Who Composed the Music for Oppenheimer?

Christopher Nolan’s films are known to be immersive and emotional pulling with mind-blowing visual and auditory experiences. Music scores in his films are known to be just as fantastic as the motion picture itself.

Chronicling the Manhattan Project, the biographical drama is said to be a “gripping thriller,” “an unconventional biopic,” “a devastating horror film,” and “a haunting love story.” And for the music to match an ambitious description like this would be somewhat sprawling and epic.

“The film’s score grew very organically and very gradually from the smallest elements. I had no preconceptions about the music for the film,” Nolan teased. “And in this case, all I had that I gave Ludwig (Göransson) was the idea of basing the score on the violin. There’s a tension to the sound in a way that I think fits the highly-strung intellect and emotion of Robert Oppenheimer very well.”

Oscar and Grammy-winning composer Ludwig Göransson is the mastermind behind the soundtracks of Oppenheimer, whom Nolan has previously worked with on Tenet. “We recorded music that surpassed what I believed to be humanly possible,” commented Göransson.

“The perplexing visuals of spinning atoms drove forty violins into a breathtaking frenzy, while courtroom scenes were scored with the intensity of a battlefield. The music’s extreme dynamic shifts, travelling from the depths of an intimately personal journey to the brink of utter destruction, are drastic, disorientating, and jarring.”

Göransson admitted that the scoring process has been a challenging, but deepening and perspective-changing realization of nuclear weapons and the history itself. “I grew up in Sweden, where we have a very different relationship with nuclear weapons than we do in the U.S.,’ the composer explained. “Although the entire world knows the devastation the Manhattan Project’s success led to, I’m not sure that most people, or at least people of my generation, are aware of how much this story has shaped each of our lives the way they will after seeing Oppenheimer. Finding my way through that was pretty though.”

Oppenheimer opens in theatres on July 21.