Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir is part of a wave of European composers who have entered the world of film music from backgrounds in modern classical, experimental and concert music. They include Volker Bertelmann, Jerskin Fendrix, Daniel Blumberg, Max Richter and Kangding Ray — all of whom, like Guðnadóttir, landed on this year’s Oscars shortlist for Best Original Score.
But if Guðnadóttir is in some ways part of a thriving community that has put a bold spin on film music, she’s also a rarity as the only woman in this century to win the Oscar for a film score, and one of only three female composers to ever do it. (The first two were Rachel Portman and Anne Dudley, who won for “Emma” and “The Full Monty” in the 1990s, during the four-year existence of a separate Best Original Musical or Comedy Score category.)
Guðnadóttir won for 2019’s “Joker,” and has since composed scores for films including “Tár” and “Women Talking.” She also came three-quarters of the way to an EGOT in the span of about a year, winning an Emmy for “Chernobyl” and Grammys for both “Joker” and “Chernobyl.”
Her latest film is Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” which transplants Henrik Ibsen’s late 19th-century play “Hedda Gabler” to 1950s England and lets the entire action play out over the course of a raucous party at a huge estate. Music plays a central part in the wild soiree, which helped Guðnadóttir focus the film’s approach to music. But as she told TheWrap in a recent conversation, it also led her in bold directions that included turning the film’s crew into a makeshift choir, and recording them as they all stood around a shattered chandelier that fell to the floor during one particularly dramatic scene.
Did the fact that the entire movie was set in one location over one night influence the musical vocabulary you used? Definitely, it really did. And because it’s a party and you have the band playing and it’s a period piece, the band is obviously going to be playing music from that period. So that really set the parameters quite strongly. I think it’s really exciting when you have a frame to work in and you have to figure out how you can make the most of what you have. Rather than bringing in an orchestra and blowing things out, sound-wise, how can I keep it in the world of these people and this band?
That’s always the most exciting part when you start working on a film: to imagine, what is the sound world we’re in? In this case, I wanted to lean into the fact that they were playing jazz music, and I wanted the love theme to be part of the music that the band is playing. So I wrote a song for the band that also becomes the big love theme, and Nia wrote the lyrics.
But also, I think it’s very exciting when you do a period piece to understand what music was being written at the time. One of the most exciting composers for me at this time in England was Cornelius Cardew, who was writing music for a combination of professional and amateur musicians. He would do these large-scale performances where he would have people sing together, so I was kind of imagining that he was at the party and was starting to write some of those pieces.
And so I made a choir from the cast and the crew of the film. We were all singing together and breathing together, so that all the voices and the breaths come from this choir made up of women from the production office and gaffers and extras and some of the cast. There are so many people behind the camera and around the camera, and it was nice to bring them all into the music. I recorded it all around the broken chandelier on the floor. (Laughs)
Were the crew members eager to participate? A lot of them were not used to singing, so they were very nervous about it. But I had just finished a book about breathing and Nia had been studying the Samuel Beckett play that is basically just an inhale and an exhale (the 35-second 1969 play “Breath”). We were both thinking about that, and when I came up with the idea of recording the cast and crew, breathing together was a great place to start making sounds. The singing came out of the breathing.
With some of the musical cues in “Hedda,” you wrote arrangements for the big band, but then you went back to the theme and stripped elements away, until you took the piece all the way down to, say, percussion. Exactly. I think it’s really interesting to see how much you can do with very little. I’m always very interested in trying to figure out how to force a whole sound world out of very small elements.
I remember an extraordinary concert you did at Disney Hall a couple of years ago, where one of the pieces was performed by a single musician standing at the front of the stage playing a little triangle. Exactly, exactly! (Laughs) That really embodies what I’m so interested in, which is listening to the details and listening to the textures to understand the world of sound you can get from that one thing. I’m always curious about that – like with “Chernobyl,” when I made a whole score out of the sounds of a power plant. It’s always exciting for me to make these challenges for myself and see how far I can go with it.
After the success you’ve had over the last few years, what does it take to make you say yes to a film assignment? I try to always use these film projects as a kind of venue to try out something that I wouldn’t have tried otherwise. I’ve been writing music for a very long time and playing the cello and my instruments for a long time. These are things I’m comfortable with, but I really try to find something that I have yet to explore when I take on a film. In “Hedda,” the jazz element was something I probably wouldn’t have done by myself.
Did “Joker” dramatically change things for you, especially in Hollywood? Absolutely. I think both “Joker” and “Chernobyl” have been really lovely for me, because before those two projects, I got asked a lot more whether I could handle those types of projects. (Laughs) For whatever reason, I kept hearing that question. And also, the way I like to work, which is to write music very early on to accompany the shooting, people weren’t as accustomed to that way of working.
But when I did both of those projects, having them work out the way they did has given people more trust in my sometimes unorthodox ways of working. People are less afraid when I waltz in and say that I want to do a whole score from the sounds of a nuclear power plant, because they realize I can actually pull it off.
You’ve got a couple of scores coming up, including “The Bride,” but also some of your non-soundtrack work. I do, yes. I have a band (Osmium), we just released an album in the summer. I’ve been going back to playing concerts more because my son is a teenager, so I feel I can travel a bit more. I had my first solo record in 10 years come out in October, and I played my first cello concert in nine years a month ago. And next year is the 20th anniversary of my first record. I have a record coming out to celebrate that, and I’ll be doing quite a few shows next year.
So I’ve been quite busy. I was laughing about this: I used to really love playing Tetris when I was younger, and now I think I’m playing Tetris with my calendar.
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