Oscar-Nominated Composers Single Out One Magic Moment in Their Scores

The films contending for this year's Best Original Score Oscar represent a wide spectrum, including historical epics, sci-fi adventures, and dark comedies. For each nominated composer, a specific scene demanded music that was integral to the story's fabric. Ludwig Göransson, recognized for both Score and Song, pinpointed this moment in "Sinners" during a juke joint performance of "I Lied to You." Director Ryan Coogler's cinematography visually ties the singer, Preacherboy (Miles Caton), to a lineage of Black music, cutting between images of African drummers, a guitarist evoking Jimi Hendrix, and modern hip-hop artists. Göransson, who co-wrote the track with Raphael Saadiq immediately before traveling to the Louisiana set, emphasizes the scene's deeper meaning: it depicts an artist connecting to his past and future through song, illustrating the very evolution of the blues. The shoot was a significant logistical feat, with the elaborate, multi-era sequence condensed into a single day. Göransson's portable music rig was crucial, enabling real-time adjustments to synchronize the camera movements with an eight-bar musical progression that gradually built in intensity.

A pre-existing composition can occasionally redefine a film's entire trajectory, as happened with Chloe Zhao's "Hamnet." The director found herself stuck on the scripted ending until actress Jessie Buckley, playing Agnes Hathaway, played her Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight." Richter, a German-British composer renowned for his minimalist style, first released the piece on his 2004 album *The Blue Notebooks*; it has since become a frequent choice for filmmakers seeking emotional depth, notably in Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival." For Zhao, hearing it was a breakthrough. Richter notes that just days before wrapping, she had a vision for the film's conclusion inspired by the track. The music was played on a loop during the final shoot days, directly shaping the new ending. Despite Richter crafting an original, Oscar-nominated score for the remainder of the film, Zhao insisted "On the Nature of Daylight" provide the finale, as it was the key that unlocked the film's closing emotional resonance for her.

Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" presented composer Alexandre Desplat with a uniquely grisly challenge: scoring Victor Frankenstein's (Oscar Isaac) grim harvest of body parts from a battlefield. Desplat, a French composer with ten Oscar nominations and wins for "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "The Shape of Water," deliberately avoided accentuating the horror. His counterintuitive strategy was to score from Victor's obsessed point of view. The result is a grandiose waltz for orchestra and choir, lending a darkly humorous and almost majestic quality to the macabre activity. "The first instinct is to emphasize this horrific moment, but it would have been unbearable," Desplat explained. He used musical pauses and restarts to create a counterpoint to the visuals, reframing the sequence and inviting the audience to momentarily share in the character's fervent, if twisted, creative passion rather than merely witness its grotesque results.

The most unorthodox approach was undertaken by "Bugonia" composer Jerskin Fendrix. Director Yorgos Lanthimos—known for his surreal and unsettling films like "The Favourite"—provided no script, only three thematic words: "bees," "basement," and "spaceship." Commissioned months before filming, Fendrix embarked on what he describes as "months and months of esoteric, bizarre research" based solely on these concepts. He produced over an hour of music, which was later recorded by a 90-piece orchestra in London. Lanthimos then edited these orchestral recordings into the final score, with Fendrix having no knowledge of the production. This enforced isolation fostered a strange creative kinship. "I was starting to get a bit paranoid," Fendrix admits, a state he later realized mirrored the journey of the film's protagonist, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a loner consumed by obsessive research. Fendrix views his process as a form of "method composition," where being kept in a similar psychological space of uncertain, isolated creation allowed him to authentically score the character's descent into frantic grandiosity.