Thom Yorke tells NPR how Jonny Greenwood's advice shaped Suspiria

Thom Yorke wrote much of his Suspiria score before he had seen a frame of the film. He tells Tim Greiving of NPR that the advice came from Jonny Greenwood. The thing that Jonny from Radiohead, advised me about was, don't work to picture if you can avoid it¹, he says.

He worked from the script, and the song “Suspirium” came from reading it. Had he sat in front of the film's most violent scene and tried to score it head-on, he says, he would have gone mad.

The dance, choreographed by Damien Jalet before Yorke joined, defeated four or five attempts to write music that followed the dancers' movements. Walter Fasano, the editor, pointed him to recordings of the dancers' feet hitting the floor and the swish of their costumes.

Yorke, who was once sounded out for Fight Club and felt unready, says Luca Guadagnino's confidence in him is what got him to try this time. For the film he took up modular synthesisers and time-stretching for the first time. I'd always left that to Colin [Greenwood] and Jonny.¹

Working to someone else's brief, he did not expect the music to feel like his own, let alone hold together as a record. I'm surprised how much of an album it ended up being.¹