Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead and film composer, appreciates limits. “I like to know what I can’t do and then work inside that.”
in which Daniel Day-Lewis’s character prospects for oil. More collaborations with Anderson followed—“The Master,” “Inherent Vice,” “Phantom Thread”—alongside scores for films by Lynne Ramsay and Tran Anh Hung. The conjunction of three new movies seemed like a good occasion to explore Greenwood’s film-composing philosophy. We spoke via video call; Greenwood was in his home studio, in the area of Oxford, not far from where he grew up and went to school.
So many highlights of film-scoring history have come about when a particular composer begins working regularly with a particular director, whether it’s Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock, or John Williams and Steven Spielberg. You’re part of the process from the beginning: you’re not just a hired hand.
If the director is contacting you, at least some of the time it’ll be because they have a strong sense of your music and how it will fit with their vision. I think that score works because those sounds are all familiar. I’ve always been drawn to familiar things that have something wrong with them, that sound like something’s broken. But I’m a little wary when scores drift into sound design too much, and it just becomes slightly . . . I feel myself edging towards saying that everything should have a nice melody to whistle on the way out.
Yeah, that’s the thing about Paul’s films generally. Certainly this one and “Inherent Vice.” I thought “Inherent Vice” was a very funny film—but he wanted the music to make clear that it’s a joke, but it’s nota joke. And I think that’s probably true of this film as well, in that the romance is real and the feelings between them are a genuine thing. And it’s fine for the music to underline that and be sincere, too. Otherwise, it is just a series of sketches.
Exactly. You’re not meant to really know when the hallucination has kicked in. The music needs to slowly melt into that. It’s a lovely brief: a dream description of something to write.at the Christmas church service. There’s a change of sonic perspective, it intensifies . . .
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