Giving movies a sonic identity
Oscar winner Goransson a secret musical weapon for the hottest directors
The first few months of 2019 were huge for “Black Panther” and Donald Glover. Ryan Coogler’s superhero movie took home three Oscars, including the prize for best score. At the Grammys, where it won again, Glover’s musical alter ego Childish Gambino picked up four trophies for his ambitious political music video and song “This Is America.” Both had something in common: a Swedish musician named Ludwig Goransson.
Goransson’s brief moment in the spotlight came when he accepted the record of the year Grammy for “This Is America” and thanked 21Savage, who was absent in ICE detention. He did innovative soundtrack work for Coogler’s Rocky film “Creed” as well as the director’s breakthrough, “Fruitvale Station.” Goransson is currently at work on Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” but his next major project arrived on Tuesday: He scored all eight episodes of the Disney Plus “Star Wars” series, “The Mandalorian.”
The key to the modern-Western sound of “The Mandalorian”? A flute theme that Goransson came up with once Jon Favreau, the show’s creator, shared his vision — which involved a lonesome rider and a samurai inspiration. The series exists in “more of a dystopic part of the ‘Star Wars’ history,” Favreau said, “and technology and deconstruction are themes that we explore.”
With that in mind, Goransson locked himself in his studio for a month and intuitively bought a bunch of rarely heard bass woodwind recorders. He started improvising, going into an almost meditative state, he said, creating a sprawling four hours of score that he spent the past year writing and recording with top Hollywood studio musicians.
Goransson, 35, said he fell into his relationships with some of Hollywood’s most exciting young talents by chance. He hit it off with Coogler, a fellow student at the University of Southern California, in 2007 over a game of pool at a frat house when Coogler brought up his favourite Swedish hip-hop artists. After graduating from USC’s screen scoring program, Goransson got his first big gig as a composer for the NBC series “Community.” Glover, one of the show’s stars, came to Goransson’s studio to record vocals for an outrageous cover of the song “Somewhere Out There” from “An American Tail.”
“We kind of laughed — we had a good time together,” Goransson said. “A couple weeks later, he emailed me and was like, ‘Hey man, I’m also a rapper, so I wondered if you could take a listen to this, and maybe mix my song?’ ”
What drew Glover in? “I had the classical background and jazz background,” Goransson said. “I could bring something different to the table.”
Music has been Goransson’s constant since he was “little Ludde” from Linkoping, Sweden. His mother, a florist from Poland, and his father, a guitar teacher at the local music school, filled the house with songs ranging from classical to rock to Swedish folk.
He was named after Beethoven. (“My dad wanted to name me Albert after Albert King, the big guitar blues player,” he said. “But my mom said, ‘No — Ludwig Beethoven.’ ”) And he’s always had long hair: “Everybody thought he was this adorable little girl,” said his sister, Jessika, “because he had the same hair that he has now. I have a bit of hair envy.”
Goransson started playing guitar when he was six, but his breakthrough came three years later, when his father was learning Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” at the request of his students. “He got obsessed,” his father, Tomas, said in a phone interview. “He started to practise playing every day for three or four hours.”
Goransson spent most of his youth in his family’s basement, teaching himself how to use a drum machine and a digital eight-track recorder, and nurturing another fascination: soundtracks. He loved the music of John Williams and Danny Elfman, and won the chance to have his work performed by a professional orchestra as a senior in high school.
He went to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm to major in jazz guitar, but soon left for USC, where he scored dozens of student films. “They were all pretty bad,” he said, “but there was one of them that was actually good” — Coogler’s short, “Locks,” a precursor to his vérité-style debut, “Fruitvale Station,” about the killing of a young Black man by a white officer on an Oakland subway platform.
“It was always a collaboration that’s to be respected to the utmost, and that respect is kind of compounded because we were friends first,” Coogler said in an interview. “We’ve been close friends for so long that we’re like family now.”
When Goransson got the job scoring “Black Panther,” he knew he had to go to Africa if he was going to get it right. He recorded the talking-drum player Massamba Diop playing a motif for T’Challa — the drum literally says the character’s name — and flutist Baaba Maal playing a theme on his Fula flute for Erik Killmonger. He then fashioned a symphonic score with an African heartbeat.
Goransson tries to give every film a sonic identity inherent to its world. For “Fruitvale Station,” he used recordings of an actual BART Station. On “Creed,” he sampled a boxing training session at Coogler’s old gym in Oakland and converted those sounds into beats and rhythms for the film’s fight sequences.
Tessa Thompson, who starred as the singer-songwriter Bianca in the “Creed” movies, said she found her character by creating songs as Bianca in Goransson’s studio.
“He has this real spirit of play, and so he can really experiment,” she said. “He has a way of getting really close to the artists that he works with, so they are really deep collaborations.”