Recommendations of the Editorial team
Once upon a time, Paul Thomas Anderson escaped to a cinema in the Netherlands. The director was at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2003 when he was caught in a sudden downpour and sought shelter in an ongoing performance. The film was an essayistic mix of mostly found material that examined birth, death and the connection between body and soul in a free-associative manner. The title: “Body Song”. As we would say today: a trip.
What immediately captivated Anderson was the music. The score combined off-kilter – literal and figurative – percussion with wailing synthesizers, nervous jazz interludes, motoric beats, piano fugues that seem to fade in and out, and string arrangements of almost ethereal beauty.
All of this complemented the radical images perfectly. Even more amazing: this avant-garde soundscape came from a guitarist from one of the most popular rock bands in the world. “I obviously knew about Jonny Greenwood’s work with Radiohead and followed it,” Anderson later said. “And I just fell in love with what he did for this film.”
From “Body Song” to “There Will Be Blood”
At this point, Anderson was already working on the script for his next project, a story about an oilman who finds himself in a power struggle with a preacher in the early 20th century. He wondered if music like “Body Song” could fit the film that was slowly forming in his head.
A few years later, Anderson came across a bootleg recording of a piece called “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” that Greenwood had composed for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Anderson put the track under a scene from his film, which would later be called There Will Be Blood, and had a flash of inspiration. “Paul wrote to me and I had never heard of him,” Greenwood told The New Yorker in 2021. “He asked, ‘Can I use this in the film and would you write more music for it?'”
One of the boldest film scores ever
The result was not only one of the most daring film scores ever, but also the beginning of an extraordinary artistic partnership. It’s impossible to think of 2007’s “There Will Be Blood” without hearing Greenwood’s music in your head, whether it’s the driving “Future Markets” that sits over the incoming prospectors or the plaintive violins of “HW/Hope of New Fields.”
You can hear fragments of the experimental approaches with which Radiohead were no longer seen as just a British guitar band during the “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” phases, as well as Greenwood’s early interest in classical music and his fascination with the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. This music is equally suitable for a walk in the park, for cleaning the house – or for beating someone to death with an old nine-pin in a private bowling alley.
The missed Oscar opportunity
The fact that the score for “There Will Be Blood” was not accepted for the Oscar because of the use of existing compositions – in particular “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” – is still considered a cultural scandal for many cineastes today. At least: There is no threat of going to The Hague this year.
Greenwood is nominated for an Oscar for his music for “One Battle After Another.” It’s his second nomination for a collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson after “Phantom Thread” and his third overall, after Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.” And even if titles like “Composer of the Best Film of the 21st Century” or “Lead Guitarist of Radiohead” are worth more than any gold statue, it is high time that Greenwood can also count “Oscar winner” among his achievements.
Further chapters of cooperation
After “There Will Be Blood”, Greenwood also worked on Anderson’s next film “The Master” from 2012. The score begins with lush passages reminiscent of classic Hollywood music before increasingly sliding into disturbing, psychologically charged sound worlds.
Greenwood also demonstrated his versatility on 2014’s “Inherent Vice.” The music oscillates between a melancholic farewell tone and a paranoid Krautrock groove and fits perfectly with Anderson’s hippie noir adaptation based on Thomas Pynchon.
Romance and elegance in “Phantom Thread”
With “Phantom Thread” from 2017, he showed that Greenwood is also capable of elegiac, almost voluptuous music. The Satie-like, deliberately old-fashioned sound language reflected not only the aesthetics of the film, but also Greenwood’s development as a composer. The score earned him an Oscar nomination, but failed to win.
The highlight: “One Battle After Another”
With “One Battle After Another” the collaboration between Anderson and Greenwood reaches a new height. Greenwood was involved in the creative process from the beginning, writing music parallel to filming and thus decisively shaping the pace and tone of the film.
The score seems less accompanying than dialogic, almost as if the music spoke to the images. Pieces like “Mean Alley” are reminiscent of Ennio Morricone, while “Ocean Waves” translates Greenwood’s experimental approaches into pure forward momentum. It’s the ideal sound for a film full of urgency and detours.
A long overdue Oscar
The path from “Bodysong” to “One Battle After Another” shows how a rock musician with a penchant for dissonance gave cinema new dimensions without giving up his individuality. Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood are now working on the same wavelength.
Awarding an Oscar for these achievements is long overdue. And that “One Battle After Another” could officially make Greenwood an Oscar winner? To paraphrase an old Radiohead song: Then everything would really be in its place.