MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong

Brigid Bergin: This is All Of It. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for spending part of your day with us, whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on-demand. On today's show, we'll talk about the documentary, While We Watched. It's about a veteran broadcast journalist in India. The New York Times calls it a wake-up call. We'll talk about the Notes from America, summer playlist series, invoking the sound of the diaspora. We want to hear your reactions to Barbie. That's all coming up, but we're going to kick things off with Oppenheimer composer, Ludwig Göransson.

Like many movie buffs across the country, I too took in that much-hyped Barbie-Oppenheimer double feature over the weekend. Shout out to the Regal Cinemas in Sheepshead Bay. We're going to spend the first hour of our show talking about it. First up, as I said, Ludwig Göransson, the composer of Oppenheimer. The film traces the story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the Manhattan Project. The film directed by Christopher Nolan is an intimate portrayal of Oppenheimer's moral and interpersonal conflicts as he builds the atomic bomb during the tail end of World War II. You can hear Göransson's expansive sonic touch even in the trailer.

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Oppenheimer Trailer Song

Speaker 2: I don't know if we can be trusted with such a weapon, but we have no choice.

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Oppenheimer Trailer Song

Speaker 2: Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what's happening here?

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Oppenheimer Trailer Song

Brigid Bergin: Göransson brings his signature sound to his other projects like the Score's The Creed franchise, Pixar's Turning Red, and Marvel's Black Pantherf films. In 2018, Göransson won the Oscar for best original score for the first Black Panther installment, and that's just his work in film scoring. The 38-year-old also holds producer credits for musical acts like Childish Gambino, Adele, Moses Sumney, and Alicia Keys, just to name a few. With me now to talk about his film scoring on Oppenheimer is Grammy and Oscar-winning composer, Ludwig Göransson. Ludwig, welcome to All Of It.

Ludwig Göransson: Thank you so much. It's so great to talk to you.

Brigid Bergin: When you first read the script for the film, what sounds or sonic elements immediately came into your head?

Ludwig Göransson: My jaw dropped. That was such a powerful script. Reading every page felt like I was inside the mind of Oppenheimer. I knew that the music had to do exactly the same thing. It had to bring the audience into his mind and into his feelings so as an audience member, you're experiencing the whole movie from his point of view. He's a very complex character with a full range of emotions going on inside of him. There's a lot of different types of music and feelings that had to get in there.

Brigid Bergin: How did you begin the research process to really understand Oppenheimer's life story and to get into his head, like you said?

Ludwig Göransson: Well, it starts just after reading the script and then starts with just having a lot of conversations with Christopher Nolan. He has a very clear idea of what he wants to do and how he wants things to sound, but he's also very, very open to ideas and we start experimenting. The only thing that he mentioned, in the beginning, was to use the sound of the violin to channel Oppenheimer's character.

Brigid Bergin: Can you talk a little bit about what it is about the sound of the violin that really resonates for you and why that was the instrument he thought that would be most appropriate to convey Oppenheimer's sensibility?

Ludwig Göransson: His violin, it's a fretless instrument, so depending on just how you move your hand in terms of that, you can have a vibrato, and make it very romantic and beautiful. Then if you just press down the bow a little heavier and change the speed and the pitch of the vibrato, you can make it sound completely neurotic and horrific, and terrifying. You can go into those two different feelings within a split second. That was something that we wanted to explore, how we can move from something beautiful and romantic to something horrific within a second.

Brigid Bergin: I want to play a clip from the soundtrack. This is from the song, Can You Hear the Music?

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Can You Hear The Music

Brigid Bergin: Ludwig, we hear those strings, and that just real sumptuous sound that you created there. Can you talk a little bit about that piece in particular and why it was a way to reflect the thinking and the feeling of Oppenheimer?

Ludwig Göransson: Yes. One of the first things that Chris actually showed me visually after I read the script was his experiments of the effects of spinning atoms and fire and all these stuff that they did without any CGI. They did it with all analog. I remember seeing it first in an IMAX theater. It was sitting there and I was just immediately hit by this fluorescent light of these atoms just spinning faster and faster. I've never seen anything like it. I was immediately hit by the feeling I want the music to sound like that, to sound like that visual that I'm seeing right now.

Brigid Bergin: That's scaling up?

Ludwig Göransson: Yes, that's scaling up and the spinning of the atoms and that fluorescent light. Also, I felt just timeless to me. I couldn't tell if it was from the past or was from the future, or if it was from the present, but I also knew that I wanted it to have to be played by live players. It was a scary thing at first because I was like, "How do I get that emotion from live players to make it something faster and faster and faster and faster until it just hackathon spinning?

