Words by Amon Warmann

While many artists have transitioned from music to film composition, few master both like Ludwig Göransson.

This dual expertise in both makes the Swedish artist one of the most unique composers working today — a feat all the more impressive considering his career is barely over a decade old.

In 2013, Göransson made his feature debut when he composed for Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, marking the start of a long-lasting collaboration. This collaboration led to Göransson scoring all of Coogler’s films, and earned him an Oscar for ‘Best Original Score’ with Black Panther. A decade on, Göransson, now a multiple Grammy and Emmy winner, contributed to the soundtrack of this year’s blockbuster, Oppenheimer.

In our Zoom chat with the composer, looking into his LA studio adorned with instruments and awards, we gain insight into a supremely talented, wildly successful, and surprisingly modest artist. Despite collaborations with Christopher Nolan, scoring for Disney+’s The Mandalorian, crafting the new Star Wars fanfare, and producing for Rihanna, Adele, Haim, and Stormzy, Göransson eschews the idea of cultivating his sound as a brand. For him, each project is a chance to start anew, challenge himself, and meld the old with the current to craft bold and original sounds.

What does inspiration look and sound like to you?

In my case, inspiration starts with the social interaction with the filmmaker — and the energy that’s there. With the filmmaker or the artist, or whoever you work with, there's something there because I'm creating this person's vision. I need to be on the same page as this person and understand what they're trying to make. We're building a world. From the first conversation about the project, you need to sense the urgency. You sense the creative bloom in the person you're working with. You're sharing that from the get-go. That's what sparks the first inspiration for a project. 

In Chris’ [Nolan] case, he tells you to go read the script. So my first interaction with Oppenheimer was actually after talking to Chris and reading the script. That was a very visceral experience because I've never read anything in the first person. You really feel like you’re Oppenheimer and that was the inspiration.

Is it true that you like to use a different instrument every time you feel inspired?

I think a more accurate way to describe it is that I always want to try to approach a project in a way that feels like I'm doing something for the first time. Whether that's with a new instrument or an instrument that I know I can play in a new way. You can use the violin in so many different ways, and in a way that people don't really know what it is. There's something about taking something very familiar and manipulating it, or playing it, and performing it in a way where people will be like, “Hey, what is that?”

How do you overcome moments when an idea doesn’t come immediately? 

I'm at the stage where inspiration and ideas come more often when I'm away from my computer. I can watch something on screen or I can read something, but then whenever I want to think about music and come up with an idea, it’s always away from the keyboard and the computer and the screen. So you try to write something on the real instrument, where you can feel the keys playing or you can feel the guitar — you can feel the instruments and you feel like it's giving something back to you. The computer always just takes, takes and takes. Working with something that gives something back to create unique sounds works better for me.

I can take an instrument, and record it into my modular synth, you can tweak the buttons and create unique manipulating sounds. For Oppenheimer, one of the first ideas that I needed to build was a flurry of unique sounds. I had my sound guy record sounds from old equipment that was used from that era — the kind of radios and nuclear computers and machines that were used in the 1950s.

We then recorded and manipulated those to see how we could make it into a sample library. A lot of the time, an easy way would be to say “Oh, I'm writing music about India, I'm gonna go online and buy the Indian sample library.” But there's so much more you can do yourself. I think that's what's exciting — to build sounds from the ground up. It makes the whole process more unique and it makes it feel fresh from the very beginning.

Anytime I have moments of doubt, or when I’m stuck, I'll always try to rely on the people that are close to me. And fortunately, the people that I'm working with are also people I feel close to. If I call and talk to them, it's not just about work. We can talk about other things too. It's so important to have a system around you where you have people you can rely on.

Do you ever find that an idea will just hit you, and you’ll immediately record it in your voice notes?

More so in the last couple of years because, before I had kids, I was in the studio for 20 hours a day sometimes. Now, when I'm out taking a walk with my two-year-old, and all of a sudden there might be a car that makes some noise, or it might be just a melody that comes to me when I'm playing a record — I'll pull out my really cool voice recorder from Teenage Engineering. 

How similar or different is your mindset or starting point when you’re working on a score as opposed to when you’re working on a track?

When you work on a film, 99% of your time is by yourself. The time you can get with a director to get notes is very valuable, but also the director is so busy. As a composer, you're a very close collaborator, but you're one part of many other departments. When I work closely with artists, it's just the two of us and we’re in the room together constantly and talking about what we're trying to do. It’s really fun because it's a very close collaboration where I also feel like I always end up learning a lot, and have taken other musicians' and artists’ thoughts and creative routes into consideration much more than when I work on a film.

