![]() ![]() It took Göransson a while to come up with something he was happy with. Cue a cleverly cut together procession of images where this idea is illustrated: microscopic dust particles and fluorescent lights buzz across screen before resting on a final shot of spinning atoms. Comparing algebra to music, Bohr asks if Oppenheimer can hear the equations on the page like you would a symphony. In that scene, Kenneth Branagh’s older Danish scientist Niels Bohr lectures a young Oppenheimer at university. CREDIT: Universal Göransson’s favourite sequence was tough to pull offĮven more tricky than Oppenheimer’s theme was a montage near the start of the movie. But then if you press down the bow heavily and change the speed, you can make something horrific, manic or neurotic in a split second… Chris and I were constantly talking about going in and out of different emotions.”Ĭillian Murphy in ‘Oppenheimer’. With a solo violin, you can play the most beautiful, romantic vibrato. “Oppenheimer was a genius with a lot of complex layers underneath. “One of the early ideas that Chris had was the use of the violin,” he explains. Göransson calls Murphy’s performance “almost inhuman”, and describes how difficult it was to come up with a recurring theme that matched his nuanced portrayal. The way Murphy played him was crucial to how Göransson wanted to write, whether stressed-out as the camera zooms in on his piercing blue eyes and furrowed brow or emotionally broken by the realisation that he’s created an unstoppable killing machine. The Peaky Blinders star is in nearly every frame of Oppenheimer, so a lot of the music matches whatever mood he’s in at the time. Cillian Murphy’s performance changed the score Later, when the first rough cuts of the movie came through, Göransson was able to start fine-tuning his ideas to fit actual footage. On breaks, Nolan didn’t relax with a well-earned cup of tea, instead he sifted through endless versions of different instrumental themes to find the version he liked best. Göransson says he delivered “around three hours of music before they started shooting” – to make sure Nolan was “listening all the time”. So the regular meetings had to stop because Nolan was unavailable on set. In February 2022, cameras rolled on Oppenheimer. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney He gave Nolan a playlist to listen to Ludwig Göransson, composer of ‘Oppenheimer’. ![]() “That’s two months where I write 10 minutes of music every week, and we met once a week where I presented it to him… Then we listened to each piece about 56 times and talked about what really grabbed our attention.” “I had about two months with him before he went off to shoot the movie,” says Göransson. “One of the joys about working with him on a new thing is that you have zero impressions in your mind.”Īfter that, it got quite intense quite quickly. He was told nothing more, though Göransson says that was kind of nice. ![]() On their second project together, Göransson says the phone rang on a random day with a request that he make himself available tomorrow to read Nolan’s new script. Oppenheimer’s director is quite a secretive man, so his collaborators aren’t clued in until they need to be. We jumped on Zoom with the Scandi film wizard, who also wrote soundtracks for Tenet and Black Panther, to hear how he did it. And Göransson’s epic work – all eery violin trills followed by thundering drum rolls – is a big part of that. The race against the Nazis to perfect humanity’s first city-levelling weapon makes for a thrilling watch. It’s more dialogue-heavy and features fewer blockbuster stunts. Following the real-life story of the American physics genius who helped invent the atom bomb, Nolan’s first biopic is (ironically) less explosive than his other movies. Oppenheimer, composed by Swedish maestro Ludwig Göransson, is the same. Can you imagine Batman without the dark and moody strings? What about Hans Zimmer’s ticking clock motif in Dunkirk? No mind-boggling reversed score for Tenet? Each soundtrack supports the action on-screen building and relaxing tension like a cinematic puppet master. Let’s be honest, if Christopher Nolan movies didn’t have music they’d be a bit rubbish. ![]()
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