How Jonny Greenwood Wrote the Year’s Best Film Score

The Radiohead guitarist has a singular musical voice.
An illustration of the musician and composer Jonny Greenwood.
Illustration by Uli Knörzer

When, in the nineteen-nineties, the grand and strange rock band known as Radiohead rose to fame, word began spreading excitedly among younger classical-music nerds: we now had someone on the inside. If an arena-filling band was inserting multi-octave octatonic scales into guitar anthems or derailing string arrangements with cluster string chords, the likelihood was strong that a modern-classical mole had penetrated the inner sanctum of pop power. The agent was soon unmasked as Jonny Greenwood, the band’s lead guitarist, who, in the past two decades, has established himself as a concert composer and as a creator of film scores. Once a lanky youth barely visible behind a mop of black hair, Greenwood is now a seasoned fifty-year-old who, in recent weeks, has cemented his status as a leading film composer with the release of three projects: Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza,” Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer,” and—Oscar voters, this is your cue—Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.”

Radiohead formed in 1985, under the name On a Friday, when its members were teen-agers attending Abingdon School, near Oxford, England. Greenwood was the youngest one in the band and, at the same time, the most musically versatile; he played guitar, viola, recorder, and keyboards, and had developed a love for twentieth-century classical composers, particularly Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1991, just as Greenwood was embarking on music studies at Oxford Polytechnic, Radiohead took off. For the next decade, he concentrated his energies on an astonishing sequence of albums: “The Bends,” “OK Computer,” “Kid A,” “Amnesiac.” When, in 2001, I wrote about Radiohead for this magazine, I spoke to Greenwood about his solo compositional ambitions, which were reawakening. I wasn’t surprised when, two years later, Greenwood wrote his first film score, for “Bodysong,” and followed it with two arresting concert pieces, “Smear” and “Popcorn Superhet Receiver.”

Wider audiences became aware of Greenwood’s singular voice in 2007, with the release of Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” The smoldering cluster harmonies of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” unfurled during the almost wordless sequence 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.

When we first met, you were immersed in Radiohead but also thinking about pursuing composing more seriously.

What happened is that we did a Radiohead record called “The Bends,” and it had a few very minimal string ideas in it, just because we had a cellist and a violinist. And I remember writing out really simple ideas for them, and they were very polite about it. It made me excited to do more of that, and to be less frightened of putting stuff on paper and presenting people with it. I studied music till I was eighteen, and the last thing we had to do was Bach chorales, which was great. Basically, I’m still relying on all those lessons today. So that fed into Radiohead. I got more confident with each record. I got more and more excited about “string days,” as they’re called—that anticipation of musicians arriving for a big recording, or even a small thing. Players turn up and create sounds that are so seductive and amazing.

Do I remember correctly that in your school orchestra you played Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for “Murder on the Orient Express,” with the film showing?

Yeah, I have faint memories of doing that. Much more the memories of joining the local Oxford youth orchestra when I was seventeen. It was all the schools, supposedly the best players. Because I was a viola player, I snuck in, without the talent, just with the right instrument. It blew me away, arriving for an audition and hearing them practice. It was the first time in my life I’d heard a roomful of strings playing in tune with each other. You suddenly realize what a sound that is. Years of school orchestras and you get used to orchestras being out of tune.

But you hadn’t thought much about film scores growing up?

No, I’d never thought about doing it, and never really paid attention to it, either. It all happened backwards. It’s all because Paul Thomas Anderson got hold of a bootleg recording of this early classical thing I wrote for the BBC [“Popcorn Superhet Receiver”]. He wrote to me, and I’d not heard of him, and he said, “Can I use this in the film, and will you write some more?” It still feels a bit weird to me to be writing film music, but I’m just really happy to work with people. What I love about film music is that there’s a director to spend months, hopefully, exchanging ideas and enthusiasms for various instruments and styles of music.

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.

It’s weird because a traditional cliché about film music—which, like all clichés, is true—is that directors treat it as the last thing you can change. When a scene is too slow, or too boring, the only thing that can still be altered is the score. A lot of films are scored with temp music, and then two, three weeks before the deadline, work has started on the score, which just seems insane to me—that you don’t start thinking about music when you think about costume and makeup and everything else. I’ve been lucky to be with intelligent people like Paul, who is obviously obsessed with every part of the film while it’s still a script.

