Steven Spielberg and John Williams have worked together on 27 movies over 43 years.
Everyone except John, makes the movie. Thousands of collaborators from around the world will work together for months or even years before John is involved. The film then gets shown to John for the first time.
“I, over the years, have always felt more comfortable if I could go into a projection room and look at a film and not really know what to expect,” Williams says. “If you read the script first, you form all kinds of preconceptions about how things look, what the location’s like, what the actors are like. And then you may look at what the director’s chosen — it doesn’t comport with your conceptions at all. On the other hand, if I have the luxury of going into the dark projection room and being surprised when the audience is surprised and being bored when they’re bored, I think that gives me a sense of what my job is: where I can press the accelerator button if I need to, or support an emotion or don’t.” John Williams
He doesn’t get to work immediately, instead he goes through a spotting session. This decides which scenes should have music and which scenes should not. Great composers like John know that the power of music lies in the absence of music. John watches the movie at home alone with a pad and pencil at his 100 year old steinway piano and begins to write, taking note of the timestamps so that he can tell a specific instrument to start at a specific time with the correct tempo. He then hands the ‘“gigantic mathematical puzzle” to an orchestra of 100 people. It is during this arranged marriage of image and music that audiences fall in love with these movies.
Without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches nor do men in red capes. There is no force, dinosaurs do not walk the earth. We do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe. John makes these movies real and everlasting for millions of people.
Editorial piece
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