'Joker' Composer, Hildur Gudnadottir Is Working On 'The Bell Jar' Adaptation With Billie Eilish
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Sarah Polley’s film adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar has found its composer, and it is the only woman so far to win an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA: Hildur Guðnadóttir, the composer of the soundtrack for Joker, Joker: Folie à Deux, and HBO’s Chernobyl.
It is not the first project the two women have collaborated on, as Guðnadóttir also scored the 2022 film Women Talking, and so the composer and cellist joined The Bell Jar early on during production, writing themes the filmmaker could play on set, and she’s not shy to hide her excitement for the project:“It’s one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever done,” she says. “Sarah and I are good friends, so getting to tell this story with her is amazing. I think it’s one of the most amazing books ever written.”
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And she is eagerly happy with the female lead of the film, Billie Eilish, who plays Esther Greenwood:“[Working with a fellow Oscar-winning musician like Eilish] makes a huge difference,” Guðnadóttir states. “You know she understands the process that goes into writing music, so what you write can really resonate with her.”
Together, the three women searched for the right sound and “voice” for the film that wrapped in early September:“We talked about what we envisioned for the music, and how we could translate what Sylvia experiences into it,” Guðnadóttir says. “For me, the core of Plath’s writing is that she’s searching for identity. She keeps asking, ‘Who am I?’ and then uses her writing to understand that. Billie, Sarah, and I have been exploring how we hear that, how to translate it into music, and what music Sylvia herself might have been listening to.”
The Bell Jar was released in 1963 (under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), and it is Plath’s only novel. At the center of the story is Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old girl who takes on an internship at a fictional fashion magazine in New York in 1953. As she struggles to feel any kind of compassion for her work, her mental state degrades, and she ends up in an asylum.
As Plath herself fought with mental illness, The Bell Jar is seen as at least semi-autobiographical.
The novel has been adapted into a movie before (1979), and ten years ago it was supposed to be the directorial debut of Kirsten Dunst, but the project never got off the ground until Sarah Polley took over writing and directing.
As for Guðnadóttir, she scored Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple earlier this year, where she, fittingly, used actual bones she got from a butcher as percussion.
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Source: Variety
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