It’s been a particularly busy year for Jonny Greenwood. The Radiohead guitarist is the mind behind the scores for three major awards-season contenders: MGM/United Artists’ Licorice Pizza, Netflix’s The Power of the Dog and Neon’s Spencer, the latter two landing on the Oscar shortlist for best original score.
Greenwood’s first composition for a narrative feature came with 2007’s There Will Be Blood. (His first time composing for film happened years earlier with the documentary Bodysong). There Will Be Blood kicked off a longtime collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson that has gone on to include The Master, Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread, which earned Greenwood an Oscar nomination for best original score. He reteamed with the director this year on Licorice Pizza, a romantic comedy set in 1973.
This year also saw him return to the tumultuous frontier of the American West during the early 20th century with The Power of the Dog. Writer-director Jane Campion originally reached out to Greenwood via email. “There seems to be two ways to get a project: straight from an enthusiastic director or the slightly creepy, ‘[Would] you like your name to be added to a shortlist of other composers for this big unnamed film,’ ” Greenwood says via email. “So far I’ve been lucky enough just to do the first kind.”
The Power of the Dog stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a wealthy, menacing and hyperintelligent Montana rancher who is obsessed with traumatizing his new sister-in-law, Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst. Set on a ranch in 1920s Montana, the movie sees Cumberbatch strum his instrument of choice — a banjo — throughout the film. “I learned to play my cello like a banjo,” explains Greenwood. “That’s the sound in the film that lots of people assume is a guitar — but there aren’t any in the score.” The French horn proved important when trying to sonically convey various characters’ inner turmoil, with Greenwood describing the instrument as “the embodiment of pent-up emotion.”
Although it’s a period film, the artist opted for a more modern sound for his score. “This film has such an unusual tone: Me playing pastiche American folk music would never suit all the repressed conflict or Phil’s dark, angry intelligence,” notes the composer.
And in terms of pinpointing the difficulties of finding the sound for individual scenes, Greenwood zeroes in on one where the audience sees Cumberbatch’s Phil finally relax — in a small grassy sanctuary with a swimming pond, far away from the ranch and the gaze of his family. The musician wanted the scene to have a large orchestral backing, but they were recording at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, which meant that Greenwood ended up spending days recording himself playing different melodies on a single cello and viola, over and over.
“Eventually, it became the right kind of colorful, complex sound,” he remembers. “It’s funny, though — if you hear one on its own, you can tell it’s a $100 cello being played by a beginner. With 50 playing at once, it’s a nice, unusual texture. Safety in numbers, I suppose.”
This story first appeared in the Jan. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.