Philip Selway picks ten film scores, Jonny Greenwood's among them

Phil Selway has chosen ten film scores for Magnet, and one of them is his bandmate's. He remembers seeing There Will Be Blood and being blown away by Jonny Greenwood's score. It was so accomplished and self-assured and definitely laid down a marker for me.¹

His score for Let Me Go is the first full film score he has written. Finding where the music belongs among the direction, the camera, the design and the acting was a steep learning curve, he writes. He turned to other composers' scores.

Two of them taught him something. Mark Knopfler's Cal gave him the idea that a composer could come to film from another kind of music, and the confidence to try it himself. Leonard Bernstein supplied the warning: at a dubbing session for On the Waterfront he watched a cue he cared about all but cut to make room for a grunt from Marlon Brando. Even the greatest have to bow down at points.¹

The rest run from a teenage screening of Battleship Potemkin in a chilly village hall to The Italian Job, which started his love of Minis. Of John Williams's Star Wars music, he says God, I wish I'd written that.¹

Selway's ten