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[Williams] One, two, three.
[♪ orchestra music playing]
When I first met Johnny...
I thought, "Oh, he's too nice of a guy to written such genius music."
[Abrams] It is a magical ability that he has.
You hear his music for the first time and you can't forget it.
More people around the planet love him, even if they don't realize it.
[Kennedy] I mean, how many composers can you hear just the beginning
and you instantly know what movie that is?
His music for me is so comforting.
I know... I know immediately that it's John.
This is... [chuckles] ...John's effect on people.
[Marsalis] When you hear the music and say, "Oh, yeah. He's that dude.
Like Michael Jordan was that dude.
And Bach was that dude.
And John Williams is just that dude.
He's inescapable.
He is the solution so many times.
[MacFarlane] John's music connects with his audience on such a primal level.
It seems like these themes have been with us forever.
At one point he sat down and figured them out
and now they're just part of our collective psyches.
But he's more than just a composer.
He's just a brilliant guy
who really understands the relationship between pictures and sound.
He's the perfect marriage between old classics and modern pop.
He's both to me.
He's an incredible musical scholar of every style that exists.
How does he do it?
The winner is John Williams for Fiddler on the Roof.
John Williams for Jaws.
John Williams for Star Wars.
John Williams for E.T.
John Williams for Schindler's List.
[Howard] He's always in a process of discovery.
It starts with what he experiences,
watching a film and then going to the piano and writing.
The music comes from the sky and envelops him.
It's the purest form of art I've ever experienced from any human being.
- [♪ piano playing] - [chattering]
[Bouzereau] Real good lick.
This-This is one of my pianos.
And this one was at Fox with me for 25 years.
The first thing I played for Steven on this piano was this...
- [chuckles] - [♪ playing theme from Jaws]
And I played that for him and he said, "What is that? What are you gonna do..."
[laughing]
[Bouzereau] What about the five notes of Close Encounters?
Five... Uh, this one.
[♪ piano playing]
This piano... I played everything.
E.T. for him and all of it.
So that is the history of this little darling.
[laughs]
[Spielberg] It sounds like the wedding march.
- [stammering] - But we got married years ago.
- I know. - [laughs]
It's true.
- Oh, stranger. I'm so happy to see you. - [stammering]
- I'm crashing Johnny's moment here. - It's my bar mitzvah.
Your bar mitzvah.
- How are you? - I'm fine.
- Happy New Year. Happy New Year. - And to you, baby.
[Martin] What's interesting to me about John Williams and Steven Spielberg is
when they're together they are a band.
And bands are great.
When they're together they're greater even than the sum of their incredible parts.
The music and the image are equally important.
One is elevated by the other
and if you took either away, it wouldn't be what it is.
By the time I actually got my first job directing my first feature,
I probably had already collected 500 soundtrack albums.
And I was one of those fanboys of motion picture scores.
[Spielberg] But in the '60s and the early '70s,
motion picture scores were becoming this magnificent anachronism.
In other words, an orchestral score was no longer preferred.
They got music of the era.
It was a scary time
because I really thought it was the end of that great era of orchestral scores.
And I was not going to let that era end on my watch with my movies.
[Spielberg] I had fallen in love with a score
from a movie called The Reivers.
And I made a promise to myself that if I ever get a first feature,
whoever wrote the score,
a man named John Williams, who I assumed was English,
was going to be my composer if he would agree.
[horse whinnies, grunts]
[Spielberg] After that I heard The Cowboys, which John also wrote,
and at that point I was even more determined.
And so I asked John
if he would write the score for my first movie, The Sugarland Express.
And John liked the script enough to have lunch with me.
[Williams] I adored him from the beginning.
He was very young.
And I was already 40, you know.
A grizzled veteran from years of-of toil in Hollywood.
[Spielberg] He was an elegant man. Always has been.
But very friendly, very warm.
He looked a bit like William Shakespeare.
He had the red hair and he had a little bit of a red beard.
And beautiful hands.
I remember... I just remember his hands.
Within five minutes I realized that from a historical point of view,
he knew more about film music than I did.
[Spielberg] To prove how much I loved film music,
I think I probably hummed the first two minutes
of the Alex North opening main titles from Spartacus,
one of my favorite scores.
So I think John was either impressed by that or acted like he was.
And thought I was some kind of a nut.
And then I-I went to see his film, Sugarland Express.
Friend, you wanna give that back?
You got no idea what's gonna happen to you.
And I thought, "My, God. I mean, this kid is really a great filmmaker."
[Spielberg] And so he said yes.
And Johnny created an intimacy with one harmonica
that really brought the film to a place I never imagined it going.
[♪ harmonica playing]
Johnny deferred the main theme and a lot of the real evocative feeling
through Toots Thielemans, the famous harmonica player.
The second John finished scoring Sugarland,
I simply intended to use him on every movie I ever would make.
When it comes to this question of originality in film music
the composers are actually really often in a bind
because they come on the job and there's a temp track
which is pre-existing pieces of music, songs,
bits and pieces of old film scores that the director and editors have laid down
in order to assemble the rough cut of the picture.
