Jonny Greenwood is learning a new instrument for Anderson's next film

Jonny Greenwood is already learning a new instrument for Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, he told Mark Salisbury of Screen Daily in an interview published on 2 September. Paul is getting close to pressing the button on the next film, I believe, and I'm already trying to learn a new instrument that would be central to it.⁴ He named neither the film nor the instrument. He says Anderson had a few ideas and seems to have settled on one, and that it could come sooner than expected, since Licorice Pizza was made in a matter of months.

He also explained why Hildur Guðnadóttir took over the score of Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride! at the last minute. One Battle After Another was taking all his energy, and he had fallen ill and was recovering from sepsis. He says he is well again now. Even in hospital he was still sending music for The Bride!. I remember having my guitar in the hospital and sending him cues of me trying to play the solo guitar stuff.⁴ He has not seen the finished film.

Greenwood remembers Anderson dropping in on Radiohead at Ocean Way in Los Angeles during the Hail to the Thief sessions, to invite the band to a cast-and-crew screening of Punch-Drunk Love. On Anderson's films he works alone, with no team and no arrangers. It lets him obsess over a score but holds him to one film a year, two at most. About five years ago he decided against getting a team together. He says Anderson finds it funny to watch him work, because it looks like amateur hour, just Greenwood, paper and a printer that does not work.

For One Battle After Another he built small drum-hitting machines out of solenoids, run by software he wrote himself, and gave a piano the same treatment. Much of the film's piano is voice memos from his iPhone, which Anderson liked for the sound of someone working a thing out.