Have you gotten involved while the shoot is still going on? Or even before?

Even before there’s a script, one can start, even if it’s just conversations. I’ve been going back through the old e-mails to Jane Campion, and they’re a little embarrassing, because they’re so overwrought. You know when you’re trying to reassure someone that you know what you’re doing, and you come up with these grand, pretentious ideas? I did a podcast with her the other day, and she was reading sections of it out, and it was, like, oh, God, did I really talk like that? But that’s the really fun stage because it’s endless. You have this insane choice of instruments and players and traditions of music. It’s like a sweet shop.

Do you get requests where the fit obviously isn’t going to be right? Do people ask you to write, say, “Batman Versus Aquaman”?

In a way, it’s worse than that. What you get occasionally is an e-mail saying, Hello, I am this person, I’m a producer. And we want to know if you would like to put your name forward to be on the shortlist of composers for this enormous film. It just sounds gruesome to me. But, alternatively, I get contacted, usually by directors, like Pablo Larraín did, with an idea, and he sent me one of his films, and it seems to happen like that.

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.

Yeah. And it’s not easy for them, because I know they have to be quite indulgent, really, for the music to work best. I record a lot of stuff without click tracks. There isn’t often a demo or anything.

Looking back now, do you have your sense of touchstones of film-music history? Or do you still feel outside of that world?

It’s strange because there’s lots of film music I like, but I feel so unconnected from that universe. It’s like admiring a surfer or something: amazing what they do and did, but I don’t know how to relate to it. I still listen more to classical things, and that’s what’s really guiding how I write. But when I started with Paul, I thought, Oh, right, film music’s a thing, let me concentrate on film. The next few films I watched, I remember thinking, the music is really good. One of them was “Michael Clayton.” You don’t really notice the score [by James Newton Howard], but, if you actually concentrate on it, it’s really proper good. You realize how much good writing is going on; it’s often quite hidden or held back. Like I say, I’m ever so lucky in terms of how I get to work and who I work with. I’ve spoken to other soundtrack composers, and it just sounds like hell. Quite often there’ll be five or six producers who have to sign off every single cue before it’s allowed to be recorded. And the recording has to sound like the demo. Otherwise, it’s a problem. And it’s got to happen tonight.

One composer heard a director say, “O.K., now make it twenty per cent more Cuban.”

[Laughs, moans sympathetically.]

It feels as though there’s been a recent wave of composers breaking away from the old models. “There Will Be Blood” was a great signal in that respect.

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. Which I don’t think, but you see a lot of scores where there’s just a drone with some granular scratches on it, and things start to sound like temp music—which is a shame. Because I really do love writing all the romantic stuff. I don’t know what I’m trying to say, really.

Especially in Hollywood, there’s never a good idea that can’t be run into the ground.

It’s a technology thing, really. It feels like you have to run in front of a wave—I’m mixing metaphors in every direction, feel free to substitute any simile I use—it feels like there’s a wave breaking behind you the whole time, which is all of the sample libraries. And they are getting better and better. Even all this extended-techniques stuff can be done with sample libraries, and you hear it in films as well. You start to recognize Penderecki-style plugins, for example. It’s quite a nice motivating thing in a way, because you end up writing things that are—O.K., well, you can’t do this sound yet, you can’t actually do this texture yet. So it’s the fight to keep your head above water that I get energy from, that I enjoy.

With “Licorice Pizza,” you have a much smaller contribution than you usually do in your work with Paul Thomas Anderson. This one is driven by pop songs of the period.

I was speaking with Paul yesterday. He came in and surprised me for my birthday; it was really a lovely day. I was trying to embarrass him by reading out the reviews of “Licorice Pizza,” and pointing out that lots of people are saying how light and happy it is, and this is obviously because he’s not using any of my miserable music. [Laughs.] Maybe that’s the correlation right there. I mean, who wouldn’t rather hear some nice seventies glam disco? It’s an amazing film, so funny.

But, especially toward the end, I felt like you were pushing the film a little bit in terms of emotional direction. . . .

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 not just a 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. Plus, I can’t write comic music, which I assume is all pizzicato strings.

There are scenes in “Spencer” that require your music to be already in place, like the Christmas Eve dinner where Diana has a breakdown while a string quartet is playing.