It's a bane for composers
because the minute we listen to a temp track
a lot of creative doors close.
[Ross] Very often the director will have fallen in love
with the pieces that they've grabbed and put on the soundtrack.
And so they'll be wanting something just like that.
And the composer will be expected to replicate the sort of collage
of other people's music.
For Jaws, I had this kind of esoteric idea of what the score should be.
And I had temped the picture with, actually, John's own score
from Bob Altman's Images.
[Spielberg] And John called me after he saw the rough cut of Jaws
and he was laughing about my temp music.
Well, that was the strangest thing because I... [chuckles]
This score of Images was all effects and shrieks and frightening sounds.
Jaws seems to me a kind of nautical adventure.
He said, "Oh, no."
He said "Sweetie...
- [chuckles] - ...this is a pirate movie."
This is like... Gets you right here in your kishkes.
And he said, "Don't worry, I'm going to come up with something."
So, a week or two went by and I went over to his house
and he was at his big Steinway piano.
And I was expecting something just tremendously complex.
And it's almost like "Chopsticks."
He just used a couple of fingers.
And he went... [♪ imitates Jaws theme]
I'm looking around.
[♪ imitates Jaws theme]
[Williams] Think about being completely alone in a dark place
where you can't really see anything.
It's completely quiet.
And the first thing you hear is...
[♪ imitates Jaws theme]
You feel that something dangerous is coming your way.
Just from these low notes in an atmosphere where they don't belong.
At first I thought he was joking. [chuckles]
Everyone asks me, "What does Steven Spielberg think...
[stammers] What were his thoughts when he first heard that?"
What were your really true thoughts?
- Did you think I was an idiot? - No. No, not an idiot at all.
I thought, "Oh, my God. We're not gonna have an orchestra.
We're gonna have a piano and...
And Johnny's gonna just do a couple of things on the lower...
- on the lower register." - Why didn't you say no?
'Cause you kept saying, "Listen to it again."
- Okay. - You said, "Listen to it again."
And I start to... I started to see the brilliance of what you had done.
- This should... This should be soft, Steven. - [Spielberg] Yeah, I know.
This is already too big, you know?
[Spielberg] And I had a shark that didn't work, remember?
And I didn't have any idea that John was gonna come along
and give me the shark that didn't work in music.
So, his musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark.
Even though its two notes, this is a theme.
One thing a theme brilliantly can do
is it can keep a character on-screen when they're not visibly on-screen.
[MacFarlane] The question that I've asked repeatedly is,
"How does he do it?"
What is this divine spark? Where does it come from?
[Williams] I was called "Johnny" because it was my father's name
so I was sort of "Johnny Jr." so to speak.
My father was a drummer and a percussionist.
And my mother was very musical.
She was a girl of the '20s.
That means that she could play the ukulele.
[chuckles]
She had been a dancer when she was very young.
My father was playing in a theater in Boston.
She was dancing in the show
and musicians very often would meet a singer or a dancer that they work with.
They formed some kind of relationship and married in 1929
when she was 20 years old and he was about 25.
[Williams] I was born on February 8th, 1932
in Flushing, Queens, New York at the Flushing Hospital.
I had a sister and two brothers.
Both of the boys were musicians. Still with us and working.
And my sister, who has passed, was a piano teacher her whole life.
And when we were younger, she played much better than I did.
We were pretty much compelled to play the piano.
My father thought we should all play the piano.
And my practicing had to be done in proportion to playing baseball.
If I played baseball for an hour,
I must have to practice piano for half an hour.
[♪ jazz playing from radio]
[Williams] In those days, the radio was the source of news
and entertainment.
We had no television.
And my father was working in radio studio orchestras.
So I knew he would go to work,
and at 8:00 that night, I would hear him on the radio.
- [radio static] - [radio announcer] Your Hit Parade.
[♪ jazz music playing]
[Williams] They played with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey's orchestra
and I was very proud of his participation in all of this.
'Cause I was very interested in listening to see if I could hear the drum.
[♪ upbeat jazz music playing]
And so it was an extra kind of way of listening.
As I began to listen to the instrumentation
of bands and orchestras, I became very interested in the trombone.
My father said, "You can have a trombone if you continue with your piano lessons."
Music was so much a part of the family
and the family's professional life
that I never really had any other aspirations
that I can confess to.
My parents' friends were all musicians
and that's what I thought you did when you're an adult.
When you grew up, you played music somewhere.
Our family moves to California when I was 15 years old.
And I was a high school student at that time.
And I went to North Hollywood High School.
I had been playing piano since I was very young
and distracted by the trombone for a couple of years.
And my father said, "You have to stop the trombone.
You gotta concentrate full-time on the piano."
And I had a lot of catching up to do.
So I worked so hard.
I used to practice five, six hours a day, and the weekend all day long,
to the point where my mother thought I was gonna die from doing this.
You can't call it an education.
It's more of a training. Almost like an athletic training
to be able to do what you have to do
to accomplish a professional job at some level.
