New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Mercury KX will release the original motion picture soundtrack to Spencer, the highly-anticipated new film from director
Pablo Larraín, starring Kristen Stewart in the lead role as the late Princess Diana. It features a brand new instrumental score composed by Jonny Greenwood, a poignant accompaniment to the film, of genre bending music that combines free jazz and classical baroque. The movie premieres at Venice Film Festival on 3
September and is due to be released in cinemas in the US on 5 November.
Spencer is the latest film score from award-winning composer Jonny Greenwood, following such acclaimed soundtracks such as Phantom Thread, There Will Be Blood and Norwegian Wood.
The marriage of Princess Diana and
Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumours of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen's Sandringham Estate. There's eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. But this year, things will be a whole lot different. Spencer is an imagining of what might have happened during those few fateful days.
Director Pablo Larraín is a Chilean filmmaker who has directed eight feature films, including the Academy Award-nominated films No and Jackie.
Written by Steven Knight, Spencer has an all-star cast which includes Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales, Jack Farthing, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins.
Steven Knight says: "I am in awe of the job
Pablo has done with my script. He is an artist, a student of humankind and a visual poet. Kristen has created something extraordinary too, turning an icon into a human being and revealing aspects of that human being which have never been explored in this way.
"I have described this story as a fable as it takes elements from a real life and real events and mixes them with things imagined and things dreamt. It was written in the sincere belief that this singular life ended in tragedy, not as the result of any ill will or strategy on the part of anyone. Instead, this is the story of someone caught up in the machinery of tradition and history."
Best known as the lead guitarist of the hugely successful and influential band Radiohead,
Jonny Greenwood is also an award-winning composer for both the concert hall and for film.
His notable compositions include 'Popcorn Superhet Receiver' (commissioned by the BBC whilst Jonny was Composer-in-Residence to the BBC Concert Orchestra), 'smear' (premiered by the London Sinfonietta), '48 Responses to Polymorphia' (premiered in Poland as part of a joint concert with his idol, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki) and 'Water' (commissioned and recorded by the Australian Chamber Orchestra). Most recently, Jonny's 'Horror Vacui' which premiered at the 2019 BBC Proms, received widespread acclaim, and earned him a 2020 Ivors Composer Award; his seventh award from the Academy.
Outside of the concert hall, Jonny has emerged as one of the most sought-after film composers working in Britain. His score for the Paul
Thomas Anderson film There Will Be Blood was received with huge acclaim and won Jonny multiple awards including an Ivor Novello for 'Best Original Film Score' in 2009, as well as a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack album. This cemented the creative partnership between him and the Oscar-winning director, as Jonny went on to score The Master (starring Philip Seymour Hoffman), Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread (starring
Daniel Day-Lewis in his final screen role), which earned Jonny both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in 2018 for best original score.
Further film credits include his work with Lynne Ramsay on We Need To Talk About
Kevin (starring Tilda Swinton) and the 2017 psychological thriller You Were Never Really Here (starring
Joaquin Phoenix), as well as Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood, based on the novel by Haruki Murakami.
