Once upon a time, Paul Thomas Anderson ducked into a movie theater in the Netherlands. The filmmaker was attending the 2003 Rotterdam Film Festival, and having been caught in a sudden downpour, he quickly made his way into a screening to get out of the rain. The movie, an essay-ish mix of mostly found footage that mounted a free-form examination of birth, death, and the connection between the physical form and the soul, was called Bodysong. It was what the kids would describe as “a trip.”
What attracted Anderson’s attention was the score, which blended a lot of offbeat (literally and figuratively) percussion with wailing synths, skittery jazz interludes, motorik beats, piano fugues that seem to fade in and out, and string arrangements so heavenly that they could bring tears to your eyes. It somehow complemented the out-there imagery to a tee. Even weirder: This avant-noise opus was composed by a guitarist for one of the most popular rock bands on the planet. “I’d obviously been aware of Jonny [Greenwood]’s work with Radiohead and tried to follow that as much as I could,” the filmmaker would later tell a journalist, “and I just fell in love with what he did for that film.”
Anderson was halfway through writing what would be his next project, a story of an oil man locked in a power struggle with a preacher in the early part of the 20th century. He wondered if something akin to the Bodysong score would be a good fit for the movie that was slowly coming together in his head. Several years later, Anderson came across a bootleg recording of a piece titled “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” which Greenwood had composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Anderson tried playing the track over a sequence he’d shot for the film, which he’d eventually title There Will Be Blood, and it sparked an idea. “[Paul] wrote to me, and I’d not heard of him,” Greenwood told the New Yorker in 2021, “and he said, ‘Can I use this in the film, and will you write some more?’”
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The result would not only be one of the most daring film scores ever, but the beginning of a beautiful friendship — and a truly singular collaboration of sound and vision that continues to this day. It’s impossible to think of There Will Be Blood (2007) without hearing Greenwood’s music in your head, whether it’s the propulsive “Future Markets” that plays over numerous prospectors arriving to town (a piece that Greenwood has said is loosely based on Anderson suggesting something predatory à la the Jaws theme) or the mournful, keening violins of “HW/Hope of New Fields.” You can hear bits and pieces of the more experimental stuff that helped prevent Radiohead from being labeled “just another British guitar band” by nonbelievers during the Kid A/Amnesiac period, yet the music also channeled Greenwood’s early interest in classical music and obsession with Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s droning, dissonant work. It’s the perfect music to listen to whether you’re strolling in a park, cleaning your house, or beating someone to death in your private bowling alley with a vintage ninepin.
The fact that There Will Be Blood‘s score was deemed not eligible for Oscar consideration because it contained some of Greenwood’s previously composed work — notably elements of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” — and thus became “diluted” enough to not be considered original is, in the eyes of many cinephiles, the equivalent of a crime against humanity. Hopefully, no one will be required to alert the Hague on March 15, when this year’s Academy Awards take place. Greenwood is nominated for Best Score for his work on Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which marks his second nomination for a PTA collaboration (Phantom Thread) and his third overall (after also receiving a nod for his work on Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog). And while such designations as “the artist who scored the best movie of the 21st century” and “the lead guitarist for freakin’ Radiohead!” are worth a million times more than gold statues, it’s high time that Greenwood add “Oscar winner” to his list of accomplishments. Whether his work on Anderson’s woozy epic of resistance is his personal best is debatable — the competition is fierce. But it’s certainly Oscar-worthy, to say the least, and it represents an interesting evolutionary chapter of the musician’s work with a truly unique filmmaker.
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After Blood, Greenwood was enlisted to work on Anderson’s next film, The Master (2012), which centered on the relationship between a spiritual guru (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and an unstable WWII veteran (Joaquin Phoenix). Any resemblance to real-life movements of the mid-20th century that edged into being considered cults was, er, coincidental. The way that Greenwood evoked the lush film scores of movies from that era, however, was 100-percent intentional, and you can hear a lot of layered, symphonic pieces that would not have been out of place in a 1950s melodrama.
