Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood To Score Film Adaptation Of Murakami Novel

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is set to return to film scoring by writing and composing music for the Anh Hung Tran-directed adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood. The score will be based on a composition Greenwood wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra – “Dogwood,” which debuted last month.

Greenwood’s most recent feature film score was his Grammy-nominated compositions for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, based on an earlier Greenwood piece, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” a classical composition he had written in 2006.

Greenwood announced the project at BBC’s Maida Vale studios, following Dogwood’s premiere. Haruki Murakami’s best-selling, 1987 novel, translated into English in 2000, follows Toru Watanabe’s vivid memories of the late 60s. These memories are ignited by The Beatles song “Norwegian Wood.” The film stars Rinko Kikuchi and Kenichi Matsuyama.

Murakami is one of Japan’s best-selling authors and has written such works as Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

The film version of Norwegian Wood is scheduled for release in Japan in December; no international release dates known yet.

Greenwood’s wonderful score for There Will Be Blood was ruled ineligible for the 2008 Oscars because it had not been composed originally for the film. And that sucked hard because he should have/would have won, much less been nominated!