Jonny Greenwood on how he wrote the Bodysong score

The official website of Bodysong has been expanded with pages on the film, its composer Jonny Greenwood, the director Simon Pummell and the producer Janine Marmot, and a new section of questions and answers with Greenwood and Pummell.

Asked why he took on a film when Radiohead have so often turned such work down, Greenwood says most scoring is a discipline: click tracks, cues that must make their point in 20 seconds, and room left for dialogue. Bodysong asked none of that, so the musicians could play at the tempos that felt right and he could concentrate on mood.

The hard part was that a conventional score can be built on recurring themes or characters, and this film has neither. He was also wary of tiring an audience with 85 minutes of music that was either too uniform or too scattered in style.

Picture and music grew together. Rough cuts arrived in sections that lengthened and shortened as the edit went on; music was written and recorded for each, then trimmed to fit towards the end. His classical knowledge let him use a string quartet and write parts for jazz players to improvise around, and he praises the Emperor String Quartet for their patience and adaptability.

It was a revelation to realise that you can rely on good players to make quite simple ideas sound very 'musical'.

Jonny Greenwood¹

On the film's mix of century-old and digital footage, he says he tried not to answer old film with pastiche of old music, but found that some of the score had to be beautiful, even pretty, like the images, without apology. The dark moods came more easily, and would have swamped the film without the string quartet writing beside them.