IMAX caught up with the three-time Oscar winning composer Ludwig Göransson (just soak that up for a moment, he’s 50 years younger than the Maestro and already has 3 Oscars) to discuss his stellar work on The Mandalorian and Grogu, a score that blossoms with each play.
Q: Were you a big STAR WARS fan growing up?
A: I was a huge STAR WARS fan. I mean, I was actually more of a STAR WARS music fan.
Obviously I love STAR WARS, but the music was what was, as with so many others, one of the things that inspired me to do what I do. John Williams’ legacy and John Williams’ creation of the STAR WARS universe, that still lingers on forever. As a child, that’s what stuck with me, the images of Darth Vader with that music.
Q: Do you have a favorite scene or moment in the movie that fans should particularly keep an eye and an ear out for?
A: Something that I thought was really fun, there’s a scene when Rotta [the Hutt] is fighting against Mandalorian. It’s called the “Pit Fight.” Something that I love to do with music and score is to incorporate sound elements in the sound design.
So, there’s a lot of that in this movie. The alarms that you hear in the beginning, that is actually part of the music. That’s part of the score. Using those alarms made me able to map out the tempo of the score in a way that moves in the same tempo as the alarms essentially.
For the Pit Fight, what I was doing when I was writing the score, was creating the ambience of the crowd. Using that together with score, thinking about almost the crowd as a music element, and how the score can respond to that back and forth.
Then being there at the dub stage when we’re mixing this, working together with the incredible Skywalker Sound team, creating that ambience, letting the music and the sound design breathe together, and be coming from the same place, creating that 360 immersive experience with both sound and music…I think that’s very interesting and I love digging deeper into that.
