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After attending premieres for Oppenheimer in London and New York, composer Ludwig Göransson is seeing the movie again, this time at a little mom-and-pop theater in Höganäs, Sweden. It may not have the massive IMAX screen that so many people are watching Christopher Nolan’s latest on, but the modest theater in Göransson’s home country will be packed with his family and friends.
It’s a fitting experience for the Swedish composer, who says that his score for Nolan’s film about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer stands apart from his other work.
“It’s definitely a different personal journey for me, to do a first-person score, where you do everything from his eyes and from his mind,” says Göransson, who won both an Oscar and a Grammy for the score for 2018’s Black Panther. “It was draining, but very interesting to think about too.”
Oppenheimer is Göransson’s second collaboration with Nolan, after 2020’s Tenet. The movie is epic in scope, with stunning visual effects and bold scenes, but is also very focused on the emotional state of its protagonist. In three hours, the film traces Oppenheimer’s work as a theoretical physicist to the establishment of the Los Alamos lab, the creation of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer’s activism against further nuclear development and the repercussions of his actions later in his life.
“You really had to get his character and his emotions out there with the music. It was a tough thing to do emotionally,” says Göransson. “You’re constantly trying to emote what he’s feeling on the screen.”
The resulting score is often relentless, as Oppenheimer’s intense personality drives the story. The music relies heavily on the violin, but also brings in unexpected sounds like a ticking clock and stomping feet that add to its overall intensity. From Sweden, Göransson spoke to Vanity Fair about being given a blank slate, his toughest scene, and why this score felt more personal than anything else he’s worked on.
Vanity Fair: What were your early conversations like with Christopher Nolan about the score for Oppenheimer?
Ludwig Göransson: It starts off with me reading the script, having no idea what to get myself into, and then we have a conversation afterwards. In our first conversation, Chris was just really open. He didn’t have any specific notes or ideas, other than he was interested in experimenting with the sound of the violin for Oppenheimer.
Did that differ significantly from the way you talked to him before Tenet?
I think for Tenet, in a technical way, there were a lot of ideas that I already had on the table, in terms of inversion and reversing sounds. I think he told me to not do it [laughs]. But I think with this one, Chris really did not really have anything in musical soundscape before shooting the film, so it was really a blank canvas.