It’s just as described in the script: it starts as conventional dinner music and unravels, as Diana does, over the course of the scene. But, again, there’s a sign of how I’ve been indulged. Pablo said it needs to be a few minutes long. So I wrote it, and he cut the scene to that. Which was lovely, because it meant that all I had to do was write this piece of music and have players play it in a room without thinking about a time code and all of that stuff. It breathes. They are playing to each other rather than playing to a film.

There are great instances in film-music history, going back to Sergei Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky” or before, where the music is written in advance and becomes the driving force.

The players just play out when they’re not worried about hitting certain spots. With other cues, I actually love the period of music that is usually leant on by filmmakers when the royal family is in the shot: the natural trumpets and the timpani when you see the Queen and her corgis. All of those instruments are still around today and can be played by jazz musicians. So the idea was to get a Baroque orchestra to play music in that style, and then swap the players out one at a time with jazz players. So you’d have a jazz organist who would take over from the Baroque organist, and likewise with the trumpet and the drummer, until it became a sort of jazz group.

That was really intriguing: a Bachian world on the one hand and then something more like a Miles Davis realm. Was there a specific reason for bringing in the jazz element?

I just wanted some color and chaos. Obviously, there are slightly clumsy parallels with Diana, but that was a thought as well: it’d be nice to have this quite staid, Baroque, rigid music, and this colorful, free thing fighting against it or going along with it.

So it symbolizes the freedom that she yearns for . . .

When I saw the early footage, he was filming her very close, from the back of her head, handheld, as she was walking through the palace, and it felt really claustrophobic. That was when we knew this isn’t going to be “The Crown.” One early e-mail was suggesting that it should be the kind of music that she likes. So we looked at all these eighties bands and thought about trying to have everything sound like a Wham! B-side. I tried going into that world, and it just didn’t feel right.

The string-quartet scene begins as diegetic music—music that is happening within the frame of the scene we’re watching—and then it bleeds over into the non-diegetic. Obviously, by the end of that sequence, this is not what the quartet is playing at the royal dinner. It’s been filtered through her psychological chaos.

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.

To a less dramatic degree, the same thing happens with the organ music at the Christmas church service. There’s a change of sonic perspective, it intensifies . . .

The organist you see is the organist in the local church where they were filming. We had a recording of him playing on-site, which we couldn’t use for technical reasons. Suddenly, it became a kind of mini-commission for him. Can you write three organ pieces for him to play, that’s going to happen on this day, on this event? That’s a lovely reason to write music, because you have a person in mind, and you’ve got a deadline, and you’ve got a venue, and those three things don’t happen much with film music. And it became a big motivating thing to listen to lots of organ music—to work out how to write it, to try to understand it a little bit better.

Did you play organ growing up at all?

I used to go into the chapel and ass around on the organ a little bit. I’ve gone into it more recently, in, um, in . . . I’m hesitating because I appreciate how obnoxious this will sound, but I spend a lot of time in Italy at the moment, and the region where I am all the time is full of these churches that have amazing organs. I’m involved in concerts and restoration ideas. It strikes me as one of the few ways you can authentically hear how music would have sounded five or six hundred years ago. It’s the same pipes in the same room—nothing’s changed. And these insane keyboards, where you have the black keys doubled, because the F-sharp is a higher note than G-flat. That thing of it being such a physical effort involved in making the sound. I love the crunchy, tangible side of making this music.

“The Power of the Dog” is just astounding. What were some of those early exchanges with Jane Campion about?

She’s someone who, if she takes you on, assumes you know what you’re doing. She’ll be supportive and enthusiastic, but not prescriptive. Which was good and bad. The bad side was that she’d agree to me trying ideas which were stupid. Like, I said, um, listen, there’s lots of banjo in this film, as you know. Why can’t banjo be part of contemporary classical music? What’s stopping it? I could only find some George Crumb stuff that had banjo scored for it. So I tried writing for string quartet and banjo—which you might not be surprised to learn was terrible.

Sort of atonal banjo?

Ugh! I mean, the worst comical sorts of sounds. That was a big dead end. But it led me to playing the cello like a banjo instead. Because I played cello a little bit, with the aid of lots of Sellotape to mark where the frets should be, if it was a guitar, and I just learned to play banjo rhythms on the cello.

