Dolby Creator Talks

Academy Award® and Emmy-Winning Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir - A Haunting in Venice

September 19, 2023

“A Haunting in Venice,” the latest cinematic adaptation featuring novelist Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, starring and directed by Sir Kenneth Branagh, includes another unforgettable score by multiple award-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. But unlike most of her other groundbreaking work, this score features a more “classical” approach — a creative decision stemming all the way back to Hildur’s childhood!

Having grown up reading Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes and all these classics, I had a really strong feeling for how I felt like this genre should be approached. And how I felt like it should not be approached. And [its] quite the opposite to most of my work, where I'm quite explorative of sounds and instrumentation and building instruments or building sample worlds or found sounds. I feel like the whodunit should really just be a classical form (laughs) that should not be tampered with.

Hildur Guðnadóttir, Composer, “A Haunting in Venice”

Our guest host, music journalist Jon Burlingame, returns to the Dolby Institute Podcast to speak with Hildur about her work on this film as well as her vast knowledge of music history from this period. Be sure to check out A Haunting in Venice, now in theaters, in Dolby Atmos® where available. Please subscribe to The Dolby Institute Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out the video for this episode. Learn more about the Dolby Institute and check out Dolby.com. Connect with Dolby on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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