And that was the time that I began to pay more attention to movies.
And I gradually began to listen to the scores
because my father was working in the studios in Hollywood now.
And I would go with him to witness what they were doing
and seeing these people making music for movies.
What comes to mind most quickly is Leonard Bernstein, On the Waterfront.
My father recorded on that score with Bernstein but there were many.
Also at that time, he used to bring conductors' scores home for me.
And I began to think that I could also do that.
By that time, when I was in high school,
I was able to write for instruments for our student orchestra.
One of the students had written a musical play with piano
so I orchestrated his musical's songs
and conducted the student orchestra.
So, I think I learned by doing.
By practicing.
And a lot of self-teaching, I have to say.
My nose was in harmony, counterpoint orchestration books for decades.
I had four years of service in the Air Force,
and I was stationed for a period in St. John's, Newfoundland
in the Northeast Air Command Band.
At the end of the Second World War,
the Canadian government invited people in the film business
to come and establish film companies in Canada.
So Studio Hamburg from Germany brought their crew and their equipment
to St. John's.
And they wanted to make a documentary film travelogue
of the Maritime Provinces of Canada.
And they made this film, this little film, You Are Welcome,
and they had no music for it.
And somehow they called me.
I'd never scored a film.
And they said, "Do you think you can write music for this film?"
And I said, "Sure I can." [chuckles]
So, I went to the library in St. John's and got a book of Newfoundland folk songs.
And, well, I could make this little thing out of.
And so that's the history of how it happened.
I cannot tell you that as a young man in my early twenties
I intended to do anything else professionally but play the piano.
The fact that I ended up composing music professionally,
and particularly for film,
was a series of fortuitous accidents.
I was infatuated with jazz.
I loved the jazz that I would hear on the radio and wanted to try to play it,
which I did as a young adult and even as a young professional.
I could never claim as a player
to be a major league jazz player like Oscar Peterson
or Teddy Wilson or Art Tatum.
But I was... [stammers] ...fair, I guess you could say.
But I love writing it.
[Lucas] When I was younger, I went through a phase in high school,
and a few years afterwards, of being very much into jazz.
So I just knew him as a jazz musician, you know, as a pianist.
You listen to what he wrote in his 20s,
there's that album, Rhythm in Motion...
[♪ upbeat swing jazz playing]
...that he put together when he had his jazz band.
And it's fantastic.
There are composers much, much older today who couldn't even touch it.
It's easy to forget that he started out as a jazz guy.
You know, not what you might expect if you kind of come to him in 1977
as the composer of Star Wars and Close Encounters.
[Marsalis] But it's hard to imagine someone
writing a piece like the Cantina scene
while knowing absolutely nothing about jazz.
I've heard really bad attempts at that kind of stuff
and it comes across as a clichéd affectation at best.
But it was always like, "Yeah, this is... this is hip."
That brings me to Catch Me If You Can.
When I heard that, it was jazz.
I mean, this cat's killing it, man. It was just great.
I sat through the movie and then I wrote his office an email
and said, "Please implore Maestro Williams to turn this into a saxophone concerto."
And a few days later, I got a message back saying, "Thank you for your interest.
It's already in the works
and it'll be available within the next six weeks."
[chuckles]
So, I was very excited about that.
[Williams] I was never a movie buff, or a movie fan, then as now.
I don't go to the movies. Very, very rarely.
But my father played in all of these studio orchestras
at Columbia and MGM, 20th Century Fox, and so on.
So, the fact that musicians would find work in the studios
meant I became interested in film music for a job.
I went to Columbia Pictures and played for Morris Stoloff,
who was the music director of the studio.
And he hired me to play piano in the orchestra.
I played in that orchestra for two years working nearly every day.
And later I went over to 20th Century Fox
and played for Alfred Newman on a number of occasions there and at Paramount.
Played for Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman and Henry Mancini
in the more jazz, sort of, kind of vein.
That piano signature he does in Peter Gunn.
Where he's banging away and he's playing really hard.
That, to me, is kind of the foundation of jazz funk.
[Williams] I got so busy.
I was playing everyday in a studio somewhere.
But in the process of playing piano in these orchestras,
some of these older colleagues would occasionally say to me,
"Can you orchestrate something for next week?"
The next thing that happened was I had orchestrated a few cues
and somebody said, "Do you mind conducting for the next half hour?"
With the temerity of youth, I said, "Of course I can conduct. I will do that."
Finally said to my wife, "I think I'll just compose if I can."
And before I realized it, I was so busy writing in television and film
that I said to my wife,
"I can't keep spending these hours in the orchestra.
I have to stop playing and write."
And actually make a little bit more money that way.
I had three children, had to think about practical aspects.
My earliest memory of my father was we had a corduroy rug
in small room in our home.
On the rug was a piano
and so he would play there in this little room with the funny rug.
My mother was Barbara Ruick, and she was an actress and a singer.
She played Carrie Pipperidge in Carousel.
♪ Then I'll kiss him so he'll know ♪
I have two brothers who are younger than me, Mark and Joe.
