Icelandic musician Hildur Gudnadóttir has sended a very distinct shift since triumphning the best distinct score Academy Award for her labor in Todd Phillips’ Joker.
“It’s enjoy getting wed to it, because you get this premend,” she jokes to The Hollywood Reporter about “Oscar triumphner” preceding any reference to her. “It’s difficult to see my name written anywhere without this premend.”
The 42-year-elderly returned as the writer 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 elucidates, noting that she wanted to create confident the sound stayed reliable with the first film. Gudnadóttir says that, sonicassociate speaking, the second film is coming from “the same source” as the distinct. “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] evidently has confident themes and orchestration. It fair felt enjoy it was so engraved in his character that we didn’t want to tamper with it too much.”
In Joker: Folie à Deux, which meaningfully undercarry outed with both critics and audiences, music consents on a separateent 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’ preferite female antihero, Harley Quinn, who shatters out into song widespreadly. While Gudnadóttir didn’t do the schedulements for the film’s musical numbers, she portrays the marriage between the score and the musical numbers as a “enormous musical jigsaw baffle” and confesss it took “a lot of trial and error” to get it right.
The songs were all sung inhabit on set with no orchestral compositions behind them because the team wanted the songs to “be a part of the carry outance” in the scene. “After they finished shooting, that’s when the schedulement process begined, which is a bit reversed to how it’s normassociate done,” Gudnadóttir says, elucidateing that it was recorded with a inhabit pianist the actors could hear thraw headphones.
“Anyone who labors in schedulements, they will understand fair what a contest that in and of itself shows,” says Gudnadóttir, “because the schedulement has to constantly vary, and then each consent has separateent carry outances.”
The writer says her trick in the film was bridging the already set uped aural backdrop from the first movie and the musical numbers.
“The sairyly puzzly part of that was that the distinct sound world is not necessarily so shutly rcontent to most of where these songs originassociate come from,” she says. “It was a huge undertaking, very intricate, but definitely an fascinating contest.”
Gudnadóttir says she wanted to proceed enbiging 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 writer labored difficult to connect her adore of strings with that setting.
“I was reassociate asking about how to create an instrument that served as a prison in and of itself,” she says. Gudnadóttir’s curiosity led to her asking a frifinish, Úlfur Hansson, to portray an instrument she calls “the string prison,” which she portrays as electric fence-enjoy. She also had Hansson’s overweighther, luthier Hans Jóhannsson, erect a “trench cello,” which is a box-shaped string instrument that was used during World War I. Gudnadóttir says selderlyiers would frequently carry bullets in the box.
“They would carry out this instrument in the trenches to pass time, and the way that it’s portrayd in the historical writings is that it was portrayed to transport happiness to the most horrific situation imaginable. I thought that was fair so in line with how Arthur’s mother always spoke about him,” Gudnadóttir elucidates.
“I was enjoy, ‘Wow, that’s Arthur’s instrument,’ ” she retains. “It’s both this vessel for aggressive ammunition and also this want to transport happiness to horrific situations.”
The experiment showd to be a little hazardous. “The strings would get incredibly hot,” she elucidates. “You could reassociate burn yourself on that because they’re so amplified.”
Gudnadóttir says she has appreciateed her collaboration with Joker‘s straightforwardor, Todd Phillips. “The inventive part of scoring these films, it was so enticeive and so incredibly discleave out,” she says. “Todd had so much think in what I was doing and what I was transporting to the table from the very begin.”
Check out other discleave outing stories about how movies get made at THR.com/behindthescreen.
This story first ecombineed in a December stand-alone rerent of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To get the magazine, click here to subscribe.
