Oppenheimer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Following their collaboration on the score for 2020’s Tenet, visionary director-writer Christopher Nolan and experimental composer Ludwig Göransson reunite for Nolan’s follow-up project—Oppenheimer, the explosive biopic accounting for the creation of the atom bomb.

Nolan has a tendency to collaborate with the same people on different projects, everyone from producers and writers to cast members and composers. For the longest time, composer Hans Zimmer was one of these people, scoring nearly every single one of Nolan’s films since 2005’s Batman Begins, either by himself or in collaboration with another composer. Tenet was the first film that broke their unofficial tradition, with Zimmer choosing to score 2021’s Dune instead due to his life-long love of the series. Nolan understood his decision and has remained friends with Zimmer, opting for Göransson in his place.

Both composers excel in experimental methods to create unique sounds and pieces that match the striking visuals for which Nolan is known. With this film, the only preliminary note Nolan gave Göransson was he wanted the soundscape to be based on the violin because “it fits the highly strung intellect and emotion for Robert Oppenheimer.” Göransson then took the organic nature of those elements and combined it with his experimental style in hopes that his music would marry Nolan’s equally striking visuals.

"In the end, we recorded music that surpassed what I believed to be humanly possible. 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 via Rolling Stone

It currently unclear as to why Zimmer did not rejoin with Nolan for Oppenheimer, though it is most likely due to a similar situation of bad timing with the production of Dune: Part Two, especially since he composed an hour-and-a-half’s worth of score for it when he was composing for Part One.