The New York Philharmonic’s season doesn’t officially start until next week. But the feeling at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday, when the orchestra accompanied Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood” with a live soundtrack, was every orchestra’s fantasy for opening night: an overflow audience full of young people, the sense of a singular event, a huge ovation.

Most of the movies the orchestra has presented in its popular Art of the Score series have been classic films with compelling scores, like Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” and “The Godfather.” Under the excellent 32-year-old conductor Hugh Brunt, in his Philharmonic debut, Jonny Greenwood’s hauntingly strange and inventive score for “There Will Be Blood” made the movie seem both stunningly new and an instant classic. (The series continues with another screening of “There Will Be Blood” on Thursday, followed by “2001: A Space Odyssey” on Friday and Saturday.)

Mr. Anderson’s “epic American nightmare,” as Manohla Dargis, a critic for The New York Times, called it, follows three decades in the life of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in an Academy Award-winning performance), a mining prospector who discovers oil in California in 1902 and establishes a thriving drilling company. Plainview distrusts everyone, and his success makes him increasingly maniacal and isolated.

The score is central to the film, and the Philharmonic players reveled in its belching and mysterious moments. Every passage reveals the broad tastes and impressive skills of Mr. Greenwood, who is also the lead guitarist of Radiohead. He conceives his film scores as a series of pieces; on the soundtrack album, he organizes the music into a suite, with each piece titled and presented out of narrative order. You hear hints of Messiaen, Penderecki, Indian music, modal jazz and Bachian counterpoint, but the music speaks in Mr. Greenwood’s own voice.