Our 2022 Annual Report continues with the announcement of Hildur Guðnadóttir as our Composer of the Year. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2022. Plus, check out our Top 25 Films of 2022 list here.
Hildur Guðnadóttir has been crafting music for over 20 years and is the only woman to ever win an Academy Award for Best Original Score. And yet, she says, the industry’s innate sexism means that she still gets questioned as to whether she can do her job. “But yeah, she’s a woman. Can she really deal with working on a film score?” is the question she knows has been asked by execs over the years.
“I have had that quite a few times,” Consequence’s Composer of the Year says — even after winning the Oscar in 2020 for composing the bold score to Todd Phillips’ Joker. “I’m not going to name any names, but some executive that was in charge of whatever, he said, ‘But she can’t handle it.’ I don’t really know what more I need to prove to you.”
Guðnadóttir talks about it all with a bit of a laugh, as we sit outside her Beverly Hills hotel to discuss her incredible year as the composer behind Todd Field’s TÁR and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, two of the year’s most acclaimed films. “I still have stuff said to me that, you know, you’d never hear this being said to a man. After two decades in this industry, I’m so used to it, so I just brush it off. But I really hope that in the future, women will not have to hear that.”
Maybe the solution is for her to win another Oscar? That’s not impossible to imagine happening in 2023. Consequence previously spoke in depth with Guðnadóttir about her work on TÁR, a project for which she was the second person hired. The first person hired was Cate Blanchett, for whom Field wrote the film about a complicated female composer, and Guðnadóttir began working on the score before production even began, creating music that captured the tone, mood, and rhythm of the project.
That’s unusual for many composers, but for Guðnadóttir it’s the way she prefers to work. “It just is so much more exciting to me, to work in that way. Because you just are so much more a part of the whole thing. For me, it’s so much about this process of creating together and having a dialogue and bouncing things back and forth and really living inside the story and creating a whole universe together, from scratch. I haven’t been able to access that way of working with a very short timeline and a locked cut.”
As she adds, “There is so much musicality in all the elements of a film. It’s not just music itself — there’s a tempo of editing, there’s a tempo of the acting, there’s a tempo of the cinematography. In these movements and in these decisions for timings and such — that is very musical. So I think the more that the music can be a part of those dialogues, early on, I think the better it is for the project, because then all the elements are growing together. You know, it’s not just one element following the rest. They’re all working in parallel.”
For Joker, she says that Phillips told her to read the script and “just write some music from what you feel. He was really brave in that way. Not only did he have a huge amount of faith in me as a woman, so bless him, but he also had a huge respect and interest in what I had to say creatively. I wrote a lot of music just from my feelings for the script and he was just like, ‘That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I feel like this movie is.'”
Phillips then played her score on set during production, which meant that for scenes like Joaquin Phoenix’s memorable “bathroom dance,” “He’s dancing to the music that we hear also in the score. And the music was really able to be a part of the whole narrative of the tempo of the cinematography and acting, and of course the editing.”
Taking on Women Talking was a very different challenge, but as a longtime admirer of the actor-turned-director, Guðnadóttir was excited to work with Polley. In fact, she says, her fandom of Polley goes back to her starring role in the 1990s Canadian drama series Road to Avonlea: “We’re roughly around the same age, and in Iceland we only had one TV channel, so you just watched what was available. So I religiously watched this series, and then I saw her documentary and I’ve been following her writing also.”
What strikes her about Polley’s work is that “she has a really interesting approach to subjects that are not necessarily so easy. She doesn’t shy away from subject matters that are hard to take on, like Women Talking. It’s based on events that are just more horrifying than anything you can imagine, and there are just so many parallels to this story and the way that it’s told to so many things that women are going through today and have been going through in the last couple of years.
“It was exciting to take on that subject matter, through Sarah’s ways of seeing things. When women come together to amplify each other and move forward together, there’s so much strength in that. And that’s when change can really happen, you know? It’s so relevant.”
Women Talking stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Frances McDormand as Mennonite women who have decided something has to be done about the epidemic of sexual assault that has terrorized their patriarchal community. Based on the novel by Miriam Toews (itself based on a true story), it’s a gutpunch of a film, something Guðnadóttir felt from the beginning: “When I first joined [the project], I researched a bit about this colony, about these women, what happened in reality, and I was literally paralyzed with anger and sadness. I just couldn’t get myself to even start to write the music, because I just couldn’t really get my head around what had happened there.”
Matters weren’t helped by the ongoing attacks against women’s rights all around the world, from an America without Roe v. Wade to the ongoing protests in Iran. “It’s a really huge backward step for all of us as women, you know?” she says. “But ultimately I think the real courage comes from not being paralyzed and finding the courage to move forward and to change things in a way that you want to see them change.”
However, she says, while her initial reaction was “to want to write music from that space, it was really beautiful to have a dialogue with Sarah about that. Because in this story she really needed the music to be a vehicle of hope and forward movement, and I had to find that within myself, because I find it hard to write music that I don’t feel myself. I find it hard to just make up something that I’m not interested in, or that I’m not emotionally invested in. So I had to really do a lot of self work and self observation to find the sense of hope in situations that are just incredibly infuriating.”
Where she found that sense of hope, she says, came from “what we see in our reality, is that the hope and the change comes from the community and sticking together and bringing people together. I felt it was important to have that also in the music. So, I looked to my community to make this.”
Tone-wise, Guðnadóttir was very aware of the film’s grounding in reality, and leaned heavily on guitar for that reason. “You’re dealing with things that actual people went through, and I think it’s important to not dramatize the way that you portray these events. I think when you storm in with taiko drums, although those are very effective storytelling tools, it has a sense of fictional drama. So I felt like this music needed to be really honest and down to earth, and based on a sound that would be somewhat approachable for these women. I wanted the music to be rooted in love and community.”
Thus, for her score, Guðnadóttir enlisted her best friend and guitarist Skúli Sverrisson as a collaborator. “I’ve played with him for over two decades on a huge amount of different music. Through music, we have such a strong, beautiful friendship, and it’s a friendship like no other, when you can have a dialogue that’s beyond words. I felt like the only way to make this music with the sense of hope that it needed was to pour as much love into the music, real love and friendship. Our recording sessions, half the time we were recording music, and the other half we were talking about our lives and dreams.”
Guðnadóttir says she was involved with TÁR for about a year and a half, while Women Talking took about nine months — those time periods overlapped, though, so she would focus for a month at a time on one or the other. “I don’t like multi-tasking very much. I like really being present for what I’m working on. When you’re making films it’s so fulfilling when you can really immerse yourself in the film and you can really live inside of it, so it’s hard to switch worlds.”
Plus, she says, being able to work on her scores over a longer period of time (“a lot of times, composers will just have like three weeks to finish a whole film”) allows her to find some perspective. “When you’re working on something for a long time, you can create something and then you can step back and then you can come back to it. You have more space to review and you have more space to just let it sink in, like what you are, how you’re approaching things. So for me that that works really well. I know not all composers like working in this way, but for me, it’s the best.”