How do you decide on when to use electronic elements or orchestral sounds, and how do you balance them both in a score?

They're both great tools. An orchestra has dynamic range and expression. It makes a big difference if you have 50 people playing a melody — you can hear the air in the room. There’s a closeness to it. You can tell the difference if it's one person or 50 people, just like you can tell the difference between a beginner and a professional.

What I'm interested in is also how you can create a new experience. And there's so much you can do with an orchestra. They can cover a lot of grounds emotionally. But there are some frequencies that are part of our world today that an acoustic orchestra is not gonna be able to reach.

Your work tends to fuse analogue with digital — would you ever want to make a score that’s entirely one or the other?

Absolutely, I would definitely be up for that. What I'm doing right now is very much in both worlds, taking something from the past, taking something from the present, and stirring it around to make it sound like something from the future. But I've been thinking about that a lot, actually — trying to maybe make a score completely analogue and mix it analogue and not do anything in Pro Tools. Using analog tape or a machine as your sequencer, and hearing how different the music would be. Wondering how much more difficult the whole process would be, and how much more time-consuming would be. I think limiting yourself in this era where everything is available to you, limiting yourself to the sounds you use, the machines, and to the way you create, might develop some very interesting ideas and open up your mind.

Once you’ve created a sound library for a particular project, do you ever revisit it for something else? 

I have to start new all the time because everything I do for all my projects is so specific. Sometimes, I’ll try. I have 10 GB of samples from Tenet, where I recorded all instruments backwards and made a really incredible sample library. I’ll see if I can use that cool backwards guitar and drag it in, and it's the same thing every time; it's just so specific to that time and that era in my life — but I think that's a good thing.

I need 90% of my sounds before I see the first cut because once I have the first cut I don't have that much time to go back and tweak sounds. After all, I have a four-hour movie to work with. I'm trying to have my sounds and my library and the world that we're trying to create complete before we have a first cut. It takes about two to three months to come up with that palette, and then when you have a first cut you have three months to finish it.

You’ve done multiple movies where you’ve gone from score to song. What’s the joy of that for you? 

I think it's extremely powerful. And I think it's also something that you don't see very often because, for a long time, it's just been two different jobs. The music supervisor puts in the songs and the composer writes the score. It’s baffled me – how isn’t that one job? There are so many times in the theatre when there's a needle drop that comes on and immediately takes me out of my experience. You can put it in a way where it's tastefully done. But I feel like when it gets really interesting is when you create a unique immersive world for the music. So you don't start thinking about what are the songs and what’s the score. You’re just completely immersed in the experience. I love creating those kinds of experiences.

When I'm scoring a movie and I'm watching a scene, I think it's the composer – the person that has the most experience with music – that should have an idea or feeling like, “Oh, there could be score here and here’s a big space where the voice can come in and take over. What could a voice say? What kind of artist should it be?” And then it goes back into score again. There are so many options. It’s music. You're trying to push a feeling. If you're doing music, why just limit yourself to instrumental?

The merging of score and track feels distinctly ‘Ludwig’.  Do you enjoy having that sonic recognisability, or are you trying to change that to a degree so that people don’t always sense your hand in a project until your name pops up in the credits?

That's a good feeling. I went to UC a couple of days ago where I talked to the composing class. One of the first things that your professors tell you is that the most important thing is to find your own voice. I remember hearing that constantly while studying, trying to find out who I am, not just musically but in life. I was thinking about that a lot. But I think that advice is less helpful than helpful. Because it just makes you anxious.

I don't constantly think about my own voice. At the time I was like okay, I need to lock myself in, being by myself, trying to just practise and trying to be better. But in the end, what I figured out was that it was the complete opposite that helped me find my voice. It was to play with more people, look at someone in different departments, and be around people that have a completely different cultural background, and educational background. That's broadened my musical ability.

I don’t fully know what my voice is. And I'm also not constantly trying to make something so people recognise that it's me. That's not why I'm doing it. That's not why I'm doing anything, but I'm trying to always continue to have fun. So hopefully that seeps out.

Given all the strikes, there haven’t been many films or TV shows to work on. How have you been keeping your creative mind sharp in the interim? 

I think it's easier to keep your creative mind sharp if you're not in the studio all the time. Oppenheimer was back-to-back with Wakanda Forever. So I made sure to just take some time afterwards and spend time with my family. Also to reflect on what went into it, how it affected me and what I want to do next. I want to work on things that really make me excited too, something that I can put all my time and effort into. I’m back working on my own project, and musically it'll be pulling from all kinds of ideas, building a puzzle with music throughout my whole life. Hopefully, I'll be able to release it next year.