Interview with Ludwig Göransson
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Ludwig Göransson
Swedish composer and record producer who scored Oppenheimer, Black Panther, Tenet and The Mandalorian and produced records for Childish Gambino.
Source: Movieclips on YouTube
These answers are taken from Oppenheimer's Ludwig Göransson Breaks Down His Composing Career | Awards Tour Podcast on Movieclips's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about making music?
I'm always spending so much time by myself writing the music and sitting in my studio, and you need to feel like you're getting something back. That's always important to me: feel like I'm growing as a person, feel like I'm growing as a composer, feel like I'm learning something from the people I'm working with. Working with Donald and Ryan and Chris, I always feel like they give me so much. That's why I feel extremely lucky to be working with true artists.
When I see the first cut, it's an incredible experience for me. Obviously you get to see a Chris Nolan movie for the first time, but you also hear the music that you've been working on together for a long time and see how it comes to life.
And one of my favorite things is to play for a live audience.
What was a great moment for you as a musician?
The way I knew about it at first was because Ryan Coogler told me this. It was at the premiere for the first Creed film. I think Ryan had invited Chris Nolan and Emma Thomas to the premiere, and they showed up, loved the movie, and Ryan got a little chat with him after the film. One of the questions that Chris Nolan asked was, who scored the film? And Ryan was like, yeah, my friend Ludwig Göransson.
Ryan told me about this a couple days later, and I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. Obviously I didn't think that anything was going to come out of it, other than the flattering question about who scored this film. He must have liked the music. But here we are now.
How did your career as a musician unfold?
I started at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and it was the first time I experienced myself not being the best in my class at my instrument. It was a very difficult time, because I was always used to being the best on guitar. So my first two years of college I spent a lot of time just by myself practicing, getting better on my instrument and getting better at improvising, because my major was jazz performance. Then in my last year of college I started this group called Fabulous 5. We made a record, I had some great musicians with me, and we won competitions.
In 2007 I moved to LA, to America. I'd never been to the States before. I moved to start my career and my studies in film scoring, and I thought that I had to put everything else aside: my live shows, trying to play in a band, my producing. Then I met Donald Glover on my first TV show, Community, and he wanted me to help produce some of the music. We wrote music together, and then I put the band together for the live shows and we started touring. I realized that maybe my strong card was that I actually could do all these things together. He was a writer, an actor, a musician. If he does that, I can be a composer, producer, musician, play live.
How do you keep communication clear with the band and the people you record with?
With Chris, I'm one of the first persons to get to read the script. Right after the script, I sit down with him and we talk about what kind of music he's hearing or thinking, and then we start building the sound and the music world together. It's a very, very close process. We meet up in person once a week for about three months, and I write five minutes of music every week. We sit down, listen to it, go through each composition in a very detailed way, talk about specific sounds, melodies, the structure of the composition, and then we pick and choose and create our own map of music and sounds. So when he starts shooting, he has about two or three hours of music ready. Sometimes I also get a call from set: "I'm thinking about this cue. Would you mind changing the end to make it more upbeat?"
After I see the first cut, that's when my job really starts. I bring all that music back to the studio and start sketching out what's missing, where we're going to put it, how we're going to carve out the themes and make it flow into each other. We work Monday through Thursday, and then on Fridays we watch the movie, and we keep doing that every week for three or four months.
Describe your style.
I get a lot of inspiration from creating sounds, creating my own sounds, taking familiar sounds and then manipulating them into something else. So taking things from the environment, like in Creed with the boxing gym, and taking those sounds and making that into music. Hearing sounds and creating sounds is a very big part of my process.
When I start scoring any project, or when I start writing songs, I always want to feel like I'm doing something for the first time. Any movie or TV show that I've been doing, I'm always trying to do it in a different way, to not feel like I'm repeating myself.
For Oppenheimer, I wanted to start with the emotional core and not hide behind sounds or production, because if you have some really cool sounds or technology or production ideas, it's easy to hide behind that. I knew as soon as I read the script that we need to get the emotional core right: the themes, the melody and the harmony, the heartstrings. If we had a good seed with that, it would be easy to put in the production and the synths and the electronics. That would be the easy part.
Tell me about a record or a part that was hard to get right. What was it and why was it challenging?
The music is embodying him. The music has to come from his eyes, from his mind, and the audience is feeling everything through him, and the only way to make that happen was for me to do the same thing. The scene in the gymnasium, where his whole world is just shattering: I remember reading that in the script, and it had such a powerful effect on me, because I could not even imagine how that would feel. I think why it took so long is because it's such a complicated feeling, so far away from anything that I've ever experienced. It took me a long time before I could actually understand it. And it was not fun to go through those feelings either.
We didn't finish that piece of music until one of the very last days of the dub stage. I remember when we did it, Chris was like, "You nailed it." It felt like you ran a marathon.
What solved the puzzle was connecting it to a cue earlier in the movie called Gravity Swallows Light. That's one of the first times you hear these synthesizers that feel like they're grabbing you down the downward spiral. My thought was that the synthesizers would channel the impending doom, and somehow it clicked: let's bring those emotions back into this scene.
What is the biggest audience you have reached?
One of my childhood dreams, from always playing guitar as a kid, was to play for big, large audiences and big festivals all over the world, and I got to do that with the Childish Gambino band. Those are some beautiful memories, and I was so happy that I was able to incorporate all these worlds together.
When you work on a project that reaches out to so many people, it's not very often, so when that happens in your career, it really affects you in a different way. You start to get phone calls from people you haven't seen in a while, friends back in Sweden that call me like, "Oh, we saw this movie," or "We heard this music." It's a very interesting but beautiful experience.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
The first note that Chris had on the music, the first idea he had on the score for Oppenheimer, was to use the violin to portray Oppenheimer's personality and his emotional state. And he also knows that Serena, my wife, is an incredible violinist, so he knew that we could get started on that very early. That was a very lucky situation for me, to be able to work with her.
We were experimenting the first couple of weeks with microtonality, doing small little glissandos up and down in different clusters. A lot of times, especially in horror films, strings are used in clusters for the shock moments, that abrasive sound. How can we take that approach but turn it around, and within a split second change the glissando to something beautiful, melodic and romantic, with a beautiful slow vibrato, and go in between those emotions in a really interesting and different way?
In the courtroom, when he's telling the story about Jean Tatlock with his wife sitting behind him, the music coming in is almost like a horror movie, these glissandos. But the way the glissandos end is in a beautiful chord with a lush vibrato. It's going in between those painful moments in a neurotic way.
Ludwig Göransson's Full Biography
Ludwig Göransson is a Swedish composer known for composing Black Panther, the Creed films, Venom, Fruitvale Station, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Turning Red, New Girl, Community, Top Five, Central Intelligence, 30 Minutes or Less, and Tenet. He has a son with Serena McKinney, who has been married to him since 2018.