Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke introduces an open-air screening of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men at the Parco della Cervelletta in Rome, questioned on stage by Antonio Monda and Francesco Zippel, with each answer put into Italian after him.

He chose it because he is English and the film is set in Britain. He watched it again a few months earlier with Stanley Donwood, who had never seen it, and neither of them moved for its whole length. What it shows, foreigners dehumanised and violence and intimidation by the state, is to him close to what the country faces if the far right takes over. He rewatched it as ICE detentions in Minneapolis were in the news, and it made him want to cry that it was done 20 years ago. “Sometimes the most powerful work doesn't speak at the time.”

On the music he picks the climax, where Cuarón drops every sound of the violence and lets John Tavener's music come in, for him one of the great uses of music in film. Monda passes on a message from Cuarón, pleased at the choice, who says he wants to work with Yorke. Yorke is more taken with the long takes, rehearsed with cast, crew and camera for weeks, and says he only recently understood that kind of work through his friendship with Adam, an assistant director who worked with Paul Thomas Anderson and had died not long before.

Asked how film music has fed his own, he says he is not just a singer who writes songs, and that scoring films opened up a part of his brain his day job does not reach.