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He and Goransson both seem to approach film music on conceptual and emotional levels.
I wasnt surprised, but I thought it was great challenge.
What Chris really wanted was to capture Oppenheimers persona and his neurotic behavior and his character.
So much of whats happening to him is internal.
Which means that sometimes the film has to express that formally.
I imagine music plays a huge role there?Absolutely.
I saw how they did that splitting of atoms with this ultraviolet light swirling around.
I was sitting in a dark theater seeing this huge screen and these lights just swirling around.
Thats essentially when I was like, Okay, this is what I want the music to sound like.
The whole film always feels like its building and building and building toward something.
Its very fast, never boring.
What is it about the music that helps that build?
Is it the pace, or the particular instruments being used?Its both.
The sound gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
But whats going on around it is very complex.
But by the end of that scene, it endsthree times as fast.
I was very, very excited about this whole tempo illusion.
And that really came together with the first visualization I had of the atoms swirling.
You see them getting faster and faster, and then finally its almost kind of a blur.
And thats what I wanted to achieve with the music.
The trick of it is its a steadyaccelerandothroughout the whole scene, but its more of a feeling.
Like you said, the audience is really following the story through Cillian Murphys performance, which is outstanding.
So the music really needs to make you feel what hes feeling.
And as the movie pushes forward, theres more production coming in.
There was something interesting with that how that modern production symbolizes the dark clouds looming over him.
In so many of Nolans movies, theres often a conceptual element that finds its way into the music.
You did it inTenet, with the inverted tracks playing through some of the pieces.
Were there such elements you played with here?A lot.
Its a tempo thats increasing, and it hits you like a train running.
Because we did that, they were able to perform the whole three-minute piece in one take.
That kind of experimentation, that kind of recording, Ive never done before.
Just how alive the music came to be during the recordings was, I think, extraordinary.
Speaking of tempo, there isnt a lot of percussion in the film, is there?No.
When they can hear a beat, people think tempo.
Beat changes, people realize the tempo is changing.
But without the percussion to indicate it, it becomes anxiety-inducing.Yeah.
A lot of Chriss movies are very percussion-heavy.
I mean, at leastTenetwas.
A lot of movies today are.
The foot stomps are one of the only percussive elements that keep coming back in to this movie.
And since theres not a lot of percussion, that element gets so abrasive.
It almost gets distorted because youre feeling that kind of rhythm hitting you like a drum.
But I hope you werent missing the drums!
So they werent putting in other pieces of music that you then had to emulate.
I imagine thats pretty liberating.It was like that withTenet, too.
I get to see Chris a lot before we start shooting.
So I read the script, and then we have meetings once a week where we sit down.
Sometimes none of it works, but sometimes all of it works.
And I just throw everything out that I have.
Were building a sound world, and were building something from scratch.
At that stage, thats when we really start putting on our gloves and going hard on the music.
But at that time, theres already a feeling.
Theres a visual world and theres a sound world thats infused in the movie.
From when they start editing, I have two or three months to finish it.
And then every week were screening the movie.
Every Friday, Im watching it.
Hes a master of that.
When there are big pauses, theyre very effective.
But I think those are already in his mind when hes writing the script.
