Jonny Greenwood on NPR

Terry Gross talks to Jonny Greenwood on Fresh Air, with three of his films out at once, Licorice Pizza, Spencer and The Power of the Dog. A western usually gets sweeping strings and Copland harmonies, which he says are beyond him and wrong for that film. He tried writing for banjo and string quartet, and it was awful, so on the rebound he played his cello like a banjo, finger-picking it. For Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here he had half the string players tune a quarter tone flat, which their ears kept fighting.

At nine or ten, a teacher had every child bring in an instrument and find a new sound in it. He put the bow under the strings and played the top and bottom strings at once, and says that is still how he works. The piano on the Phantom Thread theme has a roll of felt between the hammers and strings, and is out of tune because he is lazy about booking the tuner. A plastic recorder given to him at six, at a school that let nobody play until 11, became an obsession. The Baroque runs through his scores. “I'm using influence in the same way that a bank can be influenced by robbers.”

He joined Thom Yorke's band, which had fallen out with a keyboard player for being too loud, and turned his own keyboard off. Yorke told him he couldn't quite hear what Jonny was doing but could tell it added a really interesting texture. Lately he has been playing old Italian church organs with two sets of black keys and stops that sound like birds.