The night of the Oppenheimer world premiere last summer, composer Ludwig Göransson was in his home country of Sweden with his wife Serena and some friends. They wanted to check out the film at a local movie theater in the small village where they were staying, but it was packed and the first showing was nearly sold out. Pleading with the person running the theater, Göransson says he explained that he scored the film and would love to watch along with an audience on opening night. They snagged a few seats — and that was the moment Göransson realized this was going to be big: They were 5,000 miles away from Hollywood and nearly every seat was taken.
“I don’t think anyone could have thought about it having this kind of impact all around the world,” Göransson tells Rolling Stone. “With the political climate of the world, I think people want to see this and open up a lot of conversations.”
As one of the most acclaimed and popular composers and producers across film, television, and music, Göransson knew that Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy, was going to be special, but he didn’t anticipate its colossal impact. The biographical thriller about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known for creating the atomic bomb, was released on the same day as Barbie, evoking a cultural phenomenon of double features dubbed Barbenheimer, and earned more than $960 million at the box office.
When Nolan approached Göransson with his nearly 300-page script for Oppenheimer, the composer was intrigued from the very first page.
“You just get sucked into Oppenheimer’s brain, what he’s feeling, and seeing,” says Goransson, who also worked with Nolan on his 2020 film Tenet. “I quickly realized that’s what the music needs to do as well. It needs to put the audience in his shoes instead of the audience sitting there and judging this character.”
The Oppenheimer theme song has reportedly garnered more than 2 billion TikTok impressions and another 60 million streams across all digital streaming platforms, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In total, the soundtrack has earned more than 200 million streams, something Göransson says “has been incredible and nuts.”
“If you can go home and put on a piece of music that puts you back in those feelings and that emotional state again, I think that’s the best thing to come out of it: People wanting to relive that feeling they had in the theater,” Göransson says. “That’s one of the biggest honors, when people give the score a life outside the screen.”
Critics have also recognized it as one of the best scores of the year. After already winning a Golden Globe, Grammy, and BAFTA for the film’s score, Göransson is also up for an Oscar on Sunday night.
At the age of 39, the composer has a long list of accomplishments, including being just a Tony Award away from an EGOT and regularly working with esteemed directors and musical artists like Christopher Nolan, Ryan Coogler, Donald Glover. He walked away with his first Academy Award in 2019 for composing Black Panther.
Growing up in Sweden, Göransson has always been interested in music. When he was nine years old he heard Metallica for the first time, and learned to play the heavy metal band’s “Enter Sandman.” He went to an elementary school that focused on music and his music teacher dad pushed him to hone his craft, too.
“I was fortunate enough to always have music around me,” Göransson says. “I remember when I was ten, the only thing I wanted was a Super Nintendo but my dad bought me a tape recorder. That was like a pivotal, crucial moment in my career where I could either play video games all day long or make music.”
Göransson went on to the University of Southern California, where he studied scoring for film in TV. He liked the idea of working with orchestras across different genres of music. It was at school where Goransson met Ryan Coogler, who is now one of his closest collaborators. Göransson scored Coogler’s first short film in 2011, Fig, and went on to work on Fruitvale Station, Marvel’s Black Panther movies, and the Creed films.
After graduating from USC, NBC’s Community helmed by Dan Harmon was Göransson’s first professional gig. Working 12 hours a day, between his studio and the show’s set on the Paramount lot, he took the job “extremely seriously” because Harmon “was also very serious about the music.”
“He understood the weight of the music and the importance of music and how if you get it right, it will have to have a big impact,” Göransson says.
After the show’s first season, star Donald Glover emailed the composer and explained that he was also a rapper and musician outside of his acting career. Glover asked for Göransson’s help mixing his own original song since he didn’t know many other people in the industry, and the rest is history.
