A film score can make uncertainty audible. For One Battle After Another, Jonny Greenwood found it in unstable machines, suspended harmony and a performance that still sounded as though somebody was discovering it.
The result grew from his long collaboration with writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson. The interest is in how they worked together: music could influence the film while the film was still taking shape.
Start with the story, before the picture settles
Speaking to Edith Bowman on Soundtracking, Greenwood describes beginning with the script and conversations about its characters. He refined the music as Anderson filmed, finding a tone that could support serious stakes inside a very funny film.
The distinction mattered. Adding obviously comic music could repeat a joke the scene had already made. Anderson wanted the score to take the story seriously, without an ironic distance from the people in it.
Greenwood describes the opening as an exercise in unresolved tension. A suspended note keeps the ear waiting for a release. It is a small musical decision with a large dramatic consequence: the listener does not quite get to settle.
Machines that bring their own uncertainty
In his Screen International interview, Greenwood explains building mechanical beaters from solenoids and controlling them with homemade software. Real drums produced the sound. The mechanism supplied the playing.
A related piano setup left his hands free to alter and detune the strings while it played. The attraction was partly the possibility that the system might misbehave. Its physical instability became creative material.
For a long sequence, those mechanical ideas were then translated into notation for wind and brass players. The process moved from a physical experiment towards orchestration, rather than beginning with a finished orchestral arrangement.
A phone demo becomes part of the film
Greenwood also told Screen that Anderson kept piano voice memos recorded on his iPhone. For the main theme, the London Contemporary Orchestra followed that piano performance. The director valued the feeling of somebody working an idea out.
That choice changes what a demo means. Instead of being a disposable step towards a polished replacement, it can contain a quality that a later performance would lose. The question becomes whether the recording serves the scene.
The orchestra is a collaborator
The Nonesuch album credits identify the London Contemporary Orchestra and conductor Hugh Tieppo Brunt. They also credit him with additional orchestration for wind and brass. This is a shared recording achievement, even when the originating musical ideas are Greenwood’s.
Graeme Stewart produced and mixed the score. Recording took place at Abbey Road and Angel Studios in 2025, with engineers John Barrett, Lewis Jones and Stewart.
Greenwood’s own credited instruments include piano, guitar, bass, percussion and ondes Martenot. Those details help explain the range of textures, but the important relationship is between an idea, the people playing it and the scene it supports.
Trust built across earlier work
In an interview about the orchestra’s film work, Tieppo Brunt traces its collaboration with Greenwood back to concert music in 2008 and their first score together, The Master, in 2012.
He describes musicians adapting to different ways of communicating a musical idea, including notation and working by ear. That flexibility helps explain why unusual starting points can become a coherent performance rather than remaining isolated experiments.
A partnership that leaves room for discovery
Greenwood’s 2019 PRS for Music interview describes a working relationship in which he supplies music and Anderson explores it against the film. Sometimes the picture moves towards the music. It is a useful earlier account of the freedom that continued into this score.
The record suggests three useful questions for a filmmaker and composer working together:
- What should the music believe? A funny scene may need sincere music rather than another joke.
- What is worth preserving? A rough recording can hold a performance that a clean remake misses.
- Where can the process stay open? Music and editing can develop together instead of meeting only at the end.
These are creative choices, rather than a recipe for reproducing Greenwood’s sound. A different story will ask for different instruments, performances and relationships.
Hear the film through its music
The official soundtrack offers eighteen compositions to explore outside the picture. Alongside the embedded title piece, Nonesuch’s official Trust Device and Guitar for Willa recordings let you compare sharply different musical materials.
For the full conversation about this film, listen to Greenwood’s Soundtracking interview. Its value is hearing the composer explain how decisions changed during the work, rather than treating the finished soundtrack as something that arrived fully formed.
That interest in discovery also runs through Hans Zimmer and Roger Sayer’s Interstellar organ story and Daniel Pemberton’s Project Hail Mary score. In each case, the human choices behind a sound are as interesting as the sound itself.
