'Tenet' composer says an 'out of body experience' on set inspired him to create the movie's dynamic score, which included having an orchestra play music in reverse

• "Tenet" composer Ludwig Göransson spoke to Insider about creating the movie's score.
• He said to match the movie's story, he played music on top of music and even forced the orchestra to play some music backwards.
• "I got a lot of questions from the musicians wondering if their part was full of typos," he said.
• Göransson also weighed in on why it's so difficult to hear the movie's dialogue. "It's because the music...is so highly experimental and new," he said.

The creation of music for the blockbuster "Tenet" was not immune to the complexities director Christopher Nolan forged on his latest story.

In fact, composer Ludwig Göransson admitted it was a little tough to share exactly how he pulled it off.

"I was in that world for a year and to me it all felt clear," he told Insider. "After, it's so hard to explain."

But after clearing the cobwebs, Göransson revealed a process that involved hours of swapping music with Nolan, multiple trips to set, and inevitably mixing the music together in post production so it would mirror the plot that involves a nameless spy, played by John David Washington, who has to dive into an inverted world to save the day.

The journey for Göransson began before Nolan even started shooting. After a six-hour long first meeting with the director and a couple of read-throughs of the script ("I had to read a couple of things over again"), Göransson began creating the music, leading to him creating close to three hours of music, which Nolan incorporated while editing the movie during shooting.

Göransson then went deeper into the world of "Tenet" when he visited the set where the movie's final battle takes place.

"I drove out to this California dessert and it was like an out of body experience," he said. "I have never seen anything that crazy before: Eight helicopters above me; a thousand extras, half of them running backwards and half of them running forwards."

With all of that inspiration to feed off of, Göransson began to craft the score in a way he's never done before.

Known in Hollywood for his heavily-produced sounds that have earned him an Oscar for his work on "Black Panther," Göransson is also known among the "Star Wars" fandom thanks to the music he's created for "The Mandalorian."

Still with "Tenet," the Swedish composer said he elevated his game and was "extremely proud" of how the score turned out.

"One of the things I love about my job is being able to learn new things every time," he said. "I worked with new techniques I've never done before; record[ed] instruments that I didn't think was possible."

That included using alarm sounds to generate a thrilling score in the heist scene of the movie where the protagonist (Washington) has to steal the artifact out of a truck with the help of a fire engine. Or having two scores playing over one another in the finale battle when the inverted and non-inverted teams go on their mission.

But the most challenging for Göransson was writing the orchestra's music that they would eventually attempt to play.

In the case of the scene where the protagonist observes fighting being done by both inverted and non-inverted soldiers on a large boat, he devised a complex score that would match the footage.

"For that scene, I had the main protagonist's main theme play inverted," he said. "I made it sound like the orchestra was playing the theme backwards while the rhythm and percussion is still moving forward."

"In order to achieve this," Göransson continued,"I reversed the musicians individual lines of music on the page. I got a lot of questions from the musicians wondering if their part was full of typos. Then I recorded them playing and reversed the audio of the recording - if that makes sense."

Like everything with "Tenet," it makes more sense the more times you watch the film (and maybe have the subtitles on, too). But Göransson believes that's the joy of the movie, that it's unlike anything you have seen before - or heard.

"That's why for some people it was a shock to see this movie," he said. "Like people complaining about not hearing the dialogue clearly, it's because the music and the sounds that Chris and I created is so highly experimental and new."

"When people sit down to see a movie, their brains are already programmed to a certain blend of score," he said. "What we did is we turned it on its head."

"Tenet" is available now in theaters, Blu-ray, DVD, and On Demand.