Ludwig Göransson never imagined scoring a film about a blues guitar player, let alone with a vintage resonator guitar. But that’s what happened when the Oscar-winning Swedish composer got to stir up the blues for Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” the genre-bending vampire film set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932.
“I grew up with blues around me,” Göransson told IndieWire. ”My dad is a blues guitar player who put a guitar in my hands when I was six and actually wanted to name me Albert after the great Albert King. So this hit close to home.”
It hit close to home for Coogler, too, who has family roots in Mississippi and who wanted to explore the cultural importance of the blues and its supernatural mythology. Taking inspiration from the legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil for musical genius, Coogler offers a fresh spin with young blues man Sammie Moore (newcomer Miles Caton) attracting both good and evil spirits with his electrifying debut at a juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi, run by his twin cousins, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan).
To make the music feel authentic to the time, Göransson went on a blues tour from Memphis to Clarksdale with Coogler, members of the music team, and his dad, who came out from Sweden. They conducted research and made connections with blues musicians. “I think what was so interesting about Ryan’s concept of this music is that when you hear it today on the old recordings, it sounds like dog shit,” Göransson said. But these were not old men singing at the time. They were young guys. They were dangerous. Their music was edgy. It was ‘the devil’s music.’ If you’re listening to this music, you’re bonding with the devil.”
On “Sinners,” Göransson contributed both score and songs in conjuring this devilish sense of mystery and danger. The movie opens, fittingly enough, with “Playin’ Games, Tellin’ Ghost Stories” and the off-screen sound of Sammie tuning up his guitar. This occurs during a prologue in which a narrator describes the relationship between the blues and the spirit world. “I thought this was an interesting way of starting things,” he said. “The score is very much in line with the story. Everything is kind of acoustic, up until the scope of the movie changes and we’re in this different world.”
In cues such as “Clarksdale Love,” the guitar reverberates with deep suffering and spiritual transcendence. But Canton needed to find the right slide guitar for Sammie, one with a resonator specific to the era, as requested by Coogler. This made the guitar louder, before amplifiers. So Göransson did some research and found a 1932 Dobro Cyclops in L.A. He needed two more in case one broke, and he located them in Nashville and London. This became the hero guitar, which took Caton three months to master.
Göransson created the whole score on the Dobro, as well as Sammie’s crucial song: “I Lied to You” (in collaboration with Grammy-winning songwriter Raphael Saadiq). The youngster performs this stirring confessional of being liberated by the blues at the juke, which transforms into an otherworldly dimension, where he’s joined by multicultural musicians and dancers from the past and future. Together they perform Göransson’s “Magic What We Do (Surreal Montage),” a whirlwind showcasing the evolution of the blues and its cultural importance today.
The live performance was shot in a single day as a oner using the 65-pound IMAX camera on a steadicam, which winds its way around the juke in three sections. “After my songwriting session with Saadiq, we had the base of what this surreal montage was gonna be,” added Göransson. “And then it was a question of: How are you gonna make that happen? Because, reading the script, I had goosebumps. I had never even thought of that idea. But it could only be done because we were on set, living in New Orleans. It took months of prep before shooting the scene, every department working together, mapping it out. And then I had a rough video of the take, and I wrote music to that video. And we went back on the stage, and we had one day of shooting this.”
Coogler knew exactly what cultural representations and musical styles he wanted in the “Surreal Montage” scene. “You had little pieces of musical histories coming at you, depending on where the camera is, and it was all happening live the moment we created it,” Göransson said.
The scene includes an African Griot playing a forerunner to the banjo, a ’70s guitarist with a Jimi Hendrix influence [legendary blues guitarist Eric Gales], a DJ at a table doing an ’80s hip hop beat, some West Coast R&B, an African drummer, a Chinese dancer, a ballet dancer, and a battle toward the end between an African ancestral dancer and a modern hip hop dancer.
“The tricky part was how we were gonna make it all feel seamless,” added Göransson. “You’re creating solos in those styles from this music, tying it all together with Miles’ vocals on it. We even recreated an original drum machine beat that became the beginning of hip hop.
”And then, in post, with the mix,” he continued, “we could really play with the [Dolby] Atmos of music panning around you. It was very much also using modern technologies.”
That blend of technology and history is what allows Göransson, Coogler, and the entire “Sinners” team to stretch the music of the montage across space and time. It makes Göransson’s work as powerfully supernatural as anything else in the film.
“Sinners” is now in theaters.
