Jonny Greenwood

Terry Gross talks to Jonny Greenwood on Fresh Air, first broadcast on 7 February 2022, with three very different films of his out at once: Licorice Pizza, Spencer and The Power of the Dog.

She asks technical questions and then waits. The opening of The Power of the Dog, she notes, sounds like a western and then does not. The sweeping strings and Copland harmonies a western usually gets are beyond him, Greenwood says, and would have been wrong for the darkness of the film anyway, so he wrote for banjo and string quartet, convinced the banjo is a genuinely sinister instrument once it is taken away from its comic associations.

A school music teacher once had the class bring in whatever they played, recorders and violins alike, and asked each of them to find a new sound in it. Greenwood remembers putting the bow under the strings to sound the top and bottom at once, and says the instruction has stayed with him and still describes how he works.