"Working on any of Ryan's [Coogler, writer/director] movies is very challenging because of how real they feel," said Goransson. "It was very helpful to have a close relationship with Ryan and we dissected every scene thoroughly and always asked ourselves why we need music here."
"One thing that we always wanted to be conscious of with the score, was to make sure that it always felt organic," said writer/director Ryan Coogler. "A lot of the film would play without score, so Ludwig made sure that whenever we brought score in came out of sounds in the environment. It was an incredible creative slight of hand on his part, as the music would blend in with the environment, and subtly put the audience in Oscar's head. We worked remotely for most of the creative process."
Ludwig Goransson is a 28 year old composer originally from Sweden. Amongst his most well known work is the award-winning movie Fruitvale Station and the top hit shows Community and New Girl. Aside from scoring movies Ludwig also produce artists like Childish Gambino, Haim and most recently Chance The Rapper. Ludwig is a graduate from the filmscoring program at USC.
Winner of both the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Prize of the Future at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Coogler's Fruitvale Station follows the true story of Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old Bay Area resident who wakes up on the morning of December 31, 2008 and feels something in the air. Not sure what it is, he takes it as a sign to get a head start on his resolutions: being better son to his mother (Octavia Spencer), whose birthday falls on New Year's Eve, being a better partner to his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), who he hasn't been completely honest with as of late, and being a better father to Tatiana (Ariana Neal), their beautiful four year-old daughter. Crossing paths with friends, family and strangers, Oscar starts out well, as the day goes on, he realizes that changes are not going to come easily. His resolve takes a tragic turn, however, when BART officers shoot him in cold blood at the Fruitvale subway stop on New Year's Day. Oscar's life and tragic death would shake the Bay Area—and the entire nation—to its very core.
"Ryan and I talked a lot about how sound design was going to have a huge role in the movie and very early on I got sent the actual sound recordings of the Bart Train," said Goransson. "I manipulated the train sound and made it almost feel like a dark ambient synth sound and I used it almost throughout the whole Bart platform scene. The other element in the score is lots of layered and manipulated guitars sounding almost like haunting pads."