Thom Yorke attended the Rome Film Festival yesterday with his new wife Dajana Roncione. He was there for a panel to discuss his career and some movie soundtracks that were formative for him. He spent a lot of time talking about John Williams’ score for the 1977 Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

“It was the second film I’d ever seen, the first being The Spy Who Loved Me,” Yorke said. “It completely blew my mind when I was a child on lots of different levels. The alien thing became a little bit of an obsession with me. I still draw those figures if I’m sitting at home, it’s something I doodle.”

He went on to talk about why he likes Williams’ score for Close Encounters so much:

I think the tones of the instruments. When I was a child, I thought it was just synthesizers but it’s not… I don’t know why those particular sounds always stuck with me when I was a child. They’re relatively simple. The tuba is only one instrument but they make it sound so immense. The way that John Williams composes this piece is super modern as well. Melodically, I have no idea how he went about composing it, but the idea of one pattern being repeated and changed and then repeated and then changed… It’s happening a lot now in music.

But he admitted he’s not really into the rest of Williams’ massive oeuvre of soundtrack work:

I’m allowed to be honest? I’m not a massive fan of John Williams except for this. Sorry. But then, to be fair, this is my ignorance coming out because I don’t really know much about… What I feel in a way sometimes happens with very successful soundtrack makers is that they get copied so much, that when you go back to the original work, you don’t appreciate it for what it is.

Here’s video from the panel:

On the event’s red carpet, he talked about his hopes for culture post-pandemic: “The idea of people getting together still in reality, not on a Zoom call, to speak about what they care about is still important. I hope culture is still important, I hope films are still important, I hope we’re all not being told by our governments that we have to go build houses because music and art and film will no longer be important after the pandemic. I hope people will still take culture seriously.”

And here’s a few more Yorke clips from the festival: