Jonny Greenwood

Talking to Adrian Larkin and Matt Everitt for BBC 6 Music, Jonny Greenwood calls his soundtrack work, by now a career of its own, an adolescent fantasy come true, sitting in a room with instruments he can barely play and making music out of them. He went through a period of collecting soundtracks, French ones especially, partly because everyone was buying old vinyl at the time, and what he loves about them is structural. The pieces are one or two minutes long, and a soundtrack is the only place a composer is allowed to write and release music in segments like that.

On There Will Be Blood he credits the director rather than himself. Paul Thomas Anderson is so enthusiastic about music, and so willing to let it run without dialogue for minutes at a time, that they ended up with too much and had to take some out. He is clear that this is rare and that he got an easy ride.

For Norwegian Wood he read the script, then the book, in the wrong order, and wrote the guitar music as if he were the character in it, a piano teacher learning classical guitar badly after a breakdown. Writing deliberately incompetently came very easily, he says, and it let him keep everything shy in the playing.

He also admits to being star-struck on meeting Adam Buxton, and to not being ready to score a romcom.