credits the director for bringing him into the VFX process, which he says “sparked a lot of ideas in my head.”
The video also offers viewers a glimpse into the process of scoring the Oppenheimer security hearing. Nolan approached Göransson to compose a “30-minute courtroom trial piece of music” and reveals that the director wanted to approach the sequence “like an action movie.” The filmmaker says of the process, “We would take his experiments and we would put them to picture and edit them and try different things and show it to Ludwig and he would go and bring more things to the table.” He adds, “I think Ludwig’s work on the film really achieves an enormous amount of the effect of drawing the audience into the emotional dilemmas of the characters. I think he’s really put together a very remarkable score.” Watch the full video above for further discussion of additional scenes from the film.
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