Composer Ludwig G?ransson on putting Puccini in The Mandalorian and the future of Black Panther
The only blockbuster film to be released since lockdowns spread across the world has been Tenet. Epic in scale, with spectacular stunts and cutting-edge CGI, the sci-fi spy drama may not have singlehandedly saved cinema, as some were hoping, but it was certainly an event. What is perhaps less well-known is that its striking, atmospheric score was created in the composer’s bedroom.
“It was right at the beginning of the pandemic,” says Ludwig G?ransson, chatting via video call from LA, “I had to record the musicians one by one at their houses.
“My one-year-old was in the room next to me, so every time I went out to take a coffee break, you know, you can’t just go past and then go back in. But seeing him being playful was helpful for me and my creative world.”
G?ransson’s creative world is a very unique place right now. Not only has he composed the scores for Tenet, Black Panther (2018) and the Disney+ Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, which has just returned for a second series (for which he was able to record the orchestra all together in a room), but he’s also a Grammy Award-winning pop writer/producer, working with artists as diverse as sibling guitar-group HAIM, Vampire Weekend, and hip-hop star Childish Gambino.
The latter is the alter-ego of actor/writer/singer Donald Glover, whom G?ransson met when they were both working on the cult US comedy Community back in 2009 – Glover as actor, G?ransson as composer. Together they went on to co-write nearly all the songs on Childish Gambino’s first three albums, as well as the zeitgeist-defining This Is America in 2018.
Its satirical dissection of the black experience in the US (“Police be trippin’ now/ Yeah, this is America”) seems an unlikely fit for the softly spoken 36-year-old Swede, with his flowing locks and hippy-influence suits.
“We have completely different upbringings,” he says. “But we have similar tastes, so I think when you combine those two different backgrounds, the result can be very interesting. We’re also great friends. So whenever we’re in a room together, we're just having a lot of fun.
“What’s exciting about working with him is that I never know where he’s gonna go,” he adds. “I just need to be ready.”
G?ransson has that absence of cynicism and quiet seriousness common to many Scandinavians. He grew up in the city of Link?ping, in southern Sweden, where his father was a guitar teacher who named his son after Ludwig van Beethoven. It’s perhaps only a small leap from the foreboding power and intensity of the classical giant to G?ransson’s first musical love...
“I started playing guitar when I was about six,” he tells me, but it was when he was eight or nine, that he “heard some noise from the basement, and when I opened the door, my dad was headbanging and playing guitar to Enter Sandman by Metallica. And ever since that moment, I knew that I wanted to do music.”
He’s a perfect example of early hot-housing: “My parents took me a lot to see orchestra performances when I was very young, and I was a little bored, but my dad was always whispering to me the story of what the music was about. I remember always wanting a Nintendo, but instead of a Nintendo, my dad kept giving me music stuff. I got a four-track cassette recorder when I was nine, so I spent all my time on that, trying to make songs.”
It paid off. And G?ransson rediscovered some of that childlike wonder in creating the score for The Mandalorian – set just five years after The Return of the Jedi (1983). “I went back to the feeling that I had when I heard the Star Wars music for the first time, I wanted to connect with that excitement and that feeling of being in a different universe. Normally I sit and write all the music by the computer. But for The Mandalorian, I surrounded myself with instruments, the way that I used to write music when I was a kid. And I locked myself in for a month and just played recorders, drums, guitars, these old Seventies synthesisers, and created music in a very playful way.”
“You can put a lot of your energy and time into a computer, and you don’t get anything back. But when you sit and play an instrument, it talks to you, it resonates with your body and it tells you things, and that's how these compositions grew.”
Many varied musical forms flow into G?ransson’s work. He has just curated his own streaming radio station, Things That Stuck, for Sonos Radio. The perhaps inevitable ABBA (Lay All Your Love on Me) sits alongside Drake (Worst Behaviour) and Ennio Morricone (Cinema Paradiso). There’s even a bit of British acid jazz picked up during his visits to stay with his older sister when she moved to Hackney in the late Nineties.
And, as with Star Wars’ original composer John Williams, who looked back to Holst and Wagner in creating perhaps the best-known film theme ever, G?ransson finds inspiration in his classical heroes. “When I started The Mandalorian, I went to see a bunch of Puccini performances at the LA Opera, like La bohème or Madame Butterfly, just the core emotional ripping-your-heart-out feeling that I got from those performances had a huge impact on me. So there’s a lot of Puccini on there.”
His ability to absorb musical influences helped shape his superb score for Black Panther, too. He and director Ryan Coogler go all the way back to their time together at the University of Southern California – G?ransson has soundtracked all three of Coogler’s feature films to date, including the 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed.
On Black Panther, his score sits alongside original songs by hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar, and G?ransson has fond memories of working with him to shape the astonishing car chase scene filmed in Busan, South Korea, when his music has to intermesh with Lamar’s song blasting out from one of the car stereos.
Did he anticipate opposition to a white guy composing the score for such a landmark film for black representation in the Marvel universe? “I understood early how important it was to get this right,” he says. He felt the pressure “from so many people that it needs to be done in a way where the African music is true to itself. So that’s why I decided to go to West Africa and work with African musicians to create a sound where the soul of the music is African.” They included the celebrated guitarist and singer Baaba Maal. In the film, he explains, Wakanda is a nation that has never been colonised, and also the most technologically advanced country in the world, which is reflected in the score. “The electronic element is supporting the African music.”
The film’s star, Chadwick Boseman, who played the title character, died recently of complications from colon cancer. “I met him for the first time on set,” Goransson says. “He was always right next to Ryan, involved in every part of it, talking to me about the music, which is not normal with actors in Hollywood – they shoot their scene and go to the trailer. What stood out was how extremely passionate he was.”
What music does he associate with him? He pauses: “The Ancestral Plane, when he takes the herbs and goes and meets his father the first time. That's something that I strongly connect with Chadwick.”
There’s been talk of Letitia Wright’s Shuri, the sister of Boseman’s Wakandan king T’Challa/Black Panther, becoming the focus of the sequel. Does G?ransson think that Wright can take on the mantle and carry Black Panther forward? “I’m sure whatever Ryan’s writing, they will make it in a very respectful way,” he says.
Its music though may already be taking shape. “I’ve been thinking about it since the first one,” G?ransson says. “It’s always in my mind, just thinking about the possibilities and where to take it.”
As for Tenet, he and director Christopher Nolan had met once a week for months before shooting to talk about the music. “Chris wanted to experiment,” he says. “As an audience member, when you go into a theatre, you’re already expecting to hear a blend of electronics and an orchestra. But for Tenet, the music production is heavily manipulating the organic and electronic elements, so they blend together with the sound design. So most of the time, you think you know what it is, but you don’t.”
That thought stirs another question. Tenet’s backwards/forwards sci-fi spy plot has baffled audiences the world over. After all that time spent with Nolan, does G?ransson know what it’s about? “Yeah, it’s, it’s…” he begins, “I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s about time… And, um, and er, relationships.” Phew, that’s sorted then.
The Mandalorian is available to watch on Disney+. Things That Stuck is streaming on Sonos Radio