‘Tenet’: Ludwig Göransson Put Chris Nolan’s Breath in His Score — and Rethought Composing Altogether

When composer Ludwig Göransson first met with Christopher Nolan after reading the “Tenet” script to discuss how they were going to implement the time inversion theme for the score, the director already had a musical idea in mind: making the electric guitar sound different. That turned out to be a great catalyst for reverse engineering the musical soundscape.

“I started writing music three or four months before shooting,” said the “Black Panther” Oscar winner, who was available when Hans Zimmer committed to Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune.” Chris was actually in town and we had a lot of time together, listening to demos I created, so we analyzed every little sound, and we started building our sound world very early. When Chris first mentioned that he wanted the guitar to not sound like a guitar, I had to rethink how to record a guitar with a lot of sonic options. That meant layering 100 tracks on top of each other. When we hear the opening scene at the opera house, we have this low, twangy guitar boom.”

There are many ways to invert music, going up and down, but Göransson immediately discovered that the music sounded phony when playing it on the piano. But because he was allowed to attend creative meetings with supervising sound editor Richard King and costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, the composer was privy to tackling other inversion issues that could be useful musically. “In order for the reversed fighting scenes to look more interesting, the moves needed to be beautiful,” he said. “It inspired me to invert the music in different ways. I spent six months erasing as much as I could the typical ways that I record music. I wanted to reverse the entropy of an instrument, and to experiment with time signatures.”

“Tenet”

Warner Bros.

Like Zimmer’s “Interstellar” score, which created variations on a theme built around the organ, Göransson constructed his score around a main theme associated with John David Washington’s The Protagonist, emphasizing the electric guitar and synth strings. The result is the most unique hybrid of organic and electronic music ever attempted by the composer. But the revelatory moment for him came when watching the scene where The Protagonist steps into a puddle and the water travels up his leg. “That’s what I wanted the music to sound like,” he said.

That’s when Göransson came up with new methods for how he wanted music to sound in reverse. “One thing that I did was that I recorded three percussion players first in my studio,” he said. “I had them play the main rhythm of the scene. And then I reversed the recording on my computer. And then I played the reverse recording for the musicians and asked them to emulate the recording, which is difficult, but they got pretty close. I recorded that and then I reversed it again.”

And the most elaborate that this process got was for the climactic battle involving two pincer movements from different time periods. This is when the main theme …read more

Source:: IndieWire