It’s not online yet, but EW‘s Holiday movie preview has some good stuff in it. They got an interview with both Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Paul Thomas Anderson talking about the score to PTA’s upcoming film “There Will Be Blood.”
Many have noted, including ourselves, that ‘Blood’ is a uncharacteristic left turn for PTA. There’s no gregarious, Robert Altman-like scenes with overlapping dialogue, there’s no vignettes style multiple characters intersecting (again like Altman) and there’s no pop music or any references to pop culture whatsoever, ‘Blood’ is about a greedy oil baron in early 20th century California.
PTA first start adapting the novel on which the screenplay is based on – Upton Sinclair’s “Oil!” – purely as a writing exercises to get out of a creative rut, but then he found he found he was testing his artistic limits and coming up with a new voice. In keeping with this ideas, PTA purposely put himself outside his comfort zone and instead of going to his regular troupe of players, like longtime composer Jon Brion, the director went to the unknown in Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (plus lots of other new and unfamiliar crew members).
“It’s really thrilling just to hear different sounds coming out of a film you’ve made,” PTA told EW. “I worked with a production designer and other people I’ve never worked with before . It’s nerve racking and exciting and…you have to be more polite,” he laughed.
Greenwood says he and Anderson talked about the score in advance and planning out the mood. “Sometimes Paul would describe it close to the horror genre,” Greenwood said. “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. Even though you know the sounds you’re hearing are coming from very old technology, you can do things with the classical orchestra that unsettle you, that are slightly wrong.”
PTA had a dream to make a Kubrickian film with no dialogue and just music and sound and with ‘Blood’s first silent 20 minutes (alternating between “silence and screeching strings”), he almost succeeded. “I got close with the first 20 minutes here,” he said.
Spoutblog noticed that Bathysphere noted that PTA’s had been thinking about Pendercki way back.
The Bathysphere point to this episode of Henry Rollins’ IFC show, in which the [PTA] says he listened to “a lot of crazy Polish pirate music” like Krzysztof Penderecki while writing [‘Blood’] (Rollins does a wide-eyed double-take at this tidbit that’s pretty priceless). The Bathysphere points to this MP3 of Penderecki’s Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima, which was also used in Children of Men, and
which sounds *a lot* like the music that backed the twenty-minute reel of Blood shown at Telluride.
Radiohead fans will note that Greenwood is an avid fan of Penderecki, so it sounds like this A/V marriage was perfect from the get-go.