The Constraint Method
Jonny Greenwood was 15 when he heard Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony and decided music could do something he hadn't imagined. He had already joined the band that became Radiohead, but what Messiaen opened wasn't a rock door. It was a compositional one.
His first film score arrived in 2003 with Bodysong, a documentary. Paul Thomas Anderson called four years later. There Will Be Blood (2007) became Greenwood's arrival as a serious film composer: strings deployed like something unraveling, music that turned oil money into dread. Rolling Stone called the score "a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be."
The approach hasn't changed. Greenwood's working method is built on limits. "I like to know what I can't do and then work inside that," he has said. The constraint just shifts from film to film. Phantom Thread leaned into silences and chamber music. The Master pushed into dissonance and texture. One Battle After Another, the sixth Anderson collaboration, returned to the piano: understated, then not.
The Anderson Partnership
Six film scores for one director isn't a streak. It's a language. Anderson and Greenwood developed theirs across more than two decades, trading scripts for recordings, letting music enter production before cameras rolled. The tonal range across those six films is wide: the brutalist weight of The Master, the poisoned elegance of Phantom Thread, the warmth of Licorice Pizza. For One Battle After Another, Greenwood had the script in late 2023 and composed alongside the shoot. The finished score features 18 new compositions performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Piano-driven, reaching for strings when the tension required it.
The partnership isn't his only consequential one. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) showed Greenwood in a smaller frame: intimate, suffocating, sound placed where it hurts most. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021) carried a similar restraint and earned him his second Academy Award nomination.
Three Oscar nominations total: Phantom Thread, The Power of the Dog, One Battle After Another. None have won.
October in Ghent
This August, the World Soundtrack Awards named Greenwood a Film Composer of the Year nominee for the 26th edition, alongside Alexandre Desplat and Hildur Guðnadóttir. The ceremony takes place October 10 at Film Fest Gent, Belgium.
He remains Radiohead's lead guitarist and a co-founder of The Smile, the trio formed with Thom Yorke and Tom Skinner in 2021. The film scoring career runs parallel, not adjacent. Greenwood has never treated them as separate modes. The result is a body of work that sounds like neither pure rock nor pure classical, but something that functions exactly because it doesn't resolve.