They're both musicians.
Joe is the lead singer for the band Toto
and Mark is a drummer
and has played with Crosby, Stills, and Nash
and Air Supply and Tina Turner.
My parents were very glamorous
and they went out a lot.
They threw parties.
We also always had a nice Christmas.
Christmas was lovely.
I remember that my father played a lot of show tunes.
He and my mother would rehearse and have fun together and play songs.
And we were able to entertain each other and make each other laugh
and have so much fun together.
[Williams] So I found myself writing television shows every week.
I had several wonderful years where I had one hour anthologies.
Chrysler... Bob Hope Theatre and Alcoa Theatre.
And one week it's a western, the next week it's a comedy,
the next week it's some drama.
Every possible thing you can imagine
done by directors who went on to do feature films.
Syd Pollack and Dick Donner and Robert Altman.
He mostly worked at Fox,
but he would work at home a lot on the weekends.
And he was always scribbling away.
One time he was writing and I wrote him a note saying,
"You gotta come out and see me and attend to this."
And I pushed it under the door and that made him mad. [laughs]
[Williams] In the '60s, I worked at the studios more than I did at home
for a very practical reason.
My children were very young
and there was a lot of noise and distraction around the house.
And hard to achieve the kind of isolation and solitude you need to be composing.
So, I'd come in to Universal
or go to Fox Studios, where I worked for a long time,
not as an employee but just as a sort of man who came to dinner and stayed.
The fact that the same man wrote the score for Star Wars
and also wrote music for Gilligan's Island
gives you his vast and seemingly limitless range.
You get that pole!
Aye, aye, sir.
How about this one, Skipper?
Perfect. Now get it in here!
On the double.
[Jenny] We were in Hawaii on a family vacation
and he got a ukulele.
And his assignment was he was supposed to write a new theme for Lost in Space.
So he wrote the theme for the TV show on the ukulele.
These were opportunities to work for, in this case, 20th Century Fox,
where I formed a friendship with Lionel Newman.
And if I hadn't made the step into television,
I wouldn't have had the opportunity later to do feature films.
[Spielberg] How much did they pay you, John? What does it say there?
- [person laughs] - $12,500.
[Spielberg] Ooh, for a week? [laughs]
- [person laughing] - For ten weeks! Oh, no.
[Williams] I did a lot of comedies at one point,
and I really felt, ugh, I don't want to do another comedy.
An older colleague of mine called me
and he said, "John, if you're going to be composing music for film,
when they're going to put your name on the film,
and it can't be Johnny. That's a fine name for a juvenile person
but you have to change your name. You have to be John Williams."
So I-I actually... I thought he was right.
♪ If I were a rich man ♪
♪ Ya ba dibba dibba Dibba dibba dibba dibba dum ♪
♪ All day long I'd biddy biddy bum ♪
♪ If I were a wealthy man ♪
♪ I... ♪
[Williams] The first really major budget films were musicals,
in which case, I was arranger, orchestrator,
but also music director and conductor.
We needed to have choral tracks, children tracks, orchestra tracks of all kinds.
And every word of the vocals had to be understood, even with a chorus.
♪ Tradition, tradition! ♪
♪ Tradition! ♪
So, in the manufacture of this thing,
the mixing of all these sounds, the editing and cutting
is an education of its own and an enormous experience for me.
Not especially as a composer, but as-as someone...
As-as a craftsman working in the process of making films.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Initially, the score was written by André Previn,
but unhappiness emerged between André and the producer.
So Leslie Bricusse was engaged to do the score, both lyrics and music.
But André Previn was something of a mentor and was very encouraging to me.
He didn't think I should stay in Hollywood.
He said, "John, you want to write your own music: concertos, symphonies.
Don't waste your time on so-called 'commercial work'."
Frankly, I thought if I had his talent,
perhaps I would leave the movies and write symphonies.
But I didn't lose myself in Hollywood. I found myself.
[Abrams] That's the thing about John Williams.
As good as the material he's getting, he always makes it better.
He always finds a way to tap into the essence
of what makes it moving, or meaningful, or resonant.
Even when it was a classic '70s disaster film
like Poseidon Adventure or Earthquake.
[Newman] One of my earliest memories of John on the podium
was seeing him conduct Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno,
and you could come in and you'd be right next to the bass players
and there would be John and I... and I think his classic black turtleneck.
And he would conduct and I would kind of sit quietly
with some degree of intimidation and watch this all go down.
[Williams] Irwin Allen was a wonderfully flamboyant character.
He was wonderful with the mixing of the sound called dubbing,
where the sound effects and dialogue and music is all put together,
and he always insisted everything be louder.
[chuckles] Just simply, make it louder.
I've done all this using a pencil and paper
and I still use them and I haven't changed.
I've actually been so busy in the years that I've been working here
that I haven't had time to retool and learn the electronic systems,
which I think probably go a little faster.
If you wanna write this...
it's nine or ten notes. I have to write them like this.
And if it's...
That's a lot of notes.
And in the computer, you push a button and then you can see it.
I have to write all those little things.