Did you happen to see the “(Gimme Me Some of That) Ol’ Atonal Music” video?

No!

It’s a satirical country song that actually has a twelve-tone banjo solo on it. So it’s possible.

Amazing.

What were some other ideas that did take off?

French horns in a big room was an idea I did see through. The idea of having a French-horn duet in a room so big that the room was another player, an equal part of the sound. And that we did manage to do in a church in Oxford. And, again, great: a venue, a deadline, players coming, and I’m writing lots and lots of horn things, some of which made it through to the film.

The French horns come to the fore when Peter, this sensitive, intelligent, bullied boy, is wandering up a ravine on his horse. It fits because we’re in this canyon space. We first heard them near the start, when Peter visits his father’s grave. They hint that this character is more formidable than we think—there’s a brassy strength there.

No, literally! That’s another e-mail that Jane read back to me. I was trying to argue that Peter is a kind of camp character, but there’s that Stephen Fry description of camp in which he says that it’s synonymous with strength, which seemed perfect for Peter. And I think you’re right: that’s when you start realizing that he’s going to work on his revenge and stand up for himself.

There’s another layer, too. You feel an ominous intensity that seems out of proportion with what you’re seeing, which is a boy riding a horse in the mountains. Not to give anything away, but the music pressures you to pay attention, especially when we get to the cow.

When I first started to talk to Jane, I’d just read Ted Gioia, where he talks about how the orchestra is made up of animal parts, animal bones, animal skin, cat gut, actual horns. Historically, it’s a sort of slaughter yard. That’s something that we thought about a lot—trying to make the music . . . “visceral” is really overused, isn’t it? But trying to make it as physical as possible, make it feel sort of dirty. We couldn’t use folk music, and we couldn’t use American country, because, first, it’s beyond me, and it wouldn’t have worked in the same way. So it was about using traditional instruments but having them sound like there’s something slightly wrong with them. Make it evident that it’s a human being making the sounds—that it’s being made with effort and sweat and breath. When the players are breathing too loud, make the most of that. It’s like Glenn Gould murmuring along with things. I want to know that there’s someone behind it.

Gioia draws on Pascal Quignard’s book “The Hatred of Music.” Music is human, and so it has violence in it.

And the drum kit—you can date it back to marching bands, army bands, carrying bass drum, snare drum, and cymbals. The music of war, the sound of armies going into battle. And then it’s someone dancing in a night club in Paris to Daft Punk or whatever. It’s exactly the same set of sounds. Isn’t it so strange?

What is the process of deciding when to have music? Are there instances where the initial idea was not to have music, but you feel, Oh, there is something I can add here? Or vice versa, you’re looking at a scene and you think, This is better without music?

Honestly, it’s kind of a mess, because every combination of those things happens. Peter going wandering off on his own on the horse was something I felt strongly should be horn music. But then I go write lots of horn music and see what fits. Elsewhere, it’s Jane saying, This scene is a key emotional center of the film, and the music should try to be magical and complicated. It’s all quite vague until things are recorded. But I’ll just tend to over-record, and overwrite too many things, so there’s lots to choose from.

I love the feeling in a movie when a composer is lying back, watching and waiting. You almost feel the absence of music. And here sometimes we just want to listen to the soundscape—the wind, the creaking floorboards, these sounds that communicate the loneliness of people out on this huge landscape. But it also felt like you were listening, too, and picking up sonic threads: the player piano, the banjo, singing around the campfire.

The piano is a key part of the story as well. And that terrible Strauss march.

Rose is trying to play Johann Strauss’s “Radetzky March” on the piano, and Phil, her brother-in-law, torments her by picking it up on the banjo. Was that already in the script?

No, Jane asked me for suggestions: What is a piece of music that is instantly recognizable and not very good? So when [Rose] plays it, you feel the awkwardness of it all, the sort of Alan Bennett-y terrible shame of what’s about to happen. I love that kind of humor, that kind of pain. And it’s a terrible piece of music. I’m sorry.

Did you compose the banjo response? Or was that improvised?

No, they had this amazing guy that came and just worked it out. But it was a cue to get into, like you say, player-piano territory. I’m lucky in that I’ve got one next door, and I attacked it with a tuning lever. It was my two loves together, because I was driving it with a laptop with Max/MSP, so I still managed to get my programming fix. Try to write software that emulates the paper roll rather than using manuscript notation.

