Music is often used as a powerful storytelling tool in movies as it enhances emotional depth and makes the cinematic experience more immersive for the viewer. In simple language, music makes or breaks a particular movie. A musical score makes a movie memorable and a good example of this was 2023’s Oppenheimer.
The original soundtrack album, Oppenheimer, was composed by Ludwig Göransson. The original theme of the film contained memorable soothing violin elements, which was director Christopher Nolan’s idea. The album has been nominated for Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media at the upcoming 66th Annual Grammy Awards. Göransson once opened up about how Nolan’s idea inspired him to create the music for the movie.
Christopher Nolan showed Ludwig Göransson visual experiments to inspire him to create Oppenheimer‘s music
In July, Swedish composer, Ludwig Göransson appeared for an interview with Vulture to talk about the original soundtrack album for 2023’s Oppenheimer. Göransson explained that the director of the movie, Christopher Nolan asked him to sit down in a dark room and showed him visual experiments to inspire the musician,
“He is such a complex, obviously genius character, but I think at times not a lot of people can understand him. At its core, his theme is played by the violin in a very simple, intimate way with six notes. But throughout the movie, I have that theme with a lot of crazy, mathematical, rhythmical, complex ideas around it. When I first started working on the movie, Chris invited me to an early screening of some of their visual experiments. I saw how they did that splitting of atoms with this ultraviolet light swirling around. I was sitting in a dark theater seeing this huge screen and these lights just swirling around. That’s essentially when I was like, ‘Okay, this is what I want the music to sound like.'”
Even the idea of using violin for the movie’s main theme song came from Christopher Nolan. This wasn’t Göransson’s first time collaborating with Nolan as the musician also worked on the soundtracks of his 2020 movie, Tenet.
The violin played a key role in the original soundtrack album
Further in the interview, Göransson explained how the use of violin was gradually increased as the movie progressed,
“After we start off with just the solo violin, as the story continues, there are more players joining. A solo violin might make it very intimate and sincere, but you can gradually introduce a quartet and an octet and then the whole string ensemble, and play with that sound and manipulate it, too. The sound gets bigger and bigger and bigger. This is also why it’s so great to work with Chris: He has such a good mind for tempo and for pace.”
Göransson is a well-known name in the industry. For his work on the 2018 superhero film Black Panther, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. Thanks to his remarkable talent, Oppenheimer has been nominated for Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media for the next Oscars.
