Paul Thomas Anderson is not resting on his laurels after his Oscar triumph in 2026 with One Battle After Another. The director is indeed at work on a new mysterious project, and the news comes from Jonny Greenwood. He is not only the guitarist for Radiohead but also a composer for films. For PTA he has written the scores for There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, and the aforementioned One Battle After Another, making him a reliable source. Speaking with Screen Daily he stated:
I believe Paul is about to start his next film, and I’m already learning to play a new instrument that will play a fundamental role, which means there’s quite a wait ahead…
The journalist who interviewed Greenwood commented that he imagined Anderson would not dive immediately into another cinematic venture, to which the musician replied:
It could pass relatively little time as well. He had a few ideas, he picked one, and I think he’s ready to go. You always think it will take years for a new film, and instead here is Paul starting and finishing Licorice Pizza in a few months.
In the interview Jonny Greenwood also talks about the pleasure – and the fatigue – of working for Paul Thomas Anderson. When he must compose the score for one of his films, the musician thinks of nothing else for months, especially because he works alone:
When Paul comes to visit me and watches me work, he says he finds me amusing, that it seems like Amateur Hour because there’s only me with a printer and sheets of paper, and the orchestra arriving the next day. But he knows I take the job very seriously. He’s a terrific man, with a very European sense of humor.
Greenwood finally recounts when he met the director, who invited him, along with the other members of Radiohead, to the preview of Punch Drunk Love (Ubriaco d’amore). The guitarist is convinced that PTA did it because the film’s title had partly borrowed from one of their 1995 songs: Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong.
Whispers say that the new project alluded to by Jonny Greenwood is a jazz-themed film set in the 1940s, focused on the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the West Coast jazz scene. Bought by an African American couple before the 1929 crash and created to host the Black community, which by law could not lodge in hotels, it hosted legends such as Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. It was initially linked to a project with Denzel Washington and Tiffany Haddish, but nothing more has been heard about it since.
Paul Thomas Anderson is indeed a director who takes his time to make his films, and it is worth waiting long for them, because they are crafted down to every detail, as well as being profoundly different from one another. Up to now the director has made 11 films, all of them magnificent.
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