“I was a little skeptical but then he sent me a song and it was truly incredible. I suggested we record some of the drums live and we started to work together, that was on his first mixtape. We’ve done four or five albums now,” Göransson says. “We were always working on Community so we spent our nights and weekends making music. We were able to carve out our own way.”
The two have worked together ever since. Göransson, who’s produced Glover’s albums and also worked on his hit FX series Atlanta, was inspired by his collaborator’s refusal to be put into a box.
“Meeting Donald [Glover] made me look at what he does and realize he’s writing, he’s acting, he’s making music, he’s doing all these things and from doing all of that, he creates his own voice,” Göransson says. “And that definitely inspired me to be able to understand that the more things I can master and use, I can take all of that and make one powerful voice for myself.”
Nolan has now become another one of Göransson’s regular collaborators. Göransson explains that typically, a director uses something called a temp score when making the first cut of the film and then incorporates the original score at the end of editing. But Nolan prefers to come up with the music before he even starts cutting the film so that the filmmaker has his own sound world throughout the editing process. For Göransson, that meant spending time with the director in pre-production talking about themes and sounds and scoring before the film even started shooting. In terms of the musical choices in the film, Nolan said he wanted to utilize the violin to portray Oppenheimer’s character because it’s an expressive instrument. Göransson called on his wife Serena, an accomplished violinist, to create these sounds for the film. They spent hours in sessions creating the film’s theme.
“We just experimented with going in between romantic, beautiful, then scary, and horrific sounds,” Göransson says. “We were exhausted spending hours and hours recording those kinds of effects. At the end of one session we were about to go home, I had to put our kids to bed, and then I just sat down and I wrote this super simple baseline with a piano melody on top of it. I asked Serena to play it and the way she performed it was a very intimate performance with no vibrato. You can almost hear her breathing in there.
“It sounded so fragile and vulnerable. I sent it to Chris [Nolan] right away and that became Oppenheimer’s theme. It can go from something that sounds smooth and sober to something horrific and terrifying within a split second.”
One of the most tense scenes in the film is when the group of scientists working on the atomic bomb witness its first explosion in a test. It’s the score that makes you feel that anticipation in the pit of your stomach.
“Chris [Nolan] is already thinking about the sounds when he’s writing the film. Obviously he knew he was going to need a piece of music leading up to the explosion where you sit on the edge of your seat for 15 minutes,” Göransson says. “The music in that scene is reflective of how we see the bomb for the first time. It completely changes from this organic, beautiful string ensemble to something that’s a thumping bass, this little ticking that makes you feel like, Okay, they could actually blow up the whole world right now. The stakes are extremely high.”
When asked what projects he’s cooking up next, Göransson doesn’t point to a specific film, album, or TV show, except for saying he’s “always working on something.” He also hints at being in the studio with Glover, saying, “Donald [Glover] and I are always working on something. He’s in a very interesting place with his artistry and where he is in life now, so I’m excited about where he’s going.”
He will say he’s nearly finished with an album of his own. After working with countless award-winning artists and scoring some of the most popular movie and TV shows in the last decade, the composer says he’s been taking his time to complete his own record, which he started in 2018. He says he’s producing, arranging, writing, and even performing all of the songs on the album.
“I’ve been trying to learn how to write lyrics, and that’s been really fun, and I’m trying to learn how to sing. Every time I get closer to being done, I have to start a movie or another project,” he says. “But now that’s almost done and it’s been incredible to try and get my own music finished.”
But before he finishes his album or makes way on any other projects, Göransson will go to Sunday’s 95th Academy Awards in which Oppenheimer is nominated for a total of 13 awards, including Best Original Score.What would it mean for Göransson to win an Oscar for Oppenheimer?
“I’m so grateful to get these accolades and recognition, from the Grammys to the Academy nomination,” he says. “We’re like a family, all the people who work on Chris [Nolan]’s movies, so during award season we all get to hang out a lot more with each other and get to celebrate the movie and celebrate each other. It’s been such a joy. Winning would be an incredible honor.”
