It’s possible that Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson has had better years than 2017. Already well-known in the classical music world, Johannsson’s rise in film has been pretty meteoric: beginning with his tremendous score for “Prisoners” in 2013, he’s become one of the most in-demand composers around, winning Oscar nominations for his work on “The Theory Of Everything” and “Sicario,” and picking up a ton of praise for his work on last year’s “Arrival” too.
But yesterday, we learned for sure that Jóhannsson had been replaced on his regular collaborator Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049,” with Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch, a disappointment for those of us who love his work on “Prisoners” and “Sicario.” And now it turns that this isn’t even the first movie in the next few weeks that Jóhannsson has written a score for, only to see it discarded.
Indiewire report from the press notes that the composer was intially hired to work on the score for Darren Aronofsky’s imminently-hitting “mother!,” only for the decision to be taken to release the film without a score. However, at least in this case, it seems that it was very much a mutual decision. In fact, it may even have come from the composer himself.
Jóhannsson is credited on the finished movie as “Music And Sound Consultant,” and tells the press notes “‘mother!’ is a film where half measures have no place and after Darren and I had explored many different approaches, my instinct was to eliminate the score entirely. Erasure is a big part of the creative process and in this case, we knew we had to take this approach to its logical extreme.”
In its place is an expressive sound design that uses some work by Jóhannsson, but not in a traditional sense: “The music that is there is really effective — it’s Jóhann’s music, but it’s more sound design than classic score,” sound designer Craig Henighan comments. “He records all these really interesting musicians and interesting instruments and we’d take those and manipulate them in different ways. When you go into the movie you aren’t going to hear a classic score by any stretch of the imagination.”
It’s a bold and brave creative decision, and one that we’d fully expect from two talents as massive as Aronofsky and Jóhannsson. Nevertheless, we hope they get the opportunity to work on something that does end up with a more traditional score down the line. You’ll be able to see the results of “mother!” once it opens on Friday (and read our review here), and you can next hear Jóhannsson’s work in James Marsh’s “The Mercy” and Panos Cosmatos’ “Mandy” in 2018.