Folie à Deux’ Composer on making ‘String Prison’ for sequel

Icelandic musician Hildur Gudnadóttir has undergone a very clear transformation since winning the Oscar for Best Original Score for her work in Todd Phillips’ film Joker.

“It’s like marrying into it, because you get this prefix,” he jokes The Hollywood Reporter about “Oscar winner” preceding any mention of her. “It’s hard to see my name written anywhere without this prefix.”

The 42-year-old is back as a composer for Jokerits sequel, Joker: Folie à Deuxa choice he says was simple. “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 remained consistent with the first film. Gudnadóttir says that, sonically speaking, the second film comes 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 the Joker), so we didn’t want to stray too far from that.

“(Phoenix’s character) obviously has certain themes and orchestration. It felt like it was so ingrained in his character that we didn’t want to touch it too much.”

IN Joker: Folie à Deux, which failed significantly both with critics and audiences, the music takes on a different role than in the first film. The film is a jukebox musical featuring Phoenix’s Fleck and Lady Gaga Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, also known as DC Comics’ favorite female antihero, Harley Quinn, who often sings. Although Gudnadóttir did not make the arrangements for the film’s musical numbers, she describes the marriage between the score and the musical numbers as “a giant musical puzzle” and admits that it took “a lot of trial and error” to get it right.

The songs were sung live on set without orchestral pieces behind them as the team wanted the songs to “be part of the performance” in the scene. “After they finished recording, that’s when the arranging process started, which is a little bit different than usual,” says Gudnadóttir, explaining that it was recorded with a live pianist that the actors could hear through headphones.

“Anyone who works on arrangements will understand what a challenge this proves in itself,” Gudnadóttir says, “because the arrangement has to constantly fluctuate, and then every take has different performances.”

The composer says that her trick in the film was to bridge the already established auditory background from the first film and the musical numbers.

“The slightly confusing part of it was that the original sound world wasn’t necessarily that closely related to most of the places where these songs originally came from,” she says. “It was a huge undertaking, very complex, but definitely an interesting challenge.”

Gudnadóttir says she wanted to continue expanding the “vocabulary of string instruments” from the first film, using the cello as the main instrument. Much of the sequel is set during Joker’s time behind bars at Arkham State Hospital; the composer tried to connect her love for strings with that setting.

“I was really curious about how to make an instrument that serves as a prison in itself,” she says. Gudnadóttir’s curiosity led her to ask a friend, Úlfur Hansson, to design an instrument she calls a “prison of strings,” which she describes as resembling an electric fence. She also had Hansson’s father, the luthier Hans Jóhannsson, make a “trench cello,” a box-shaped stringed instrument used during the First World War. Gudnadóttir says soldiers often carried bullets in a box.

“They would play this instrument in the trenches to pass the time, and the way it is described in historical writings is that it was designed to bring joy in the most dire situation imaginable. I thought it was very much in line with how Arthur’s mother always talked about him,” explains Gudnadóttir.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s Arthur’s instrument,'” she adds. “It’s also this container for aggressive ammunition and also this wants to bring joy to terrible situations.”

The experiment turned out to be somewhat dangerous. “The wires would get incredibly hot,” she explains. “You could really burn yourself on it because they’re so amped up.”

Gudnadóttir says she appreciated her collaboration with Jokerdirector, Todd Phillips. “The creative part of making these movies, it was so beautiful and so incredibly open,” she says. “From the very beginning, Todd had so much confidence in what I was doing and what I was bringing to the table.”

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