Thom Yorke talks film music on stage at the Festa del Cinema di Roma

Thom Yorke was the last guest of the Incontri Ravvicinati (Close Encounters) talks at the 15th Festa del Cinema di Roma on Saturday 24 October, a conversation about cinema and soundtracks built around clips from Taxi Driver, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return and his own video for “Like Spinning Plates”. He walked the red carpet with Dajana Roncione, their first public appearance together since their wedding in Sicily on 19 September.

He had watched Taxi Driver again recently with his 16-year-old daughter, picked as a film for the two of them, and a scene he had not seen for years shocked him, and he rang Jonny Greenwood straight away. In the studio, he said, he is now trying to do what that 1970s score did, and working out how to take those sounds somewhere else; he could hear Charles Mingus in Bernard Herrmann's music. Rolling Stone Italia and Movieplayer.it took this as a hint at where new Radiohead music is heading, though what Yorke talked about was his own studio work and Jonny.

Jonny also advised him on his score for Suspiria in 2018. I was terribly tense, I didn't know where to start, and I asked Jonny for advice, since he has already done quite a few.¹ The advice was to write from the script and find the music in himself before seeing the film, or he would freeze when he did.

Seeing the psychedelic sequence of 2001, a perfect fusion of image and sound to him, was like seeing God. The score that influenced him most is A Clockwork Orange, whose 1970s synthesiser versions of classical pieces blew his mind.

In a video interview for Movieplayer.it he chose Willem Dafoe to play him in a film, with Paul Thomas Anderson directing. I have lots of things on the go. I'm lucky, because I have a recording studio at home. I hope some of that work will be revealed next year.³