Jonny Greenwood on Alamo Drafthouse

After a screening of Junun at the Alamo Drafthouse, the IndieWire critic David Ehrlich questions Jonny Greenwood, Nigel Godrich, Paul Thomas Anderson, the nagara player Nathulal Solanki and Shye Ben Tzur, whose album Greenwood came in to produce. The Rajasthan Express, the Indian musicians on the album, are waiting to play. The music is devotional and so uplifting, Greenwood says, and the recording went the same way, which is not their usual day. The “have a great time” sign held up to the camera early in the film was packed into a flight case by Plank, Radiohead's chief technician, one of them says, and it sums up the trip.

Greenwood first heard Ben Tzur's name after watching a band that were not very good play one great song. He said so, and they told him who wrote it. Ben Tzur explains the rules Greenwood set. There were to be no Western instruments beyond their own guitars, and no Western harmony, because chords pin this music down. Westerners who record in India, Greenwood thinks, often have too much respect and miss the roughness of a brass band following a wedding through the back streets of Jodhpur.

Is there anything Greenwood can't play? Maybe one day they'll find out, Godrich says. Asked about locking Radiohead in an Indian fort for three weeks, Godrich says the power cuts would drive Thom Yorke insane, though the method would work for anyone and he would dearly love to try, but he doubts he could get the band to go. All the reverb on the album is real, from a big space under the fort that happened to be full of pigeons, while Anderson's camera gear sat in customs, nobody bribed anybody and it went back to America, so he shot the film on a very small camera. Solanki, the 13th generation of his family to play the nagara at the Brahma temple in Pushkar, remembers his brother dying on stage at Town Hall in New York.

A fan asks how Greenwood wrote the “Paranoid Android” solos. He didn't know what the notes were, he says, and picked a pattern up the fretboard.