That’s how the score starts out, at least. Once the film slowly starts to dip into psychological-warfare territory, the music begins to mirror the sheer weirdness and mental unraveling happening onscreen. “Able-Bodied Seaman” starts off with what sounds like a detuned bass, or possibly a gigantic rubber band, being plucked while exotic percussive instruments are hit at odd intervals. When a string section comes in, not even the more traditional sound of the violin parts can temper the unease. By the time you get to the piece “Baton Sparks,” the mix of a violent, Bernard Herrmann-like opening and what sounds like a shrieking chorus of instruments being transmitted from within a swarm of bees is enough to permanently put you on edge. It’s another blend of the beautiful and the damned, and further shows Greenwood’s skill at blending discordant sounds with standard classical suites in a way that shouldn’t work, yet does.
Anderson enlisted him as well for Inherent Vice (2014), his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s hippie noir that earns a place in both the out-of-his-depth-detective-story and stoner-flick halls of fame. It’s a movie that features Joaquin Phoenix at his shaggiest, Josh Brolin eating a Humboldt crop’s worth of marijuana, and the general feeling that the center circa 1970 cannot hold. Vice is also an elegiac story about saying goodbye to both an ideological decade and a certain type of countercultural innocence, and several of Greenwood’s original pieces take on a slightly funereal edge without going full dirge, especially in relation to the character of the “missing” young woman Shasta Fay. But there are also several funky, Krautrock-influenced tracks that fit right next to the Can songs featured in the film. The paranoia is strong in this score. So is the melancholy.
You almost wouldn’t know that Greenwood was the person responsible for the swoonworthy music that characterizes Phantom Thread (2017). That the gent who added such oddball touches to so many of his previous scores could do something so straightforward and Satie-like here was, frankly, astounding. But it speaks to both Greenwood’s growth as a composer and the mind-meld that he and Anderson had formed by this point. “[Paul] wanted romantic music, and also for it to be quite English, which feels like a bit of a contradiction,” Greenwood said during a Q&A. “But he wanted it to be sincerely felt. He sent me a lot of Nelson Riddle… I tried to steer him toward Glenn Gould and Bach.”
You can hear all of those influences in his arrangements, along with some of Miklos Rozsa’s work outside of his usual Hollywood-epic sturm und drang. Much like the story itself — which followed Daniel Day-Lewis’s 1950s British designer falling head over heels in love with his reluctant muse and eventual equal — the music feels like it’s being beamed in from a bygone era. It earned Greenwood an Oscar nomination, though surprisingly not a win. (Alexandre Desplat’s music for that year’s Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water, edged it out.)
Which brings us to One Battle After Another. Greenwood has worked with other filmmakers in addition to PTA over the years, including Lynne Ramsay’s revenge thriller You Were Never Really Here (2017), Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (both 2021), which garnered the musician his second Oscar nomination. All three of those movies benefit from Greenwood’s scores, particularly Dog; his signature ability to induce dread with something as spare as “Miss Nancy Arrives” gave a simple scene in that neo-Western an edge. He also contributed a few bits of original music to Anderson’s needle-drop–heavy soundtrack for Licorice Pizza (2021) as well, notably, the title track.
Yet the latest collaboration between Anderson and Greenwood truly does stand out in his catalog, and it involves a key difference. “[Jonny’s] been involved from the beginning and has had this script for a long time,” the filmmaker told Forbes. “He’s been writing music, but the important part is then hearing it. We would watch dailies, and we would be able to play the music that he was writing along with it, so everybody starts to really get a sense and an understanding of the tone. Everybody gets that same music in their bodies, and it helps push us all along on a similar journey.”
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The synchronization between the music and the rest of the film feels less like one is reverse-engineering the other and closer to something like a cinematic call-and-response; it’s as if Greenwood’s music is conversational instead of reactive. It may be why his score seems even more integral to the pace and tone of the movie than usual. You can also feel Greenwood both flexing his chops and pushing himself outside of his film-score comfort zone; the meandering “Mean Alley” evokes Ennio Morricone, and “Ocean Waves” turns his experimental-noise schematics into something that’s all forward momentum. It’s the ideal sound for a movie that’s filled with both urgency and roundabout detours.
To go from Bodysong to One Battle is to chart how a rock star with a knack for off-kilter composititons found a way to deliver added dimensions to all sorts of stories without watering down his more unorthodox creative instincts or eclipsing the film itself. Anderson and Greenwood have long been a great match. Now they seem to be operating on a single wavelength. Giving the composer an Oscar for his contributions to the form is long past due. But having One Battle After Another being the one to make him an official Oscar winner? To paraphrase another associate of Mr. Greenwood: That would truly put everything in its right place.
