How Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir Brought Tension, Electricity, and Love to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”
With The Bride!, writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal mines both classic literature and the history of horror cinema to introduce a new, decidedly feminist take on Frankenstein’s bride. Jessie Buckley stars as Ida, a pliable 30-something gangster’s moll revived by the iconoclastic scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening). The doctor does so at the urging of the lonely and surprisingly erudite monster Frank (Christian Bale), who yearns for a mate. She is “reinvigorated,” but in the form of a strong-willed, expletive-spewing, opinionated fireball. They wind up going on the lam, chased by detectives Jake Wiles and Myrna Mallow (Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz). Frank and the Bride cross the country on a road trip that takes them from theater to theater, in which Frank’s favorite and Fred Astaire-wannabe Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal) is featured onscreen.
Gyllenhaal draws inspiration from punk and romantic elements in film, music, and literature, often intermingling influences as diverse as 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde and 1986’s Sid and Nancy. She finds the perfect collaborator in Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, whose music for the film balances romantic strings and punk-influenced guitar, building tension throughout the score, even within the repeated love theme. The Credits spoke to Guðnadóttir about how she maintained that tension, creating music that feels as electric as the volts that brought The Bride back to life.
What were some of the first conversations about the score with Maggie on its guiding principles or foundation?
The very beginning was about the love theme, because that felt like it was the most crucial element to get musically, and that came relatively fast to me. Once we’d established that, we could have a larger conversation about the music, which was important because there was a lot of ground to cover given the film’s multifaceted nature and the many elements that don’t naturally complement each other. There were a lot of opposites that had to come together in order for this story to work. The look and feel of the film is very punk. It has a lot of raw energy and electricity, and that electricity, I think, is the unifying factor. Musically, we needed to cover life and death, and mixing something old with something familiar but exciting. For me, the element that tied everything together in this audible way was the electricity, because obviously, punk is always amplified. It’s never acoustic, and there’s a lot of electricity in that, but electricity also plays a big role in the story.
How did that translate for you in terms of how to proceed?
What was exciting for me was tying together the classical orchestra and the punk, and one way I did that was to record the orchestra as if it were a punk band. We recorded the orchestra through these stacks of amplifiers and live distortion, and recorded in a space traditionally used by bands in New York. It’s a space that David Bowie, Lou Reed, and a lot of iconic New York punk bands had used for their best work, and I think it has that energy.
The tension keeps building in the score, regardless of how dramatic or gentle the song might seem, as in the love themes and the cues used during Ida’s reinvigoration. How did you incorporate guitars, and who were some of your collaborators?
Tension is exactly what we were aiming for. I think it’s really important when you’re leveraging strong genres like punk that you know the players from that scene, especially when you’re looking at instruments like electric guitar. It’s such a common instrument played by so many people, but it’s amazing how individual the sound is to each player, especially the greats. We worked with Amedeo Pace, the lead guitarist from Blonde Redhead; Lee Ranaldo, the co-founder of Sonic Youth; Mark Ribot, who played on some of the most famous albums of all time; and my brother Tóti Guǒnason, who is in a band known in Iceland. They’re all amazing guitarists, and it was incredible for me to see their different sensibilities and how very different and instantly recognizable their sounds were. Even though at one point we were recording three different guitarists at the same time, you could always tell them apart and hear their specific contributions. Each one of them brings something of themselves into how they play.
What did each guitarist bring to their performances?
Lee Ranaldo has this sound world or soundscape he creates with his guitars that was super exciting to incorporate, the way he plays it with a bow, and there are sounds and an energy and tonality that are very specific that he brings to those tracks. Mark Ribot is an unbelievable, masterful guitarist and a jack-of-all-trades. He can play anything, so his sensibility was perfect for those more lyrical moments, where we were working with themes and orchestrating them, and bringing them into the guitar world. He would notate everything with scribbles and yet be very accurate. Amedeo brings this gorgeous Italian romanticism to an otherwise edgy sound world. That’s the beauty of Blonde Redhead, they’ve got this incredible sense of melody and romance played through guitars and electric instruments. And then my brother Tóti, whom I mentioned, was also on the score. He, Lee, and Mark are all playing on the cue “The Fall,” and Amedeo plays on “The Fountain.”
It must be a unique experience to play with your brother.
Tóti is a wonderful musician, with whom I’ve worked the most, and a great brother and guitarist. It’s great working with family. Maggie does it too, working with her brother Jake, her husband [Peter Sarsgaard], and her daughters on the film, and it was very much the same with the music. My son added some screaming in “Putting on the Ritz”, and my husband was working with me on the production. With Tóti, since guitar is not my main instrument, having someone so close to me who plays it and can really translate what I’m thinking through that instrument was really great, and made it an important collaboration.
Can you talk more about the tension that you build across the entire score?
Even on a subconscious level, if you hear something electric humming in your space, it gives you a sense of tension without you even realizing it, until you turn it off, and there’s a sense of relief you didn’t know you’d feel. I am very interested in what sounds and music can do on a subconscious level, how it can move us without our even understanding or realizing what’s happening. I’m curious about psychoacoustic elements, and electricity brings a heightened tension and a bit of edge. Even in the moments when they’re falling in love or leaning into their connection, and they’re allowing emotion to take over, there’s still this monstrous element. The violence is never that far away from the romance. I thought it was important not to just process the orchestra afterward, as is often the case when working with both electric and acoustic elements. Normally, they’d be separated and then processed afterwards. For me, I wanted to record the orchestra live, using amplification and getting distortion, or tense and electric elements, to have an organic tension, because that’s not something you can recreate in the same way as when it’s being performed. When I record music, I never cut a bunch of takes together. I always do things physically in one take. It takes longer, but there’s energy to performance that can’t be replicated. There’s a substance to that presence.
There’s a repeated phrase in the film, “I would prefer not to,” about women standing up for what they want and declaring themselves. How did that play into your work on The Bride!?
That phrase really stuck with me. It’s a very practical phrase to have. I think there’s an attitude to the whole film of not wanting to be boxed in, and that’s why there are so many opposing elements working against and with each other. Maggie was very deliberate in preferring not to be in a box with both character and story, and I think that’s what the music strives to do. It’s not purely classical or electric, and cannot be defined as one thing. As a musician, and especially as a female composer in an industry populated mostly by men, I don’t want to be put into one box. There are images or ideas of what women are supposed to be, or what is expected. All that is just waiting to be broken down. We are many things at once, we are complex, and we need stories and music that reflect that. It feels like all that fits perfectly into her message of ‘I would prefer not to.’
The Bride! is in theaters nationwide.
Featured image: Caption: (L to r) Jessie Buckley as The Bride and Christian Bale as Frank in Warner Bros. Pictures THE BRIDE! A Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
