Thom Yorke on Festa del Cinema di Roma

At the Rome Film Fest in 2020 Thom Yorke talks about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the second film he ever saw, after The Spy Who Loved Me. He still doodles the aliens at home. He even bought the book of the film all the kids were buying, the script rewritten as a story, which made up a scene in which the synthesiser they use is borrowed from Stevie Wonder, and at eight he dreamed of owning one that could communicate with aliens. As a child he thought the music was all synthesiser; it is a cor anglais and a tuba with a synthesiser, the tuba only one instrument but made to sound immense. The way John Williams repeats a pattern and changes it, which goes back to Steve Reich, sounds contemporary to him.

Beyond this piece he is not a massive fan of John Williams. Williams has been copied so much, under explosion sequences that are not that good, that he has become a victim of his own success.