Hildur Gudnadóttir by no means imagined doing something however making music.
“I by no means actually decided to turn into a musician, it was simply the conventional factor to do in my household,” says the Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning composer of Joker, Tár and HBO’s Chernobyl, winner of this yr’s career achievement award at the 2025 Zurich Film Festival. “Everybody in my household is both into music or into medication. It’s nurses or docs or physiotherapists or musicians. And the musicians are the bulk.”
Gudnadóttir skilled as a classical cellist from the age of six, however was surrounded by each sort of sound. Her mom is an opera singer, her father is a conductor and composer answerable for commissioning new, avant-garde works in Iceland. As a young person, she performed in bands that mixed pop and folks with electronica and heavy metallic.
“From very early on, I believed there was no proper or incorrect solution to play music,” she says, “Something was doable and all the things was allowed.”
That experimental perspective has outlined her profession. Her haunting score for Chernobyl — an Emmy, BAFTA and Grammy winner — was composed completely utilizing on-site recordings at a nuclear energy plant. For her Oscar-winning score to Joker, Gudnadóttir composed sections on the halldrophone, a cello-like electornic instrument that creates an eerie drone, a sonic expression of the anxious dread on the coronary heart of Todd Phillips’ psychological superhero-adjacent blockbuster.
As totally different as her movie and TV music will be, all of Gudnadóttir’s work shares a transparent id. There are sonic by way of traces between Chernobyl and her scores for Todd Area’s Tár or Sarah Polley’s Girls Speaking, and with Gudnadóttir’s authentic compositions. (Her new album, “The place to From” her first in practically a decade, comes out Oct. 31). Administrators who search her out are in search of that Gudnadóttir sound.
With ‘Joker,’ Hildur Gudnadottir grew to become the primary feminine solo composer to win an Oscar
“Certainly one of my largest blessings in my life as a musician is that I don’t usually get requested to write down music as anybody else however myself,” she says. “Usually, I get entangled in a mission actually early, when there’s only a script. I choose my initiatives based mostly on my response to the script. If there’s a way of melodic resonance, once I can think about the sound world of this universe and I feel I can compose into what this universe requires, that’s the start line.”
That was the case with Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, starring Tessa Thompson. DaCosta’s re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen’s basic play Hedda Gabler shifts the story from Nineteenth-century Norway to Nineteen Fifties Britain. All the movie performs out over one lengthy celebration at an English property, the place the stuffy, conventional English aristocracy collide with Hedda’s bohemian artist associates.
Taking inspiration from the interval and site, Gudnadóttir pitched DaCosta on constructing a rating across the concepts of Cornelius Cardew, the English experimentalist who pioneered the “Scratch Orchestra,” a radical ensemble of skilled and untrained musicians.
On set, she recreated that spirit. “The primary actors, a few of whom had expertise singing, but additionally the ladies from the manufacturing workplace, the increase operator, the gaffers — I simply grouped them collectively whereas they have been taking pictures and had them sing,” she recollects. “It was a celebration of what occurs whenever you make a movie, the way you get lots of of individuals simply to make this one piece of artwork collectively.”
Layered with stay jazz and pounding percussion from experimental duo Robin Schulkowsky and Joey Baron, the end result gave Hedda an additional pulse. “While you make movie variations of performs, there tends to be plenty of textual content, so we thought we wanted one thing to present motion and motion to the story,” she says.
Tessa Thompson in ‘Hedda’
Courtesy of TIFF
With Hedda, as with all her scores, Gudnadóttir stays distinctive with out being in-your-face. Restraint and subtlety have turn into her logos.
“Music will be very manipulative. You possibly can sneak in by way of the again door of individuals’s feelings,” she notes. “I at all times attempt to be very respectful of that, to present the viewers the area to have their very own feelings. In Tár, for instance, there’s music below virtually the entire movie, however most of it is vitally delicate. It really works on a unconscious stage. In the event you’re cautious about the way you place these threads, whenever you are available in with a robust assertion, it has a lot extra energy.”
Regardless of her success — she is only a Tony away from EGOT standing — Gudnadóttir says she nonetheless faces “weird” obstacles as a feminine composer in a subject dominated by males.
“I’ve been requested, straight up, if I may ‘deal with’ composing for an enormous movie as a result of I’m a lady,” she says, nonetheless incredulous. “I used to be requested that after I gained the Oscar. This isn’t historical historical past.”
The statistics again her up. “One of many causes I made a decision to place a concentrate on composing for movies was the staggering determine — solely round one % of the largest scores have been composed by girls. That share hasn’t risen by a lot. Seeing the exhausting numbers of what number of girls are getting these alternatives, it’s actually fairly unhappy.”
Not that she’s letting that cease her. Along with Hedda, she’s already completed work on two different main initiatives cued up for 2026. She’s shifting into the horror area with the soundtrack to DaCosta’s zombie sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s gothic horror romance The Bride.
“I’m such a contented individual in life, in my movie work I have a tendency to move in the wrong way, in the direction of the darker, heavier aspect of human nature,” she says, laughing. “So horror will not be such a attain. An actual problem for me can be to do a rom-com. That’s actually not my line.”
