THE MAKING OF A SOUNDSCAPE

As the lead guitarist of British band Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood doesn’t take just any film project that comes his way. “We had tried as a company to work with Jonny many times before,” says The Power of the Dog producer Emile Sherman of See-Saw Films. “It took Jane Campion to lure him.” Writer-director Campion and her producing partner Tanya Seghatchian were eager to work with Greenwood, whose previous film scores include Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. 

“Jane and I find Jonny’s music both original and emotional,” says Seghatchian. “We wanted his depth and his originality.” All necessary prerequisites to composing music for their singular story: The Power of the Dog, adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, is the tale of Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rancher in 1920s Montana whose world shifts as his brother brings home a wife and stepson, igniting his cruelty and ultimately uncovering his secret interior life. Woven throughout the film’s score are echoes of the western landscape and the film’s characters: the inventive picking of a cello, a frenetic piano, the sounding of lonesome french horns.

Music plays not only an audible role, but a visible one in the film. Phil’s newly minted sister-in-law Rose (Kirsten Dunst) plays piano. And Phil’s own skill in banjo, along with his character traits, opened up a space in which Greenwood could create. “There is so much culture in Phil’s character,” says Greenwood, “He’s well-read and it isn’t hard to imagine his taste in music being — alongside his proficiency on the banjo — very sophisticated. The pleasure in a character this complicated and emotionally pent-up is that it allows for complexity in some of the music.” 

Greenwood and Campion recently discussed how the layered beauty of The Power of the Dog score came to fruition. What follows is an edited version of their conversation. 

Jane Campion: I’ve worked with a lot of different composers and I think they’re brilliant, but you really are stepping out of the canon of classical music and reusing instruments in ways that we’re just not familiar with. It’s quite emotionally devastating because we don’t know how to react. We haven’t heard it before. Normally when I hear classical music played in a score, I’m a little cynical, to be honest, because it feels like it can’t avoid all the normal cliches of bringing the strings in to build emotion, things like that. And I so hate being manipulated. It just doesn’t work on me.

Jonny Greenwood: I really feel for how film composers have to work. I don’t really do film music that much, but what was great is that you asked me so far ahead. We had the fun of discussing music and talking about instruments before and even while you were shooting. It seems nuts to me when directors just use a bit of temporary music and then get the composer in two weeks before the deadline. You can feel like you are on a rail a little bit.

JC: How do you stay outside of that rail then? Because that’s really not where you want to be, is it?

JG: It helped that the film has such a strange flavor to it. It’s just not a story you’re ever told. And the characters don’t remind you of characters in other films.

JC: For me, it’s so remarkable to have a composer who thinks about the characters in this way, who thinks about the story, who sees and hears it in the way that I do.

JG: I remember getting the early footage of the cattle and the mountains, and it’s just shot so beautifully, and that got me really excited. That was inspiring for the music, seeing those sorts of images and seeing how it felt really contemporary. It was sweeping shots of the landscape, but not like you’ve seen it before. It was amazing. It is amazing.

JC: You gave us a lot of different pieces in the end. You thought a lot about the instruments, like you were creating a palette for the film with instruments in the way that designers often do with color choices or other materials they may or may not decide to use.

JG: It’s like opening a cupboard of spices; what you can do with the flavors there is sort of endless. Why would you not start like that? When the banjo doesn’t work, then throw it out embarrassedly, and when stuff like the French horn or the piano works, then you know that it’s something you can just focus on and think about all the time.

JC: To open the film, the cello is played as a guitar. How did you come up with that idea?

JG: The cello idea just came about from trying to play the cello like a banjo. In a way, recycling some of the banjo ideas. I think the result is something which gives you that nice confusion — a sound you recognize, but not a style that you’re familiar with. So it’s familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, hopefully.

JC: It feels like a Western in a way.

JG: Yeah. We talked about how, at the start of the film, it would’ve been a shame to not have a sense of momentum.

JC: Momentum was important.

JG: The banjo can be nice and dark and sinister, but it just felt like there’s so much real banjo playing in the film [by actors]. It felt like it would’ve ruined the score to have yet more banjo played by somebody else.

JC: I think that was a good call. I also felt like stepping away from it was really brilliant because the banjo wasn’t going to get us into the spaces we wanted to get to.

JG: Yeah, we decided early on that Benedict’s character Phil would suit music that wasn’t necessarily traditional Western American folky. It’s actually quite sinister when he’s playing, when he is practicing, and it has that character to it. That worked really well.

JC: How much were you thinking that the piano was going to be like a sort of haunted version of Rose?

JG: It felt like the piano is hugely symbolic for Rose and her social awkwardness. So that was another reason to think, let’s push it into being inhuman in how it sounds. The fact that it became a theme for Rose and her drunkenness and her confusion, that’s when it really connected as an idea.

JC: The French horns came out sounding like sad repression, lonely. They also sound like whales calling out to each other underwater or something.

JG: All the shots in the desert, all the wilderness, and the mountains made it seem even more alien and foreboding.

JC: And quite masculine.

JG: Yeah, I think so. The same with the cello, in a way. I mean, there’s not much in the music that’s dainty or wrapped up in the romance of the landscape. 

JC: You handed music over to us, and then we started trying out different cues and seeing where they’d work, and struggling with some, and succeeding with others, and shuffling it around. Was that frustrating for you; maybe you thought we weren’t using the right cue sometimes?

JG: No. I mean, I always feel a little bit fraudulent that I’m quite rarely writing stuff directly to the picture and it’s more about the characters and the landscape, and that usually means writing a lot more music than is needed, but it also means I feel a lot freer to just sort of sit and write things.

JC: The results really speak for themselves. I mean, when you actually listen to the mixed film, the music is so epic and powerfully integrated. It takes you someplace you’re not expecting, even me. When I heard it again recently for the first time after being mixed, I found it’s really got an energy.

JG: It’s that thing of having a good reason, that’s inspiring, to write music — and having a deadline.

JC: I just remember when we heard the very first piece that you sent us, we went, “Oh my God, that’s it. That’s our music.”