Spending much of the 90s as lead guitarist in a 5-piece indie rock band, and noted for playing his guitar aggressively enough to give him a repetitive strain injury, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood nevertheless has more strings to his musical bow than most indie guitarists. A multi-instrumentalist with classical training, as well as an enthusiast for computer programming, he was a driving force behind the band's exploration of alternative, electronic and experimental forms on Kid A and Amnesiac and adopted a sideline working as composer for the BBC Concert Orchestra. All of this has fed into Greenwood's work as a film composer, which began in 2003 with the score for human life documentary Bodysong. It was Paul Thomas Anderson's loose take on Upton Sinclair's Oil!, There Will Be Blood, however, that brought Greenwood to critical attention and acclaim as a film composer. Anderson had been an admirer of Greenwood's work on Bodysong and elements of that previous score crop up in the Radiohead man's music There Will Be Blood (enough to disqualify it for an Original Score Oscar for not being totally original). Both movie and music received critical and awards acclaim, with Greenwood giving his traditional classical score an unsettling avant-garde edge that helped support Anderson's concept of the film as a horror. Greenwood looks more likely than most on this list to establish himself as a successful film composer in the long term and has since worked on the music for a number of dark dramas including We Need to Talk About Kevin and another collaboration with Anderson on The Master.