So, I'm probably taking a lot more time to do things than my younger colleagues do.
A lot of times I write music, I'll fill up the paper with notes
and come back the next morning and look at it.
[stutters] And it is as though someone else had written it.
I look at that and say, "I couldn't possibly have written all that.
Certainly not yesterday. There wouldn't have been enough time."
[Gruska] He's somebody who learned his skills painstakingly,
and now he lives in a time where you can conjure music
from a prompt with A.I.
And I think people should see somebody who has worked alone in a room
for 60-plus years.
There's a lot of sacrifices. There's been some pain in his life.
And so, when you pass a certain point, he gets quiet.
And I think that he expresses himself through music.
[Jenny] My mother was away in Reno, Nevada,
doing a small part in a film called California Split.
- Old Blue out of chute number two. - Old Blue?
Old Blue out of chute number two.
- That's the truth. - No. [laughs]
We received a phone call from Kathryn Altman
saying, "You need to have your father call me."
So I wait in the house for about an hour or so,
and he comes home and I say, "I think something's going on with Mom."
[Williams] It was an unbelievable event. A perfectly healthy, gorgeous young woman
suddenly gone from an aneurysm that we couldn't have predicted.
That was a profound event in my life, obviously, my wife,
but also the mother of my three children. And she was only 41 years old.
[Jenny] My dad had to get on a plane and go up there and take care of everything.
And I was left at home with my brothers,
which would kind of turn into a role for me for the next... Well, forever, really.
But it started around then.
[Williams] I was suddenly in my early 40s with three teenage children to deal with.
It was a very tough situation,
sometimes very difficult to talk about.
[Jenny] It was devastating. He had no experience, really,
being very hands-on.
I had been used to taking care of my brothers
and I went into that role very easily.
And we have a very special relationship, the three of us.
And so, I didn't work for a long time.
I just didn't want to deal with films and stories and characters and so on.
Right after she died, he actually wrote a violin concerto for her.
[Williams] Her father was a violinist. She loved the violin.
She always wanted me to write something for her.
Of course, I never did until she passed.
[Jenny] Prior to my mom's death,
it may be that my father, although a brilliant composer,
was more of a journeyman.
But then after she died, there was some kind of feeling that he had,
that she was by his side.
I felt like she was helping me,
which is a funny kind of feeling that I had.
And I still have it.
And I think in some way, I grew up artistically or gained some kind of energy
or penetrated what I was doing a little more deeply.
The busiest, most successful period of my life in film
started immediately thereafter
when I was asked to do a film called Star Wars.
At the same time, I was asked to do a film called Bridge Too Far.
I said to Lionel Newman, the music director,
"I think I'd rather do A Bridge Too Far,
because it has all the movie stars in it
and it seems like I don't know anything about George Lucas or his film Star Wars."
I said, "I'm looking for somebody that can do classical music."
The old Korngold, Newman, old fashioned scores for films
during the '30s and '40s.
And Steven said, "I got just the guy for you, John Williams."
I said, "Well, isn't he a jazz pianist?"
And he said, "No, no, he does great scores."
[Williams] So Steven, of course, who I've just done Jaws with,
said, "You need to meet this guy, George Lucas,"
who I'd never heard of.
I didn't know American Graffiti. My fault, not his.
So I met George and we talked about music a little bit.
He's very young to me.
[Lucas] We hit it off right away.
He's a gentleman and an easy guy to get along with.
And he was also extremely knowledgeable about music.
And he was extremely knowledgeable about symphonic scores.
[Williams] I talked to Steven the next day and he said,
"John, you should do Star Wars.
Do Star Wars, that's the thing you should... really have some fun with it.
Don't worry about A Bridge Too Far. That's just commercial.
This is going to be something really good." I said, "Okay."
So he convinced me to do it.
But it didn't take much pushing.
I think the whole project was imbued with a sense of something very special.
I think everybody knew that George was doing something
a little kooky, a little off-kilter. It was like nothing else we really had.
We've had space films before, but nothing had
quite the imagination and the spark that this had.
[Hirsch] We worked for several days going through the film
and deciding where to introduce the music, where to take it out,
or talk about the temp cue that we used, like The Planets by Gustav Holst,
the final movement of Dvorák's New World Symphony.
Bits of music from The Rite of Spring and Max Steiner's score to King Kong.
Sometimes John, he endorsed our choices
and sometimes he had an idea that improved the idea.
You do what you have to do to put the pieces of a puzzle together
and that's what it was like.
[Lucas] We had talked about Peter and the Wolf
and some of those older symphonic pieces,
'cause I wanted to have each character have their own theme.
So that when we go from one character to another, the theme goes with you.
[Williams] The sketches in the scores for Star Wars
are the most disjointed things you could imagine
because there were so many changes.
This was a minute and a half.
The next day, it was a minute and 45 seconds.
The next day it was out of the film.
And the late Ken Wannberg, who was my music editor,
drove me crazy with changes everyday.
Kenny called up in a panic.
He said... [stammers]
"You can't... [stammers] There are a million changes." I said, "Yes, I know."
