Jonny Greenwood on Soundtracking w/ Edith Bowman

Edith Bowman, who handed Jonny Greenwood an Ivor Novello and asked him onto Soundtracking then, finally has him on. He works for directors who ask him, not for the blank emails from Los Angeles offering a place on a shortlist of composers for a big film nobody can name, and scoring feels like being in a band with the director and editor. Paul Thomas Anderson should keep off the drums, he adds, having seen him try.

There Will Be Blood began with a bootleg of a BBC concert piece that Anderson laid against the film, having first heard Greenwood through his score for the film Bodysong, which Anderson saw at a film festival. He wrote a library of short pieces about the landscape and the characters, and only two or three cues to picture. For one, Anderson asked for something like the Jaws theme, predatory, while the land is being bought up, and that became “Future Markets”. Greenwood tends to start with piano, paper and recordings, and some of his phone recordings, in which he picks his way clumsily through a tune, end up in Anderson's films, because Anderson likes them. Asked about his talks with Anderson on Phantom Thread, Greenwood says, “it was me saying that this score should be really small and minimal and empty and him saying he wanted big ass strings.”

Pablo Larraín sent the first footage shot for his film Spencer, Diana followed round the castle grounds by a handheld camera like someone in a Hitchcock film, and that settled the score. Lynne Ramsay suggested the harp with metal strings for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Jane Campion wrote him long handwritten notes, photographed and emailed. He works alone, without assistants, because orchestrating is the fun part. The cello he plays like a banjo on The Power of the Dog came from a shop in Witney and carries a schoolboy's name, Stephen Bennett, in the boy's mother's felt-tip.