Jonny Greenwood on Soundtracking w/ Edith Bowman

Edith Bowman, whose show is about how film music gets made, admits she chased Jonny Greenwood for it for years and is nervous now that he is here. Her stated aim is that he should have a nice time and feel comfortable talking about the work, and they go through the scores from There Will Be Blood to Licorice Pizza.

They start with Bodysong, his first score. Paul Thomas Anderson had seen the film at a festival, and what he asked Greenwood for was more music like that, plus some tenderer pieces for other parts of the story.

For Anderson, Greenwood was not writing scene to scene. He wrote short pieces around the landscape and the characters and delivered what he calls a library, or, with some embarrassment at the word, a suite, from which the film could take what it needed. He is dry about how pretentious that sounds, and makes no apology for it being what the job turned out to be.