And he said, "John's written all this music already." I said, "I know."
[Williams] I worked for quite a number of weeks,
never knowing what to do for the beginning of the film.
I think the very last thing I wrote was the opening fanfare
and the brass march theme.
[Lucas] First time I heard parts of it was,
Johnny played it for me on the piano.
Which is... pfft.
You know, all it is, is, uh, a rough piano rendition of the themes.
And so you have to say, "Well, I guess I don't know, but it sounds good to me."
But it's not-- Doesn't have any of the energy or the emotion
or anything that when you have a full orchestra playing it.
[Williams] We decided that we needed to have a symphony orchestra to do this,
which I never had before in a film.
And Lionel Newman said that we'll hire the London Symphony Orchestra.
What a turn-on. What a blast. What an exciting turn of events.
We would go over to London,
hire this world-class orchestra to realize my score and perform it.
- [Williams] 157. - [crew member coughs]
[producer] Standby, please. Gentlemen, here we go.
[Lucas] It's hard to describe unless you've been through it.
[Williams] All right, here it is, gents. [shushes] Settle down.
But it's, uh-- It's sort of like having a baby.
That is the only way I can really describe hearing the score for the first time.
And for me, I hadn't heard it with an orchestra or anything.
And I hadn't heard it with the picture.
You know, I trusted John, I trusted Steven,
but there's always that moment where they play the first cue...
and you're terrified it's not gonna work.
[♪ "Star Wars (Main Theme)" playing]
I was like a lot of people who really got blasted by him in the first ten seconds.
And then you're wondering, "Well, who is this?"
[Mangold] That's part of the audaciousness of the original Star Wars score.
That loud anthem opening.
The most famous opening probably in movie history and music
is a tribute to the power of orchestra.
[♪ "Star Wars (Main Theme)" continues]
[Williams] Nobody had any idea that it would be the kind of,
beyond a hit, it was a phenomenon.
It's become-- It's still with us.
When the time came to make the soundtrack album,
the record company said, "We have so much music, let's have a double disc."
That recording was enormously popular with people,
many of whom probably never bought a soundtrack album before
or gone to a concert and heard music from a symphony orchestra before.
[Abrams] Back in the day, you couldn't rewatch a movie whenever you wanted.
So, I remember as a kid,
I would put on the soundtracks and stare at the album cover
and just listen to the scores and play the movie in my head.
Star Wars was the double album.
I would listen to the album and just stare at the logo of the Star Wars album cover.
The feeling was that it was so important, so epic in scope and scale
that it transports you to a different place.
I can't really think of anything in film music that's been like Star Wars.
Talk about leitmotifs and the way he uses them.
Leitmotifs just means, basically, themes.
In Star Wars universe, just John composed, like, 80 or 90 themes or something.
[Lucas] I like the one that we call "The Force".
[♪ vocalizing]
[roars]
When the motifs come back, they remind you of who you were 40 years before,
not just who the characters were in the previous movies.
[♪ "Princess Leia's Theme" playing]
So it really gets under the skin in the most amazing way.
And it all works because he found such a memorable group of themes to work with.
Every once in a while there'd be a cue and I'd say,
"Well, that's not what I had in mind here."
[Lucas] I said, "I really want it to be more like this."
And he would say, "Okay.
I'm gonna write this tonight and I'll come back tomorrow with it."
I've been with a few composers who just simply said,
"Well, that's not what I want."
They sort of insist it be their way.
And then you would bump heads.
I never bumped heads with Johnny.
He was a prince the whole time.
I truly believe that the soundtrack is half of the movie.
Star Wars basically would not be Star Wars without Johnny Williams' music.
[Williams] People would come into my office and say,
"Did you know that there are crowds around the block seeing Star Wars?"
I said, "That's wonderful. I'm glad to hear it."
I didn't experience that at all.
I was so completely occupied with what was in front of me.
The minute we finished Star Wars,
I started working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
[Williams] Okay. That's just fine. Orchestra downbeat of seven tenuto.
Six will be... [♪ vocalizing]
[Bouzereau] You got two notes for Jaws.
But then you got five notes for Close Encounters.
Well, we were making progress. We were--
So by the time we did Raiders, there were like a hundred notes.
- Yes, that's right. - [laughs]
Actually, Close Encounters was an opera. It was a beautiful opera.
What I was thinking when I played, first played it for you, I thought,
"This is the end of our relationship."
- [laughs] Oh, no! - [laughs]
[Ross] Close Encounters. Everything is in that score.
The whole spectrum of 20th century music from very avant-garde, very dissonant...
and very extreme sounds.
[Williams] One, two, three...
[♪ choir harmonizing]
To the most basic, memorable five note theme,
uh, that is heard over and over again.
- [people chattering] - [♪ whistling melody]
[♪ melody playing]
Oh, this is-- This could be interesting to you.
Each one of these is five notes, I believe.
Here's a whole group of them.
Some marked.
This is the one we use.
[♪ vocalizes] Right here.
And Steven and I just circled it, having gone through all these trial runs.
