Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood) There Will Be Blood
Jonny Greenwood — lead guitarist and multi-instrumentalist of Radiohead — composed the score for There Will Be Blood after Paul Thomas Anderson heard his orchestral piece "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" while writing the screenplay. The result was a dissonant, string-heavy soundtrack that treated the period drama as a horror film and began one of the most significant director-composer partnerships in twenty-first-century cinema.
Anderson heard "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" and knew he had found his composer
"Popcorn Superhet Receiver" was a BBC-commissioned orchestral piece Greenwood had written for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Anderson heard the piece while developing the screenplay and recognized in its abrasive string writing the sound his film needed — not the stately period music a conventional drama about early oilmen would require, but something closer to Penderecki's contributions to The Shining. (wikipedia)
"Sometimes Paul would describe it as close to the horror genre. We talked about how The Shining had lots of Penderecki in it. We figured the instruments should be contemporary to the turn of the last century, but not period music." — Jonny Greenwood, Entertainment Weekly / Nonesuch
Greenwood composed with near-total creative freedom
Anderson sent Greenwood the finished film and gave him three weeks to compose. Greenwood recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London, using strings, piano, and an eighty-piece orchestra — no computers or electronic instruments. He produced hours of material; thirty-three minutes made the final cut. Anderson even fitted some scenes to the music rather than the reverse, an inversion of the typical scoring process.
"I had real luxury with that film: real soundtrack composers have made it clear to me that that was an easy ride. I could write what I wanted, and had the enthusiastic support of Paul Thomas Anderson. Usually there are more than two people's opinion involved in every decision, but on that film we were left to it." — Jonny Greenwood, Nialler9 (2011)
"In the end, I wrote too much music, all about the story and the landscapes, and he even fitted some of the film to the music. Ridiculous. Shan't happen again, they tell me..." — Jonny Greenwood, Nialler9 (2011)
The score distinguishes between landscape and intimacy
Greenwood constructed two distinct musical registers: the large orchestral pieces — dissonant, abrasive, built on Penderecki-influenced string clusters — served the vast landscape shots and the film's horror undertones. The smaller chamber pieces were written for the human-scale moments, particularly the scenes involving H.W.
"It's easier having a reason to write music — something to hide behind. That music was written about those big landscapes, and the smaller chamber pieces were about the kid, H.W." — Jonny Greenwood, Nialler9 (2011)
The two registers mirror the film's structural tension between the vast and the intimate — between the panoramic oil fields and the cramped mine shafts, between Plainview's public performances and his private confessions.
The opening cue establishes the film's register before a word is spoken
"Open Ranges," the first cue heard in the film, accompanies Plainview's solo mining in 1898. The dissonant strings signal that the fifteen-minute wordless prologue is not simply a western — it is something closer to dread, an origin story for a character whose ambition is already pathological. The score tells the audience what the images alone do not: that what they are watching is not admirable perseverance but the first symptom of a consuming disease.
The Academy ruled the score ineligible for Best Original Score
Greenwood's score was disqualified from the Academy Award for Best Original Score because portions of the music — specifically elements drawn from "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" and his earlier work Bodysong — had been previously used in other contexts. The ruling was widely criticized. Hans Zimmer later called the score "recklessly, crazily beautiful." (wikipedia, alltherightmovies)
"The directors of those films just had enthusiasm for them, so we worked elements from each into the soundtracks." — Jonny Greenwood, on the reuse of earlier compositions, Nialler9 (2011)
The partnership continued through five more Anderson films
There Will Be Blood was the first of Greenwood's collaborations with Anderson, followed by The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017), Licorice Pizza (2021), and subsequent projects. The partnership has produced some of the most distinctive film scores of the century, but the There Will Be Blood score remains the one that established the terms: dissonance over melody, horror over sentiment, the instruments of the past applied with the sensibility of the present. (wikipedia)