Words by Amon Warmann

In each of the three films he’s made, writer-director Todd Field has carefully considered the role the music needs to serve.

Never has that aspect of his moviemaking been more prevalent than with his latest opus, Tár, which focuses on the revered and highly decorated Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett on phenomenal form) as she strives to record Gustav Mahler’s Fifth symphony at the Berliner Philharmoniker. A film set in the international world of classical music demanded an atypical approach from Field and a composer who could fulfil the movie’s unique requirements. 

He found it in Icelandic musician Hildur Guðnadóttir, a highly decorated composer in her own right who won an Oscar for her work on 2019’s Joker. Bringing her in at the script stage – something Field had never done with any other composer – led to a score that played a major role not only with the diegetic music but with the crafting of the titular character herself. When I joined Field at a London hotel to talk about the movie, the jet-lagged but no less enthusiastic director spoke about his director-composer partnership with both Guðnadóttir and Thomas Newman, why knowing what music you don’t want is just as important as knowing what you do want, and more. 

Why was Hildur the best choice for Tár? Was there any score that she had worked on that especially impressed you?

There’s a lot of diegetic music in Tár. Every single thing that you see whether it's Cate playing Bach at the piano or conducting or Sophie Kauer playing with cello… that's real-time. What you see is what you're hearing. There's no alternate text. There's no playback. It's all real. If you have characters that make music, it's how it would be observed to try to underscore their lives and how could you possibly do it? So one of the conditions was that I would be the only American on this production. I had very few parameters. That was one of them. Normally, I work with Thomas Newman, so I wasn't able to work with Tom.

Hildur was somebody who I had admired long before she did any scoring work. We didn't have a great deal of money to make this picture, and she was just coming off winning the Oscar for Joker. Everybody wanted her, and I thought that there was no way we were going to get her. I sent her the script and she said, “Okay, I'll do it.” When you work with an artist like Hildur, she doesn't just come in and listen to your temp score. Typically, that's the sort of unfortunate situation for a lot of film composers. They inherit the sins of decisions that you make as you're cutting. We wanted to figure this out ahead of time, all of the music, so I met with Hildur before I even met with my crew. I met with Hildur in Berlin at the end of June 2021. Hildur said, “Let's spot the script. Let's decide what kinds of sounds we can make, and figure out precisely when they come in and out.” For the most part, we stuck with that.

What other conversations were you having as you began work on this?

The other question that she asked me was what were you listening to when you were writing? Was it Mahler? Was it the Elgar Concerto? I was listening to Henryk Górecki, and I was listening to a lot of other stuff. She said “which Górecki?”, and I played it for her. And she goes, “I love that piece. That's 120 beats a minute.” I called it the ‘Tár March’. She goes, “Okay, that's her internal rhythm. So let's go through it and let's tempo map all the other characters,” which we did. Then she brought the London contemporary orchestra to Berlin, and they recorded music simply for playback just for the actors to move through on set, meaning it wasn't going to ever be heard as a score, which was tremendous. Then, of course, she had to work with Cate to say, “Look, a lot of people think that someone composes this way or that way, but this is what it's like for me. It's just internal.” 

From the moment she came on, Hildur had an idea which was that we need to do a concept album at the end of this and actually put it out. There was Cate conducting the Dresden Philharmonic, and Robert Ames conducting the London Contemporary Orchestra playing this piece of music that would have been the piece of music had Lydia Tár actually finished what she was writing…

Have you always brought a composer into the process that early? 

I've never sent Tom a script. The way I met Tom Newman was I had made my first film, and I had Arvo Pärt as temp music. It was far too much money than the production could bear, and I needed to go in and I wanted to do a first-class mix with Chris Jenkins. Chris had done me a favour on my student film and he's considered to be one of the greatest re-recording mixers on Earth, for good reason. He was re-recording 2001: A Space Odyssey at the time, and I was visiting those sessions. So he said, “Okay, I'll re-record your film for nothing, with one condition – you have to have a world-class composer because this film needs really strong music.” So he challenged me. My father-in-law Bo Goldman was a great screenwriter. He had written Scent of a Woman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and others. Tom had scored a couple of films that he'd written, and he called him up. Tom later told me “I had to do it as a favour, but I had no intention of ever doing anything for you.” [Laughs] I showed him my first film, and the lights came up and he turned to me he said “Fuck you. Now I have to do it and I suppose you want the full orchestra for it?!” So he wrote the music for that film in about two weeks, and we did one orchestra session. That was my first experience with a film composer, which was very particular because he was coming in and saving the day for me. 

With Tár, It was important to have those conversations early. Hildur’s life doesn't strictly revolve around film music and if she's on something, she's on something. There's no clock, there's no “I've already been paid.” She just doesn't stop.

How do you typically like to talk to composers about what your film requires? 

Whatever is required in the conversation. My background is in music, I went to University on a music scholarship. I am a musician, so it would be odd for me to not talk in those terms. But having said that, ultimately you're talking about harmony and disharmony, point and counterpoint, louder or softer. We can get fancy and talk about diminuendo or whatever we want. But the truth is, at the end of the day, you're trying to capture a feeling. For Tár, it's almost about talking about what the music shouldn't be. With Tom, I might say I want a waltz here. Or I might say this can't feel like it has any discernible tempo. It needs to have an internal kind of meandering to it. But mostly, I would leave all that to Tom.

What have you found are your tendencies when it comes to figuring out where music should and shouldn’t go?

Tom and I just watched In The Bedroom for the first time together last month, getting ready for a so-called retrospective of all my work. It was the first time I'd watched the film in 21 years, and the first time that Tom had too, we sat alone in a theatre together and watched it. That was a really powerful thing. I got very emotional, and so did he. But what he said to me was, “be really careful you don't want to get caught doing too much music.” There are plenty of people that would be counterintuitive and would utterly disagree. People that like having music from frame one to frame 10 billion. But I'm not built like that. I like quiet films, and music better be there for a reason. As Tom would say, it's there for you to make a rule and to pay attention in a certain way. And you can't wait too long to introduce the music in a film.

In many scenes, the music is not really in the foreground, but it's there. Are you wanting your audience to actively pay attention to that? Or is that something that is more felt than heard? 

Felt. I think that feeling is undervalued. I think there's a way that people view movie music where a lot of times we get rewarded for overdoing our jobs – overdirecting, overacting, over music-making  – as opposed to doing work that’s just as impressive, but trying to do it invisibly. There's more score in this movie, aside from the diegetic music, than I've had in any film. Tom and I typically do 25-30 minutes of music. Hildur did 40, but you wouldn't know it. The only time you would really maybe know it is in its absence, and that's really very late in the film. It's a very particular film in that it's about human beings that make music so you have to approach it that way. It would be absurd to approach it in a traditional way where the music would be more out front and forward facing.

When you’re not working on your films, what sort of music do you listen to? Are you a film score guy like me, or do you look elsewhere?

I started out as a Jazz player, and I was pretty pretentious, stuck-up snob about it. So that's what I mostly listened to as a young person. But as I've gotten older, I think as most people get older, you realise that those are just labels. My musical horizons have expanded exponentially. Some of that has to do with my children, and the music they listen to. Some of it has to do with having some distance from my own era and the music that was popular that I poo pooed at the time, and now I adore. My interests are very broad.

TÁR is available in UK cinemas now. The accompanying album can be heard here.