I mean, five notes could be...
very nice. [chuckles]
Anything. But why this?
There is, I think, something spiritual about that.
If this were...
it's finished, okay?
It's a sentence, a period.
If I do this...
That is like a conjunctive sentence or a phrase
that ends with and, if, or but.
So it's, "This is a nice movie and..."
That's the "and".
Because-- Because the note in music, there are two of them.
This is the fifth of that always goes "sol, do", as every child knows.
And the other one is this one, "ti, do".
So those are the two things that make-- If I stop a phrase there.
You have to wait for that, don't you?
It's creating an expectation with the fifth degree of the scale.
Which in that context is like "but".
"I love Laurent, but..."
[laughing] You know?
[Bouzereau] But he's asked me too many questions.
He asked me endless questions.
[Spielberg] Are you happy it fixed, John?
I hope so, but there's still something wrong with bar 35.
- [♪ whistling] - [Spielberg] There's that.
[Bouzereau] What was the hardest thing you've ever had to write, you think?
Oh, I think the last section of Close Encounters.
All of the lights, and, you know, how to do that exactly.
[♪ uptempo orchestra music playing]
[Spielberg] Wow.
So this is the original Close Encounters material out of the deep Sony archive.
Look at some of this here.
- [Spielberg] Oh, my God. Look at all... - [Williams] Yeah.
- [Spielberg] Geez. - [people chattering]
Oh, my goodness.
I remember calling my father one day when I started to work on that,
and I said to him, "Dad, I don't-- I haven't got a note in me.
I don't know what to do with this picture." I just had done Star Wars.
It was... million notes.
And he just said as any good father would say,
"Well, just keep working on it, you'll be fine.
- What are you doing for dinner?" - [Spielberg laughs] Right.
And it was certainly a great challenge.
It was a leap up orchestrally and conducting
and every other way for me.
So, that is Close Encounters.
John, in one year,
turned out the scores to Star Wars, Close Encounters,
and a picture called Black Sunday.
Each of those scores is tremendously complicated
and brilliant in their own way.
And very different one from the other.
It's really an extraordinary thing to think that one composer
would deliver all that in the space of one year.
[Abrams] It's a little bit like when you're talking about The Beatles.
Like, any one song from The Beatles would be any other band's greatest thing
and they would live off that forever. John is like that.
Any one of his scores arguably
would be any other composer's accomplishment of a lifetime.
People ask me how my life was changed by the sudden success of Star Wars,
and I have to say that I received a call saying,
"You have to come to the Anaheim Stadium which has 60,000 people or more there.
And Zubin Mehta is going to do a concert of your music, Star Wars music,
with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the stadium."
A short time after that,
the management of the Los Angeles Philharmonic says,
"We want you to come and conduct at the Hollywood Bowl Star Wars music."
So the biggest change in my life that was the result of Star Wars
was I was suddenly asked to be a guest conductor,
here and there with famous orchestras.
And it gave birth to a whole other dimension in my musical life.
- Ladies and gentlemen. - [people applauding]
Good afternoon, everyone.
- This is our new Pops. - [chuckles]
Seiji Ozawa was the music director of the Boston Symphony for 29 years.
And he was the one that appointed me conductor of the Pops in 1980.
The Boston Pops is moving from The Stars and Stripes Forever to Star Wars.
The orchestra announced today
that 47-year-old composer-conductor John Williams,
who wrote the theme for Star Wars,
will replace the late Arthur Fiedler as conductor of the Pops.
[Newman] It was Lionel who really encouraged him to conduct with the Pops.
And maybe it was because John always wanted to conduct
and being somewhat shy, probably needed a push.
I'm sure a lot of people ask who could possibly follow Arthur Fiedler,
who was such an incredible presence in everybody's mind with... with this music.
[Newman] But I don't think it was always an easy go.
I think Boston musicians were critical of entertainment music or wary of it.
[Newman] The orchestras hated playing film music.
They just thought it was crap.
[Williams] In my experience, when I went to Boston in 1980,
there was an overlap of older memberships in the orchestra
that still had that lack of appreciation and resistance
to that kind of repertoire where they were very disapproving.
To the extent that I thought that that was unprofessional.
[reporter] A long simmering dispute over the behavior of the Boston Pops Orchestra
broke into public view today
with the announcement of conductor John Williams' resignation.
The final straw, according to observers,
was the orchestra's unruly behavior during a rehearsal yesterday.
Players reportedly hissed at Williams' musical selections
and didn't pay attention during the run-through.
BSO general manager Thomas Morris said today
he accepted Williams' resignation with deep regret.
[Williams] The episode, where I had a resignation at one point,
was the result of conversations with them
about their attitudes and about their manner of expressing it.
I think film music was looked at by... certainly by concert musicians
as a bastard art.
As a low art.
Growing up I was always troubled with why there are so many walls
between the different parts of music.
Whether it's film music, concert music, or baroque music or contemporary music.
But John has made it his business to actually encompass all of that.
[Silvestri] He has, if not erased that dividing line,
he has made it so blurry,
I don't think anyone knows where it is anymore.
