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Fresh Air

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood On Scoring Films

Fresh Air

NPR

Books, Society & Culture, Arts, Tv & Film

4.336.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Greenwood plays guitar and keyboard in Radiohead, but in 2007 auteur director Paul Thomas Anderson enlisted him to score his film There Will Be Blood. Since then, Greenwood has scored such films as The Power of the Dog, Spencer, and Phantom Thread. We talk with the musician about his scoring process, his experiments with instruments, and how he joined Radiohead.

Also, Ken Tucker reviews Connie Smith's new album The Cry of the Heart.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. When my guest Johnny Greenwood was primarily known as the

0:05.7

lead guitarist and keyboardist for the rock band Radiohead, Screenwriter and Director Paul Thomas

0:11.4

Anderson asked Greenwood to write the score for his film There Will Be Blood. It was an unexpected

0:17.2

turn for Greenwood, but he was immediately noticed. The score was described in Rolling Stone as

0:22.7

a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be. Greenwood wrote scores for Anderson's

0:29.3

subsequent films including Phantom Thread and The Master which opened like this.

0:44.9

That's a pretty great way to start a film. Greenwood also writes a lot of film music that's more

0:50.2

avant-garde, but some of the avant-garde music is influenced by his love of Baroque. He studied

0:55.4

classical music when he was young, played in a youth orchestra, and has been a composer and

1:00.1

residence at the BBC Concert Orchestra. Now you can hear his music in three very different new

1:06.0

movies, Anderson's Licorice Pizza which is set in the 70s, Spencer, starring Christian Stewart

1:12.1

as Princess Diana, and the power of the dog which is set in Montana in 1925. In the beginning of

1:19.2

the power of the dog, two brothers who own a large cattle ranch are hurting the cattle to market.

1:25.3

This is the music we hear.

1:56.1

Jenna Greenwood, welcome to Fresh Air. I love your music. It's a pleasure to have you on our show.

2:07.1

So that music that we just heard from the power of the dog, it starts like it's going to be very

2:14.0

western-ish, but not quite. And then there's other potentially menacing music intruding on it.

2:22.2

It's a buzzy ominous sounding melody interfering with this western-ish kind of sound. So

2:30.9

it lets you know that this isn't going to be a conventional western even though they're

2:35.4

hurting cattle. And it also lets you know that bad things are going to be interfering.

2:42.8

What's happening musically? What are you doing musically?

2:45.6

I think westerns have a traditional sound which is big sweeping strings and

...

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