Hildur Guðnadóttir is inarguably one of the greatest composers of the modern age, especially when it comes to film scoring. The recipient of an Oscar, two BAFTAs, two Grammys, and a Golden Globe, her fierce and uncompromising style has garnered plaudits from across the world for soundtracks such as Chernobyl (2019) and Tár (2022). Not satisfied to just provide music for the screen however, she has also released music with the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Sunn O))), and Nico Muhly, and has acted as vocalist for Icelandic electronica band Múm.
Born in Reykjavik to a musical family, Guðnadóttir’s life and music has been centred around the cello, which dominated her first record, 2006’s Mount A. With a brooding and experimental cinematic style, she began working with the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, and got her break scoring the action sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018). However, it was her spectacular score for 2019’s Joker that saw her smash her way into the big boys club of film music, beating the likes of Thomas Newman and John Williams to an Academy Award. Recently, she has scored Hedda (2025) – an adaptation of the Ibsen play – and the 28 Years Later follow-up The Bone Temple (2025), while also releasing her latest record Where To From (2025) to a warm reception.
Guðnadóttir has just played a show at the Barbican, while her latest film – a reimagining of The Bride Of Frankenstein entitled The Bride! – is in cinemas worldwide. She recalled her musical life with glee, talking less technically and more philosophically about her work, which you begin to understand as she talks about her love of exploration, be it about the atmospheric space in a nuclear power plant or creating a band featuring a film crew full of untrained singers.
Mount A (2006)
Hildur Guðnadóttir: It was my first mountain, hence the name. Music was a huge part of my life already, but I felt so much of music was very busy and loud. I was really craving a place where I could be completely by myself in music. So I went to New York and I wandered around before playing and recording. I gave myself a lot of space. And then I got back to Iceland, and I went to an old bishop’s estate and there’s this beautiful chapel that’s completely wooden. So it felt like the perfect place to play the cello, because it was resonating with me. It was like this chapel was playing with me, and giving me the space to be with my thoughts and cello, without any sort of input from anywhere else. I didn’t really ever intend to release this music, and it felt very, very personal. But one of my best friends pushed me to release it so I put it out under a pseudonym [Lost In Hildurness]. And this whole world opened up to me, and that was exactly twenty years ago. It’s been really wonderful, because I feel like a lot of what I discovered in that process has really stayed with me that whole time.
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
HG: It felt very exciting. I played a lot on this as it was my first film, so it felt in some ways like a continuation of what I had already done, but it was also exciting to have the space to start exploring how to work within the scope of scoring. I made a lot of recordings of different materials, using different techniques in a variety of spaces, and I really took the opportunity to start exploring numerous ways of writing. There was a connection between the physical sound of the space and the story within the sound, that’s something that started there. It was a way of thinking which I’ve been diving deeper and deeper into with things like Chernobyl. I feel like there were a lot of rules about what film music is expected to be, you know? Obviously, the first big rule or expectation was that it was supposed to be written by a man. That was the first rule I broke. There was also a question: is it sound design or is it music? I wanted to disregard this because I’ve always been interested in sound design and field electronics and expanding the way I thought about music. I didn’t study film composition, so I didn’t have any ambitions to become, quote-unquote, a film composer.
Joker (2019)
HG: When the director Todd Phillips first asked me to write the score, I said that he had probably called the wrong person, because I didn’t think that I was a DC composer. But the beautiful thing was that after Todd sent me the script, he asked me to start writing music based on what I was feeling. I thought that was very exciting, because I originally started working in theatre, and you’re there for the whole process. So I never really fully understood this way of coming in at the end, and then being confronted with the temp music that you have to replace. I start with a feeling of the music, and if a script resonates with me, I can already feel the sound world opening up as if I’m painting. That definitely happened with Joker. A question that I get a lot is, you’re such a chirpy person, how can you write such masculine and aggressive, or sad or melancholy music? I really try to understand these uncomfortable characters, so I can see a side of them which is deserving of compassion, you know? What draws me a lot to these darker characters that are not obviously likeable and more complicated is my longing to understand human nature.
