Icelandic musician Hildur Gudnadóttir has experienced a very distinct shift since winning the best original score Academy Award for her work in Todd Phillips’ Joker.
“It’s like getting married to it, because you get this prefix,” she jokes to The Hollywood Reporter about “Oscar winner” preceding any reference to her. “It’s hard to see my name written anywhere without this prefix.”
The 42-year-old returned as the composer for Joker‘s sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, a choice she says was a no-brainer. “It was always a given that I would be a part of the sequel because the music was such a big part of the first one,” she explains, noting that she wanted to make sure the sound stayed consistent with the first film. Gudnadóttir says that, sonically speaking, the second film is coming from “the same source” as the original. “We felt that the structure of the source material was so connected to the character [Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck, aka Joker], so we didn’t want to stray too far away from that.
“[Phoenix’s character] obviously has certain themes and orchestration. It just felt like it was so engraved in his character that we didn’t want to tamper with it too much.”
In Joker: Folie à Deux, which significantly underperformed with both critics and audiences, music takes on a different role than in the first film. The movie is a jukebox musical featuring Phoenix’s Fleck and Lady Gaga‘s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, aka DC Comics’ favorite female antihero, Harley Quinn, who breaks out into song frequently. While Gudnadóttir didn’t do the arrangements for the film’s musical numbers, she describes the marriage between the score and the musical numbers as a “giant musical jigsaw puzzle” and admits it took “a lot of trial and error” to get it right.
The songs were all sung live on set with no orchestral compositions behind them because the team wanted the songs to “be a part of the performance” in the scene. “After they finished shooting, that’s when the arrangement process started, which is a bit reversed to how it’s normally done,” Gudnadóttir says, explaining that it was recorded with a live pianist the actors could hear through headphones.
“Anyone who works in arrangements, they will understand just what a challenge that in and of itself proves,” says Gudnadóttir, “because the arrangement has to constantly fluctuate, and then each take has different performances.”
The composer says her trick in the film was bridging the already established aural backdrop from the first movie and the musical numbers.
“The slightly puzzly part of that was that the original sound world is not necessarily so closely related to most of where these songs originally come from,” she says. “It was a huge undertaking, very complex, but definitely an interesting challenge.”
Gudnadóttir says she wanted to continue expanding on the “vocabulary of the string instruments” from the first film, using cello as the main instrument. Much of the sequel is set during Joker’s time behind bars at Arkham State Hospital; the composer worked hard to connect her love of strings with that setting.
“I was really curious about how to make an instrument that served as a prison in and of itself,” she says. Gudnadóttir’s curiosity led to her asking a friend, Úlfur Hansson, to design an instrument she calls “the string prison,” which she describes as electric fence-like. She also had Hansson’s father, luthier Hans Jóhannsson, build a “trench cello,” which is a box-shaped string instrument that was used during World War I. Gudnadóttir says soldiers would often carry bullets in the box.
“They would play this instrument in the trenches to pass time, and the way that it’s described in the historical writings is that it was designed to bring joy to the most horrific situation imaginable. I thought that was just so in line with how Arthur’s mother always spoke about him,” Gudnadóttir explains.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s Arthur’s instrument,’ ” she adds. “It’s both this vessel for aggressive ammunition and also this want to bring joy to horrific situations.”
The experiment proved to be a little dangerous. “The strings would get incredibly hot,” she explains. “You could really burn yourself on that because they’re so amplified.”
Gudnadóttir says she has cherished her collaboration with Joker‘s director, Todd Phillips. “The creative part of scoring these films, it was so beautiful and so incredibly open,” she says. “Todd had so much trust in what I was doing and what I was bringing to the table from the very start.”
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This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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