Shouldn’t Jonny Greenwood be sick and tired of all the acclaim and well-deserved Oscar nominations already? He already has Radiohead and the Smile, so shouldn’t someone else get a turn at composing the music for a Paul Thomas Anderson film? Este Haim thinks so. “If Jonny Greenwood happens to retire, I will be right there for Paul whenever he would like,” she recently told reporters in Berlin, according to Variety.
Haim fans, cineastes, and smart alecks will, of course, point out that Este and her sisters have already provided music for some of Anderson’s visuals since he has directed 10 Haim videos in the past decade, when he wasn’t making Oscar-nominated films or directing clips for Radiohead and the Smile. “I think Paul is one of the greatest directors of not just our generation, but of all time,” Este told the press while promoting Sunny Dancer, a film she did co-compose the score for. “And I feel very, very lucky that I’ve gotten to work with him on most of our music videos. I sort of view him as kind of like my older brother.”
Sunny Dancer, a picture starring Bella Ramsey and Neil Patrick Harris, incidentally, was helmed by George Jacques (Black Dog), a filmmaker for whom Haim also has effusive words, elevating him to family just like Anderson. “So I’ve got two sisters, and I have two brothers as well,” she said. And since Greenwood most likely will stubbornly hold onto his job for as long as Anderson allows, Haim would be perfectly content scoring for Jacques for the “rest of [her] life,” according to Variety.
And Greenwood should keep composing for Anderson since, after all, he’s been nominated twice for Oscars for Anderson-directed pictures, including Phantom Thread (2017) and One Battle After Another, the latter for which he could win this year. Rolling Stone critic David Fear believes so strongly that Greenwood should prevail in a talent-stacked category over Max Richter (Hamnet), Alexandre Desplat (Frankenstein), Ludwig Göransson (Sinners), and Jerskin Fendrix (Bugonia) that he penned an op-ed.
“The synchronization between the music and the rest of the film feels less like one is reverse-engineering the other and closer to something like a cinematic call-and-response; it’s as if Greenwood’s music is conversational instead of reactive,” Fear contended in his argument. “It may be why his score seems even more integral to the pace and tone of the movie than usual.” Winning a golden bald man statuette, Fear wrote, with pun clearly intended, “would truly put everything in its right place.”