Chernobyl (2019)
HG: With Chernobyl I came back to the questions: what is the sound world of the story, and what role does the music play? I felt that the main character in the series or, the main situation in the story was the radiation. But that’s an element you can’t capture on film or see with your eyes. It was an idea which the sound would really have to translate – the music needed to be the radiation. And the sound design and the music needed to work together hand in hand. So, I started down this line of thinking, asking, what does radiation sound like and what is radioactive music? The most obvious thing was that the radiation is happening in a space, and I felt like the only way to make actual radioactive music was to go into the space and record the radiation as it is. Even though it doesn’t have a sound as such, it has a certain feeling. I went to the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania to record with Chris Watson and Sam Slater; all three of us in full hazmat suits. We did an incredible amount of recordings there, not like banging on stuff, but really listening to what the space was communicating. These stories that are based on real events which have affected so many people, who are still alive today, so I feel like it’s important not to overdramatise them. Instruments, as wonderful as they are, feel like they have more connection to the fictional side of things. And so my big idea was to basically make the whole score out of these radioactive recordings. The only instrument in the score is my voice.
‘Fólk fær andlit’ (2020)
HG: This piece came as a direct response to a big refugee crisis that was happening at the time. There was a lot of talk about whether people should be accepted and taken into Iceland. There was a picture circulating at the time of a little boy who had died, and was now lying on the beach. The photograph had really moved people. At that time there were a couple of terminally ill refugee children that were being deported out of Iceland, and one of the ministers responsible for the decisions said, ‘These things become so uncomfortable when these people get faces.’ That sentence really stung. I had a really hard time with that sentence. There was a lack of acceptance that all people have faces and all people are human, and they all have needs and emotions and a right to be. So this little fragment of melody just popped up as a direct response to that. The word I sing is Mishkun, which in Icelandic means mercy.
Women Talking (2022)
HG: Sarah Polley had been listening to my music for a really long time and was very keen on getting me on board for this film. It was based on real events, but Sarah wanted to tell the story as a fable. So I felt like instruments were allowed – they were helpful, because what Sarah really wanted to do was to give these women hope, to create a celebration of the way that these women came together and overcame the horrendous things that had happened to them. That was the role of the music in that story, because what we were seeing on the screen and what we were feeling in the story was so hardcore and heartbreaking. When I started working on it, it was almost paralysing. I was so upset on behalf of these women for what they went through. So it took me some time to find that hope within myself. But it was a beautiful process to get to do that with Sarah, so I’m very grateful for that. Skúli Sverrisson was the solo instrumentalist on this, and he’s someone that I love so much and hold so dear, so it was such a beautiful process of working with two of my best friends in the world.
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)
HG: In the first film, the Joker loves these standards – classic tunes that he gravitates towards. It was clear that this was a big part of the his identity. The idea for the second film was to go a lot further with the songs. It became like a musical, which means that the songs became a vehicle in themselves. It was like a puzzle to figure out how those worlds might fit together. You’re always thinking of how music can support the story most effectively, and how it can interact with the other elements of the sound world because people only have two ears. Tár is a very good example of that. It is a film about music and rehearsing music, and Lydia Tár [Cate Blanchett] is very sensitive to sound, so it becomes very interesting to figure out what the space to work in is. There are different layers for different elements to occupy and there is a certain level of nuance that can be applied to tonality and orchestration plus all of these emotional aspects of the sound world. That’s what I love so much about this medium.
