The Icelandic musician made Joaquin Phoenix’s killer dance and captured the sound of Chernobyl’s creeping death. No wonder she’s being talked about as an Oscar favourite
You can see why Todd Phillips, the director of Joker, was drawn to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s music. Elegiac and ghostly, with a dark, yearning heart, the score by the 37-year-old Icelandic composer suits Phillips’s character study of a troubled, broken man perfectly.
By contrast, Guðnadóttir is chirpy and prone to giggling. We speak via Skype: she is at home in
Berlin, sat next to an acoustic guitar. In her young son’s bedroom – “next to his Lego and comics” – is Guðnadóttir’s Emmy, which she won in September for HBO’s series Chernobyl. Her remarkable score was constructed almost entirely from her samples of a nuclear power plant. It has since been nominated for a Grammy; the Joker score has been nominated for a Golden Globe and is being talked about as a favourite for this year’s Oscar. She worked on the scores simultaneously, but the two couldn’t be more different.