So it’s a microtonally modified, computer-controlled player piano. Which is a cool effect, because it plays off that out-of-tune barroom piano that we’ve heard in a million Westerns, but there’s also a twentieth-century modernist legacy: the detuned piano in Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano studies.

That’s right. It was actually the Ligeti mechanical stuff that I was sending Jane and saying, It could be like this. We can do that to a barroom piano.

With the piano versus the banjo, it’s a collision of worlds. Women in that period were brought up to play piano. The banjo has a masculine identification . . .

There is a social-climbing thing to it as well: a little bit of, let’s get the piano tuned up, the governor’s coming, we’re going to impress him with our culture.

It’s such a terrifying scene. So, skipping to the end of the film, we have this gorgeous music for strings and piano. There’s a lot of octatonic music happening there, right?

That’s true.

Do you want to take a stab at explaining octatonic music to the people?

It’s a slightly more grownup version of the pentatonic scales that we’re all taught to do with xylophones and glockenspiels when you’re a kid. Every note works with every note. Octatonic music is kind of the same idea. You’re working within a set of notes. It’s not a major scale or a minor scale; it’s something else. But all the notes work together and make a certain color that is its own thing. And I use it a lot because, well, I’m a—I was gonna say, sad Messiaen fan, but I’m a happy Messiaen fan—

There are no sad Messiaen obsessives.

—and I also like a set of rules as well. Although in that cue, on purpose, I do some suspended perfect fourths, and it’s refreshing when that happens. The relief of getting out of that is a nice effect in itself.

The octatonic scale was one of a set of scales that Olivier Messiaen called “modes of limited transposition.” The sequence is alternating semitones and whole tones. You can extract your favorite warm tonal chords from it, but you’re not going to get the most standard tonic-dominant progression—say, C-major next to G-major—because . . .

There’s no leading tone of B.

But you can have, like, F-sharp major. It’s tonal music that hits those sweet spots that people respond to, but it’s refreshed tonality.

You have the C-major and minor chords, and the E-flat, F-sharp and A-major and -minor, but you also have the supertonic [D-flat], which gives a nice, tense sourness in the middle of all of the sweetness. There are a few other limited modes of transposition that I like to use. “The Master” is full of one of the other scales—I forget which one it’s called. It’s great starting a project when you’re limited to these instruments and limited to this scale, and you’re working out what can you do with it rather than just, you know, everything being possible. I like to know what I can’t do and then work inside that.

What was it like working on these scores during the pandemic? Were there extra limitations in terms of ensembles and recording time?

Big time. That big cue you mentioned at the end of “The Power of the Dog”: I had to fake that completely with, again, my cello, by tuning all the strings, one at a time, to every single pitch of the octatonic scale. There’s about eighty cellos and violins. I just did it all on my own, like a lunatic. It’s not quite right because it’s me playing, and I’m slightly out of tune. It’s a little wonky. But at the same time it’s got that orchestral width to it. And it meant that when we did the viola and cello solos, with Luba [Tunnicliffe] and Oliver [Coates], it was a case of giving them the melody and I could accompany them on faders. They were responding to whatever chord I was pushing up, or whatever combination of chords. I mean, I was very lazy. I could practically have been smoking and drinking my way through this. They’re sweating away, and with this handful of buttons I can create this big sound. So, yeah, that was all because of COVID because we couldn’t actually get to work with an orchestra. There was a maximum of eight people or twelve people in lots of studios in London at that time.

I would never have guessed it. Although, now that you mention it, it maybe gives that music a sort of extra interiority, coming from you layering these tracks on top of one another.

That’s interesting. It’s the same with the banjo cello—it all comes from the same slightly claustrophobic feeling. But it just opens out at that point because there’s so many of them.

I have to ask the obligatory question: Has there been any Radiohead activity during the pandemic? Aside from the “Kid A Mnesia” reissue?

No. It’s weird. We’re always motivated to go on tour when we’ve got new music, and we’ll only have new music if we make another record. Ed [O’Brien] is currently going to make another solo record, and I’ve done this record with Thom [Yorke] that’s hopefully going to come out, so it’s all a bit disparate at the moment. We’re a very slow-moving beast and always have been.