Hedda (2025)
HG: Hedda combines a lot of the elements that I have been curious about. I knew that there was going to be a band in the film, so I put together a live jazz ensemble and arranged the song they would play. The film takes place in one space, so I didn’t want the sound world to be bigger than that space. I knew that I wanted the music to be exciting and energetic, because I feel like sometimes the difficult thing about making a film out of a play is that it can tend to be a little bit dry. The percussion, I felt, was definitely going to help ameliorate that. One of the interesting things about working on a period piece is understanding what the contemporary world was like – the ideas for percussion were drawn from that research. One of my favourite English composers from the era was Cornelius Cardew, who had a wonderful method of writing for combinations of people who were both professional and non-professional musicians. He had the Scratch Orchestra and would stage large-scale vocal performances of these combinations, creating a really crazy sound world, featuring people that knew how to play an instrument and people figuring it out as they go along. I wanted to capture that way of thinking into the score, so I put together this choir made up from cast and the crew members plus some of the extras, and women from the production office. These are the voices that you can hear in the film. It was such a wonderful way of including everyone. The music captures everyone’s spirit. It is a celebration of the communal process and the craziness of making a film happen.
Where To From (2025)
HG: Music often arrives completely unannounced. It will pop up when I’m out walking or doing the dishes. If a musical idea is particularly persistent, I’ll record it. This was the way I began Mount A, helping me understand where my headspace was and how the music could change or affect what I was feeling. One of the best examples is this piece that’s called ‘Make Space.’ I was leaving the house to pick up my son from school. And this music appeared and it made me so happy. Halfway to school it had become this heroic melody. To onlookers, it must have seemed a ridiculous situation, with me skipping around and dancing, but it was such a beautiful contrast to a regular Tuesday afternoon. It lifted me up, so I recorded that as a snapshot of the space that I was in when that appeared and what changed for me. That’s one of the most beautiful things about music, that it really has the power to completely shift the physical space and a mental state. I had recorded these ‘diaries’ with no intention of releasing them. But then, because I was coming up to this anniversary year of Mount A, I started to look back on all the music that I had written and seeing the way that music had changed me over that time. And then I started going over these diaries and hearing a through-line of silences. I felt that I was craving these silences so much – maybe more than the actual notes – because they were creating a slowing down of time. So I thought it would help maybe someone else who was craving that space like I was.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2025)
HG: The director Nia DeCosta and I really wanted to have a theme that created a contrast to all the craziness. The story itself is quite gory. It is so funny and wild and bonkers that I felt like it was going to be really helpful to have a theme that was very elegant – a baroque contrast to all the chaos. I wrote it right after I read the script, before she shot the film. Like Hedda, it’s quite percussion-heavy. I tend to work a lot with my friends. Friendship and community is very important to me and it’s always been one of the main elements that I gravitate towards in music. And I met these amazing friends who are two of the best percussionists in the whole world, Joey Baron and Robyn Schulkowsky. I love working with them and hanging out with them so much that, since I met them, percussion has become a lot more prominent in my music. It was really fun for me to start learning more about percussion, because I’m always trying to learn something new.
The Bride! (2026)
HG: The Bride! was such a wild story. Originally, in The Bride Of Frankenstein, she’s only in that film for two minutes… and she doesn’t say anything! So I really loved taking the idea of a silent woman and imagining what she would say if she got the chance to speak. The story was so full of contrasts, it had to be very punk with a big attitude, but also be very romantic. It had to occupy a sound world that was both very modern and old; so it was classical / orchestral and punk. It was interesting to work out where those oppositions met. There there was a lot of playing around with melodies in order to navigate those opposing spaces and ideas – the monstrousness and the softness. The idea of a silent woman getting her voice wasn’t necessarily a space where someone like me was expected to be. There is an expectation of what a woman is meant to sound like. There is a lot more to women than we’ve seen in the stories that we’ve been told in the last few hundred years. People are open to exploring these stories. They are willing to reevaluate the space we allow women to take. It’s 2026, and we still have so much to explore. I’m excited about that. I’m very interested in people, and I’m very interested in human nature. How we can we affect the world. Women are half of all people, so I feel excluding anyone from that exploration is very odd. So I feel like there is a lot left to explore.
Where To From is out now via Deutsche Grammophon
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