there will be blood
"There Will Be Blood" director
Paul Thomas Anderson & composer Jonny Greenwood (a.k.a. Radiohead's
guitarist), chat about their unique collaboration on December's historical
epic
// Entertainment Weekly, 8 November 2007
:: english original
At or near the top of most cinephiles' list of
the most exciting filmmakers working today is Paul Thomas Anderson.
Fill in ''music fans'' and ''bands'' in the above construction, and
Radiohead is the no-brainer choice to end that sentence. Now, Anderson
and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood have teamed up. The director
of such landmark films as Boogie Nights and Magnolia enlisted one
of the main creative forces behind such landmark albums as OK Computer
and Kid A to score the highly anticipated There Will Be Blood (opening
Dec. 26). There will be strings... often abrasive, dissonant, disturbing,
and always very loud strings.
Blood marks a departure for both mavericks, though
maybe even a little more so for Anderson, who'd never done a period
piece before tackling this tale of a misanthropic oil man (Daniel
Day-Lewis) in California at the turn of the last century. Though it's
not widely known, Greenwood is no neophyte to orchestration, having
done one film score before (for an experimental documentary called
Bodysong), in addition to being commissioned by the BBC to
compose a piece called ''Popcorn Superhet Receiver,'' which is excerpted
in Blood and helped get him this gig.
If you can't wait for the film to hit theaters
at Christmas time, a soundtrack CD on Nonesuch will precede the movie.
But if you really, really can't wait, EW got the two collaborators
on the phone together, trans-Atlantically, to talk about their collaboration.
__________
— Setting aside your new collaboration for a
moment, could I ask you both to name a personal favorite of each other's
previous work? Jonny, I was specifically wondering if there's anything
about the way Paul has used music in his previous movies that stuck
out for you. And Paul, do you have a favorite piece by Radiohead?
JG: I'm feeling like I'm on Mr. and Mrs. [an
English show equivalent to America's The Newlywed Game]... Punch-Drunk
Love had such great music in it. I'm a sucker for pump organ.
That was really cool.
PTA: What was the last song on Amnesiac,
Jonny, was it ''Life in a Glass House''?
JG: The Dixieland one!
PTA: The Dixieland one makes me excited and melancholy
and really satisfied every time I hear it. I love that song.
JG: That's cool. The guys who played it, they're
84... and we were only supposed to have them there for two hours,
and we kept them there all day and most of the night. [Laughs] It
was touch and go. But that was a really fun day, recording a band
like that. Yeah, I love that song, too.
— Paul, you have a dedication at the end of this
movie to one of your heroes, Robert Altman. But this is one of your
least Altmanesque films. A lot of it is one character out in the desert,
with long silences suddenly giving way to screeching strings. It reminded
me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Stanley Kubrick had the silence
of space and then suddenly ''The Blue Danube'' or one of the more
dissonant pieces he used.
PTA: Well, it's so hard to do anything that doesn't
owe some kind of debt to what Stanley Kubrick did with music in movies.
Inevitably, you're going to end up doing something that he's probably
already done before. It can all seem like we're falling behind whatever
he came up with. ''Singin' in the Rain'' in Clockwork Orange — that
was the first time I became so aware of music in movies. So no matter
how hard you try to do something new, you're always following behind.
The whole opening 20 minutes was meant to be silent. I always had
a dream about trying to make a movie that had no dialogue in it, that
was just music and pictures. I still haven't done it yet, but I tried
to get close in the beginning. Jonny was really one of the first people
to see the film. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually
helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific,
because I had no impression.''
JG: Sometimes Paul would describe the thing as
kind of close to the horror-film genre. And we talked about how The
Shining had lots of Penderecki and stuff in it. So yeah. I think
it was about not necessarily just making period music, which very
traditionally you would do. But because they were traditional orchestral
sounds, I suppose that's what we hoped was a little unsettling, even
though you know all the sounds you're hearing are coming from very
old technology. You can just do things with the classical orchestra
that do unsettle you, that are sort of slightly wrong, that
have some kind of undercurrent that's slightly sinister. Which is
what's happening with this film sometimes. Part of what I picked up
on and got excited about is that it's the end of the 19th Century.
A lot of [things are] just implied, so it's not a horror film in that
sense, because people are sort of being polite, but there's a sense
of darkness going on at the same time. I love that kind of stuff,
when things are unspoken.
PTA: I guess when you have a title like that, the
music better be a little bit scary.
— The score is extremely in-your-face in this
film, as in all of Paul's movies. To love his films is really to go
along with his musical choices. It's not like anyone could say, ''I
loved the movie but hated the music.'' It's really integral — and
loud. And it often stretches across different scenes.
JG: You're right, when Paul puts the music in a
film, it's very upfront. I realize now that I had an easy ride, really,
in that it's the first time I've done anything like it, and I thought
a film soundtrack would involve having to hit certain points and then
duck out for people to say things, and [each cue] would all be over
in exactly 63 seconds, or whatever. But instead, it's three minutes
of all music [and no dialogue], to the image, quite often. It's mad,
really. I was a bit like a kid in a candy store, in that I was just
given free reign to write a lot of music with the film or certain
scenes vaguely in mind. So I just wrote and wrote. I thought I'd have
to be timing things, and the musicians would all have to play to click
tracks. But it was the opposite to that. It felt like a really musical
thing to be doing, although I'm sure that's not how it normally is
for a soundtrack composer.
