Jonny Greenwood on Soundtracking w/ Edith Bowman

Jonny Greenwood talks to Edith Bowman for Soundtracking at ten one morning in the middle of a Radiohead tour, after he answered her email with an apology for being slow and an offer of ten the next morning, about his score for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.

The opening cue is an exercise in tension, a suspended fourth held for a whole piece so it never resolves. Anderson's first idea for Sean Penn's Lockjaw was military music, which became a dead end, and then the drums war reenactors use. Rather than hire anyone to play them, Greenwood and Plank, a Radiohead technician, built solenoid hitters driven from his laptop, “a ghost percussion group” in the next room that drifts in and out of time. When they fell apart he held them against the cymbals himself, and Anderson watched him run Pro Tools in horror. The piano plays itself too, and there are no samples. His three-string cello, Steven Bennett, is on the score as well, though Greenwood reckons only as something to hit.

Greenwood's music for the scene where Lockjaw goes to Perfidia's safe house and comes back with a battering ram took four attempts, each darker. Looking back, Greenwood thinks that is because the scene is the build-up to Perfidia leaving for Mexico, and Anderson wanted to make clear it was a big deal. Bowman points out that Perfidia is on screen for only part of the film, but her presence runs through all of it. In “River of Hills” Hugh Brunt conducted the strings up and down in pitch to follow the hills. “Trust Device” is two ringtones that only make harmony together. A 22-minute cue for the scene where it all kicks off with US immigration agents was the first time he had to write music that sits under the action for so long, and he finally got a car chase, though it turned out more traumatic than fun.

He has been on one of Anderson's sets, a terraced house in London for Phantom Thread with 200 crew on the stairs, and was invited to Curb Your Enthusiasm but stayed away. He has a script signed by Larry David instead, four pages long. It is in a drawer.