Oppenheimer Musical Featurette

Celebrity Wire

Oppenheimer Composer Ludwig Goransson and movie Director Christopher Nolan discuss how they chose to conduct the music in the film and how they wanted the sounds and music involved to fit in with the Oppenheimer movie script. Check it out.

Transcript

00:00 This is a national emergency.

00:02 Detonators charged!

00:04 As soon as I read the script, I'm putting the pieces together in my mind.

00:16 For Oppenheimer, we had a meeting and we started talking about different approaches

00:26 and different types of musical ideas.

00:30 The film score grew very organically, very gradually from the smallest elements.

00:36 And I had no preconceptions about the music for the film.

00:39 Sometimes you have an idea for the soundscape of the world, or the rhythm of it,

00:42 and sometimes you don't.

00:43 And in this case, all I had that I gave Ludwig was the idea of basing the score on the violin.

00:47 There's so much in the performance of the violin.

00:55 Within seconds, you can go from something beautiful to something completely horrifying.

01:00 And there's a tension to the sound in a way that I think fits the highly strong intellect

01:06 and emotion of Robert Oppenheimer very well.

01:08 And that's just the organic part of it. That's just the strings.

01:13 And then what comes on later is the production and the synthesizers.

01:18 (Piano playing)

01:21 I think every process of scoring is different if it's to be tailored correctly

01:32 to the demands of a new project.

01:34 And this was a type of film I hadn't made before.

01:37 And it was a type of music that I hadn't worked with before.

01:40 A lot of things you do in the beginning is about experimenting

01:44 and see where you can take things.

01:46 We would take his experiments and we would put them to picture and edit them

01:50 and try different things and show it to Ludwig.

01:52 And he would go and bring more things to the table.

01:55 Oppenheimer is a visual masterpiece.

01:59 I'd never seen that kind of intimate portrayal of a character on IMAX.

02:04 That's the sixth of Oppenheimer theme.

02:07 I felt like this movie was really pushing the boundaries in so many different fields.

02:11 So I wanted to see how we can do that with music as well.

02:15 (Music)

02:18 I think Ludwig's work in the film is both deeply personal and historically expansive.

02:26 I think it really achieves an enormous amount of the effect of drawing the audience

02:32 into the emotional dilemmas of the characters.

02:35 I think he's really put together a very remarkable score.

02:38 (Music)

02:42 (Music)

02:46 (Music)

02:49 (music fades)

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