Ludwig Göransson on Finding Oppenheimer’s Theme
This Week on the Talk Easy Podcast with Sam Fragoso
Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries.
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To celebrate Oscar Sunday and his Academy Award win, we’re returning to our talk with Oppenheimer composer Ludwig Göransson!
At the top, Göransson describes the collaborative process with director Christopher Nolan, the instrument at the heart of the film, and its hauntingly beautiful theme. Then, we walk through Ludwig’s instinctive approach to making music, his coming of age in Sweden, and the influence of Metallica and Danny Elfman.
On the back-half, Ludwig reflects on his early years in Los Angeles, finding kinship with director Ryan Coogler and polymath Donald Glover, and how he slowly began to understand his voice. To close, he shares how his process has evolved from Black Panther to Oppenheimer, the potential impact of AI on the music industry, and what he hopes for in the years ahead.
Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!
From the episode:
Sam Fragoso: In the film Oppenheimer, there is roughly two and a half hours of original music, which some publications have reported you made in five days. How does someone make something like this in five days?
Ludwig Göransson: Well, to start– some of that publication is not correct.
SF: Beautiful.
LG: (laughs) This is not possible to do in five days. It was published that I recorded the music in five days, which is also not true because I recorded this for about six months with different musicians—string quartets, string octets, soloists. But when I had the whole orchestra together in the same room, that happened over five days. When you record the full orchestra together, that’s the last piece of the puzzle. That’s the final stage of putting together a film score. The hard work is often way before that. Normally, when you hear the orchestra playing the score, that’s the climax of the whole process—when you can take a step back and just listen to the music, almost like seeing the birth of your child.
SF: If that’s the climax, let’s go back to act one. You got a call from Christopher Nolan. What did he say?
LG: He said, “I finished a script, and I would love for you to read it. Can you come by tomorrow?” So, I go out to the studio, go into a room, close the door, and sit with the script as long as I need. This was a pretty heavy script. I had no idea what it was going to be about. So, I was immediately sucked into the story and Oppenheimer. The script is written from his point of view; you’re living the world through his eyes. I was completely taken by surprise to read something like that, and I was completely floored after I read that script. I immediately thought that the music needs to do the same thing; it needs to get the audience to feel like they are in his eyes, feeling everything he’s feeling.
SF: The only specific instrument Nolan wanted was the violin. As I understand it, you don’t play the violin, but your wife does. When you drive back home, what was the pitch you made to her?
LG: A few days after I read the script, I went to Chris’ house. We talked about the script, and we listened to music. That’s when he mentioned that he didn’t have any ideas other than trying to experiment with the violin.
SF: Do you remember a moment when it started to click?
LG: I remember my wife, Serena, and I had been recording all day— different glissandos, just one note vibratos, and long notes. Changing the pitch and changing the speed of the vibrato. Going from something somber and beautiful to something horrific within seconds. Then, after a whole day of recording that, we were about to go home to our kids. I was putting something down on the piano really quickly, and I said, why don’t we record this idea over this baseline I wrote? She played the melody in one take, and it was beautiful and haunting and intimate and sad and fragile. We recorded that within ten minutes. I sent it immediately over to Chris, and he called me later that night and said, “This is Oppenheimer’s theme.”