PTA: To make a film, the final big collaborator
that you have is the composer. Jonny was really one of the first people
to see the film. And when he came back with a bunch of music, it actually
helped show me what his impression of the film was. Which was terrific,
because I had no impression. I had no idea what we were doing. And
really, you have so many people that you collaborate with along this
whole road of making a film, and you get to the end, and you're kind
of face to face with two people really at the end: the editor and
the composer. It's like the bottom of the Christmas tree. There's
just the three of you standing, holding all of these people's work
together, trying to make sense out of it. It was funny, because some
of the stuff that Jonny came back with initially didn't make any sense
to me at all. And he was smart enough to avoid me for a few days,
so that I could let it all settle. 'I'm really not that competent
at describing things musically. I think Jonny was probably amazingly
patient with hearing some really long winded descriptions of things
that made no reference to how you could do it musically.
JG: That's interesting, what Paul's saying about
coming in later. It's a weird position to be in. It's only now I'm
kind of realizing how weird that was, to be having fresh opinions
about something that's already involved so many people.
PTA: Or that you have the ability to ruin everybody
else's good work...
JG: Really ruin it! No, I think in the end, it's
all right. I think we got away with it.
— Did you ask Jonny to score this film because
of his Bodysong score, because of 'popcorn superhet receiver','
or just from being a Radiohead fan?
PTA: I saw Bodysong at a film festival
in Rotterdam on a rainy afternoon. I'd obviously been aware of Jonny's
work with Radiohead and tried to follow that as much as I could, and
I just fell in love with what he did for that film. It was near while
I was about halfway through writing the film, I guess, [that he thought
about JG]. Then when I heard ''Popcorn,'' I just loved the sounds
of it, and I just couldn't put my finger on what I liked about it.
Because I would always hear it when it wasn't on, like a phantom limb,
just the strange sounds of it. I had been listening to it over and
over again, and then when not listening to it, would feel like I had
left the stereo on in the other room or something.
JG: That's mad, because that's exactly why I wrote
that! That's really weird, that you saw that in it. The whole [conceptual]
idea was about when you think there's some music playing, and there
isn't. You know, like when you're doing a Hoover or a vacuum cleaner
and you think there's a radio playing as well, and you turn it off,
but there isn't any music on. That was the starting-off point for
that piece, anyway.
PTA: I just saw a report that people are reporting
that they feel like their phone is buzzing in their pockets, even
though they don't have their phone in their pockets.
JG: Fantastic!
— Did the collaboration go smoothly?
PTA: You know, I'm really not that competent at
describing things musically. I think Jonny was probably amazingly
patient with hearing some really long winded descriptions of things
that made no reference to how you could do it musically.
JG: It's funny, I found an early e-mail from Paul,
and it just says ''I've got complete trust that what you do is going
to be great. Don't worry. I believe it's going to be fine.'' I think
I was slowly trying to back out, like a few months ago, thinking,
I can't do this. I can't go on with this. It was a combination
of [PTA's reassurance] and just general enthusiasm for the whole project
that just made me think it was going to be all right. And when that
happens, you just always want to do your best for that person. I'm
sure it was very sort of psychological mind games going on, to get
me so happy. But it was a really happy time.
PTA: By the same token, I just really wanted to do really right by
Jonny, too, wanting to try to protect all these pieces that he made,
and find the right use for them. There were some times where I was
concerned with it a little too much, because there were so many things
that were so wonderful, but just couldn't fit in the film. I was probably
more despondent about it than he was.
JG: It did feel like a lot of early drafts had
too much music in them. But just being in a room full of string players,
when they start up, whether it's an 80-piece orchestra or string quartet,
is the most addictive sound.
PTA: Just speaking for myself, it is such an intimidating
set of circumstances to walk in and see 80 string players sitting
there. I mean, I spent the better part of the first day, while incredibly
excited, just completely terrified and paranoid. I went over to the
corner and felt very out of place. But once I warmed up to it, God,
it was thrilling. They were all so generous, too, and very inviting,
and once you got to that place where you could actually stand down
on the floor and feel not like an imposter but like a cheerleader
or supporter and could actually ask for something, it felt great.
— Jonny, now that the Radiohead album In Rainbows
has gotten out there for people to download and hear, how do you feel
the release of the album went? Do you feel like you did the right
thing, putting it out that way?
JG: Yeah, I'm just glad that everyone's hearing
it at the same time — because that was the point, really.
— With all this talk about the radical distribution
model for the new Radiohead album, Paul, I wondered if what they did
might have inspired you to think that maybe you should just put your
new movie up on the web and let people pay whatever they want for
it... I'm joking. I think.
PTA: God, I mean, it's every person's dream, I
suppose, to have ownership. Unfortunately, to make a film this size,
it would be impossible to finance myself. I'd have to come up with
something that I could do on a smaller scale so that I could do that.
Because you don't get pride of ownership when you make a film. You
get pride of authorship. And you get paid for it — that's the switch-off.
But movies aren't far behind [music] in falling apart — I mean, the
business itself. One of the films that I have the fondest memory of
seeing is Gallipoli, because I knew absolutely nothing about
it. My brother said, ''Let's go see this movie.'' And I said, ''What's
it about?'' He said, ''I'm not going to tell you.'' And I hadn't seen
the poster, I hadn't seen a trailer or anything, and it was such an
amazing experience. [Talking about the Radiohead release] just made
me think of it. To be able to just kind of get something as close
to the bone as possible, without too much intrusion...
JG: I'm a great one for reading movie reviews in,
like, one second, and you think Oh, that's gonna be worth seeing.
I don't know, it's like looking at the end of a book before you read
it. It's best avoided, really, so you've got no idea what's coming.