Nathan Johnson

A versatile composer, filmmaker, and producer whose work spans scoring, directing, and collective projects, Nathan Johnson first drew widespread notice in 2005 through his distinctive music for the neo-noir feature Brick. He sustained that approach of merging conventional instruments with unusual sound sources across later scores, including those for Looper and the Knives Out films, all helmed by his cousin Rian Johnson. Beyond cinema, Johnson has created multiple short films and music videos while serving as a founding member of the Los Angeles-based visual, engineering, and musical arts collective The Echo Society.

An East Coast native who relocated to England during the 2000s, he established The Cinematic Underground—an alternative rock ensemble drawing on a rotating roster of friends and relatives from both continents—after his return. The collective issued its first album, the narrative-driven Annasthesia, in 2003. That same year saw him scoring his cousin Rian’s debut feature, Brick; captured inside his own apartment alongside fellow Cinematic Underground members, the recording blended found objects such as filing cabinets and cheese graters with acoustic instruments and earned substantial praise. Strings and woodwinds augmented his self-coined “back porch orchestra” on the 2008 comedy-drama The Brothers Bloom, while electronics and field recordings broadened the palette for the award-winning Looper in 2012.

In 2013 Johnson supplied the score for Don Jon, the directorial debut of Brick and Looper star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the following year he worked as both composer and executive producer on director Jack Paltrow’s science fiction action film Young Ones while also scoring the biographical crime thriller Kill the Messenger. He rejoined his cousin Rian for the 2019 mystery blockbuster Knives Out and composed the soundtrack for Gordon-Levitt’s comedy-drama television series Mr. Corman in 2021. Two years later he revisited the Knives Out universe with his music for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.