Brigid Bergin: How many instrumentalists did you need to create that sound?

Ludwig Göransson: We had different ensembles. It started off with just a solo violin, and then it goes into a string quartet and then a string octet, and then eventually into the whole string ensemble.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Speaker 2: It's a total of 21 tempo changes in the whole piece. I didn't even think it was humanly possible to be able to record this in one take first, but we recorded with some amazing musicians in LA and we were able to do it in a new way where we gave the musicians the new tempo before it actually had happened.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. You said that so casually. You recorded that whole thing in one take?

Ludwig Göransson: Yes. I mean it took three days to figure out how to do it-

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Ludwig Göransson: -but then when we figured it out, we did it all in one take.

Brigid Bergin: That is incredible. I understand your wife is also a violinist. Did she help you at all with this project?

Ludwig Göransson: Oh, yes. Absolutely. She's the main violin soloist that you hear throughout the score. She was with me from the start when we started out experimenting out with these ideas about the romantic tour horrific. Those are microtonal glissandos. That was very valuable for the process of scoring this movie because I wrote most of that music before Chris had shot the film. A lot of the themes and a lot of the soundscapes came out from these experiments. When Chris actually started to shoot the film, he had about three hours of music that he could listen to.

Brigid Bergin: That's amazing. This is the second time you're working with Christopher Nolan. The first time was for his 2020 sci-fi action film, Tenet. How different was your work on this project compared to that last one?

Ludwig Göransson: The process was similar because it's so important with-- Why Chris is so great is that he gets his collaborators in very early in the process, so we have several months to work before I actually have a cut. Then also he's also so engaged and has such a great ear for music, and also the music, I feel is very important in his films. It's almost like a character itself. Obviously, Tenet was a completely different type. We used completely different techniques, especially in how to reverse and inverse music but the process was similar.

Brigid Bergin: You talked about how you had composed so much of the music before, so he had these three hours of music to listen to before shooting began. I wonder then if you could also talk about what the revision process was like. What did earlier versions of the music sound like and how did you have to adjust things once, as you said, saw some of these amazing visuals?

Ludwig Göransson: After they shoot the movie, Chris Nolan goes in with this editor, Jennifer Lane, and they start cutting together a first cut. When they do that, normally what people do is that they use something called temp music. They put music from other movies or from songs in the first cut. Because we already have established a sound and a theme for the score, Chris only uses my music.

It's all original music in the first cut. Now, is when the real work begins because we have a first cut, but the music is, like I said, like demos from that I did earlier. Now it's about fine-tuning it, find the right themes for all the characters, and also really see where we can push the boundaries.

Brigid Bergin: Was there any particular moment that you struggled with in that process where you felt like it was hard to get the music just right or once you saw the visuals, did it seamlessly evolve the way you felt like it needed to?

Ludwig Göransson: It was both. Just watching Cillian's performance, obviously, it's out of this world. It's almost more than human. It's so intimate at so many places and just draws you in. That was obviously a lot of inspiration and made it feel easy. At the same time, there's scenes when its emotions and what it is going through is so complex. For example one of the most difficult scenes to score for me was the moment right after the Trinity Test when he's about to have a congratulatory speech.

What you see in his eyes and his facial expression, it's so visceral and so cathartic. To find that emotion and to solve that puzzle with music, we worked until the last day on being on the sound stage when we had to lock and finish the entire movie. We worked on that for a long time.

Brigid Bergin: I wonder if you could continue on that point a little bit in terms of the role that Cillian Murphy played as Oppenheimer and how you tried to score it so that audiences would see the protagonist through his point of view and not judge him for what he's feeling. As you described there, experience some of the nuance of this moral dilemma that he's faced with having this unbelievable opportunity to create something and then the unbearable burden of what he's creating. How did you use your score to do that?

Ludwig Göransson: Yes, that's a great question because there is a lot in there and the most important aspect of that was to solve and figure out what the emotional core is. I did that just with using violins and organic instruments, piano, violins, the orchestra. I knew we needed to get that emotional core of the music right before I can take in the synthesizers and the modern production in that music. Eventually, there is the synthesizers and the modern production that comes in there. To me, I'm using those elements as foreshadowing the impending doom as you'll see.

I feel like there's three movements to the score. The first one is that intimate journey, and the second movement is when there's an actual bomb and they're about to detonate and try it out for the first time. The whole score almost changes there from this beautiful lush orchestra to this very intimate and horrific sound design with radioactive crackles and this little metallic ticking in this throbbing base. The third movement is the courtroom, the trial scenes, which we actually almost score like an action film.

