Quotes

[on his inspiration for going into the business] It was John Williams. It was Danny Elfman, especially the score for Edward Scissorhands (1990) had a big impact on me. I remember one of the more modern scores I listened to in high school was the Michael Andrews score for Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005). That was the first time I heard modern synthesizers and production in a score. I listened to it over and over again. But John Williams and Danny Elfman were my main inspirations.

My approach is to build sounds from the ground up so there's nothing that has specific associations. Everything is fresh. And that allows the music to function more in a way that traditional sound design functions in a film, where it's very subliminal.

I think something that's really interesting, being inspired by some of the great film composers like John Williams and Ennio Morricone is that something Morricone was so great at is being a music producer. Some of the most iconic western scores, it was just taking one sound, playing one note, just making it so distinctive so the first time you hear it it's burnt into your brain for the rest of your life. I think that's something I was very inspired by through my whole career, how you can make a sound and make it super distinctive.

My whole life I went to school for music. In elementary school, I went to a music elementary school so we had choir every day. I had a band and we played every day. In high school I went to music high school in Sweden. It was actually 'Star Wars' music that got me into classical music in high school. It opened up the doors to me to classical music and I was obsessed with 'The Planets'. That led me to delving deeper into classical music and I also got into jazz. After high school I went to the Royal College of Music in Stockholm studying jazz improvisation for three years. I ended up moving to Los Angeles where I studied scoring for grad school for a year at USC.