Joker: Folie à Deux (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), which features 19 tracks from Todd Phillips’ highly anticipated Joker: Folie à Deux, arriving in theaters on October 4th.
Joker: Folie à Deux (Score from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) reteams composer Hildur Guðnadóttir with writer/director/producer Todd Phillips following their collaboration on the latter’s 2019 blockbuster Joker, which earned more than $1 billion at the global box office and an Academy Award, Golden Globe, Grammy and BAFTA award for Guðnadóttir. For Phillips, the decision to bring her back to compose the music for Joker: Folie à Deux was an easy one. He had this to say: “There was no version of this film where we weren't calling Hildur to do the score. I think her music is basically the second biggest character in the first film.”
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Arthur Fleck, reflects on the impact Guðnadóttir’s music had on his performance, noting, “Hildur’s score was a huge part of the first film, and really the development of certain parts of the character; I think I found the character while listening to her music on set, with film rolling. And that's a really special feeling, any time something comes alive in that way, and to have it captured on film. From that moment, I felt like the character and Hildur’s music were very closely tied together.”
For her part, Guðnadóttir was excited by the new challenges this film created. The theme for Arthur took on a new role and to capture this, she invented a new instrument. “Arthur’s theme is like a thread of sound that goes in many different scenes, trying to find its place, like what Arthur is going through in this film. He’s trying to find his place between reality and fantasy, Arthur and Joker, being in love or being made a fool of. The sound world we had before [on Joker] was very string-based, and I started imagining Arthur in the prison and how I could take that sound world and turn it into a prison, really make this confined space out of strings. I worked with instrument builders from Iceland to help me build what I call a string prison, which consisted of very long strings that are strung through a space forming a prison. I used a trench cello to play through the string prison, where Arthur is held captive by the sound of the strings, and bring this sense of joy married with claustrophobia in this horrific situation.”