Brigid Bergin: All of those sequences in the film are so wonderfully knit together. I want to play a little bit more from your score. I want to play a bit from the song, What We Have Done.

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: What We Have Done

Brigid Bergin: Ludwig for our listeners who have not yet gone out to see in the film, help put that song in context for us. What is happening and what are you trying to convey in that very spare-by-comparison piece of music compared to the first piece we listened to?

Ludwig Göransson: This is the piece of music that follows right after the Trinity Test. This is the aha moment when he finally realizes that he's not in control anymore. They spent all this time making-- He's been in charge and everyone has been dependent on him to make this wonder. When he finally does it, it's like he's saying he created these bombs. Finally and it's him saying bye and he doesn't have any power with them anymore. It's this emptiness inside that I wanted to channel with just this string quartet, just playing this piece of music that just channeled the loss and the emptiness inside him

Brigid Bergin: You have two other tracks in the soundtrack titled Fusion and Fission. I wonder if you could talk a little bit, we're going to play a piece of Fusion in just a moment, but before we do, can you talk a little bit about how you bring to life these scientific themes like quantum mechanics and nuclear physics?

Ludwig Göransson: Well, always when I score a project, and when I get it started on something new, I always want to feel like I'm doing something for the first time. That means coming up with different techniques and different ways of creating music. Mostly, it's through improvisation or through different ideas. Some of them are mathematical, some of them are coming from the rhythm ideas.

Some of them are coming from chord ideas. Some of them come from a mathematical equation. That was something that was extra fun obviously with scoring music for scientists, how you can take a mathematical idea and create a scale, a hexatonic scale with six notes and do a different figure. A pattern within that scale. You can come up with some interesting ideas.

Brigid Bergin: Let's play a piece from Fusion.

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Fusion

Brigid Bergin: We talked a little bit about going into it, but now that we've heard it, tell us a little bit about what you were doing in that song.

Ludwig Göransson: This is Strauss theme, and Strauss is played by Robert Downey Jr. It's such an interesting character. In the beginning, you don't know really what his part is in the story. Is he one of the good guys? Is he one of the bad guys? He's a mystery and he's one of the persons that is challenging Oppenheimer. We wanted to add that, a pace to it and that energy that makes it feel almost like a mystery but also a threat and almost like a ticking clock.

Brigid Bergin: That tension was what I felt when I watched it, that kind of you were in this mode of suspense and trying to figure out who is this guy? I felt like that music certainly contributed to that palpable anxiety around what was he when he came in a room, who was he? We will avoid spoilers, listeners, for those of you who haven't seen it yet but it is definitely a source of intrigue throughout the film. I want to talk a little bit about the use of natural sound effects in this film. Feet stomping, rain hitting the windowsill, tire vans grinding against gravel. What role do these kinds of natural sounds play in the story and how does that compliment your work as a composer?

Ludwig Göransson: It's extremely important. I think sound design today, the way he can use it in film, and also the way that Chris uses it in his film and how he spends so much time in detail at the sound mix making a visual but also an audio experience. Something you put when you go see one of his films, you put yourself in a world you never experienced before both visually and audioly. In this movie in particular, something that Chris and I talked about in the beginning was to not use drums, for example, because we didn't want to give Oppenheimer any kind of military feel. I think that played a big role because when there's no drums but there's almost no either percussion or score.

It's about two hours and 30 or 40 minutes of music. No percussion and that is something that you can feel. It's also, because we don't have that, it leaves a lot of room for the sound design, and there's some really interesting sound design choices in the film with foot stomps and these explosions. We don't have any percussion, those sounds, you put a lot more attention to these sounds.

Brigid Bergin: We have so much more that we could be talking about. We haven't even touched on all of the other work. You've done your role as a composer for television, for community. We've been talking about content that is so intense but you've also composed music for comedic shows, and you've played a producer role for, as I mentioned, childish Gambino and Adele. Since we're talking about Oppenheimer, I want to play one more piece. We have two other tracks lined up. I'll let you choose which one we play. Either Destroyer of Worlds or Trinity.

Ludwig Göransson: Why don't we play Destroyer of Worlds?

Brigid Bergin: All right.

MUSIC - Ludwig Göransson: Destroyer of Worlds

Brigid Bergin: My guest has been Ludwig Göransson, the composer of Oppenheimer. Thank you so much for joining me this morning on All Of It.

Ludwig Göransson: Thanks for having me.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.