It goes back to Duke Ellington,
who said, "There's only two types of music, good music and bad music."
And I think John has been a... a leading light in that happening.
[Williams] I think certainly a seated orchestra that are tenured correctly
have a voice in the repertoire that they play.
But also should not resist, to a certain extent,
the creative ideas that a new or different conductor might want to bring to them.
An orchestra is a human family.
It's a community effort.
[reporter 2] The search for a new Boston Pops conductor is over
now that John Williams agrees to come back to the job.
Williams resigned, citing artistic and creative differences.
But apparently, they have been resolved.
Williams said, "I've only the greatest admiration and genuine affection
for the orchestra and its members."
[Williams] Going from Hollywood studios to Boston was very, very satisfying
in the sense that in Hollywood there's no audiences of film
when we're working in a clinical studio setup, if you'd like.
Whereas going to Boston Pops there's an orchestra, there's an audience.
The music is brought to life.
- People applaud. - [applauding]
And for the wounded ego of a Hollywood composer
who never sees an audience to get some applause,
it's lovely to go to Boston and have a marvelous audience there.
[applauding]
Most of the rest of the classical world has come around to the idea that,
yes, this is a brilliant and original composer.
Someone who has also done an incredible service
in terms of supporting orchestras.
And anyone who looks down on film music now at this stage of history
I think is just not thinking seriously.
When I was a little boy, Superman cartoon was very popular in the newspapers
and I used to read it all the time.
So, the idea of writing that theme with the cape and all the things,
I loved doing that.
What the hell is that?
- [yells] - Easy, miss. I've got you.
[stammers] You've got me?
Who's got you?
[Williams] I love Chris and Margot.
They flew together. That love scene.
I mean, I couldn't wait to get my hands on that
and make a... [stammers] ...an ascending thematic piece.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to John Williams.
Without his music, Superman's powers are greatly diminished.
[laughs]
Believe me, if you try to fly without that theme...
- [audience laughs] - ...you go nowhere.
One step, two steps, and... [whistles] ...down.
There's a lyricism to Johnny's music.
For example, he has so much fun writing themes for Harrison.
[Williams] Harrison Ford has this ability to do the most dramatic scenes
with this slight tongue in his cheek or twinkle in his eye.
I'm going after that truck.
- How? - I don't know. I'm making this up as I go.
That gives John a lot to write for.
Hyah, hyah!
John Williams and I go way back, 'cause my dad and he were in the army together.
In the army band together.
My dad played guitar and Johnny played piano.
And Johnny was always over at our house.
So, I'd known John Williams since I was a kid.
But to get to work with him on a movie,
that was just one of the most wonderful moments of my life.
[Spielberg] On Raiders of the Lost Ark, Johnny did the score in London
with the London Symphony Orchestra.
The music was pulse pounding.
The nuance of the score.
The music details the smallest things.
Johnny was scoring individual snakes during the Well of the Souls sequence.
He was putting little decorations on different snakes that were
making quick moves or hooding or rearing back or striking.
He wanted something very Hollywood, very romantic for "Marion's Theme"
because he said, "I think the music could really make them even closer."
She wasn't there that much, except she was a central character.
So we had to give her a cue
that would remind you of all the things that she embodied.
[Spielberg] His theme for Marion was so beautiful
and it's so evocative of those old Hollywood scores,
like from Franz Waxman, and Miklós Rósza, and David Raksin.
And even on the sequels, he keeps the standard themes in there
to remind people that it's still about Indiana Jones.
But he finds a whole new way of telling the story musically each time.
- [screams] - Duck!
So, we're at the Oscars,
and John Williams was sitting right behind Steven.
And I saw John and I freaked out
'cause I haven't seen him, you know, since Temple of Doom.
So I gave him a hug and Steven was so excited.
He says, "Ke, do you remember that you have a Short Round theme?"
And I said, "Of course I do." I mean, how many actors can say that
they have a theme composed by the legendary John Williams?
And then we both started humming, simultaneously, that theme.
[♪ humming "Short Round's Theme"]
It's great. It's such a great theme.
[Spielberg] The greatest way to demonstrate how much energy and emotion
John's scores can give a sequence, play it absolutely with no music at all.
Just sound effects and dialogue.
[growls]
And then go back and do the whole scene again with all the cues.
[♪ "Indy's Very First Adventure" playing]
And you'll recognize the absolute value of film music.
[film crew] Marker.
This movie is a tiny epic.
And, uh... And I think John's score will be very suitable to that, uh, description.
Okay, it would be nice if we didn't hear anything until...
[Henry Thomas] We have to go now--
"We have to go now, E.T."
Okay.
And that's right after, "We have to go now, E.T."
Is where it comes back in again.
- Give me a timing for the end of the line. - Yeah.
The deer looks up and turns.
- And if something could... - Mm-hmm.
...just catch the deer.
- Maybe that harp again. - That harp again.
- I love that harp. - Yeah. Yeah, the harp again.
[Spielberg] I look forward to every time John says,
"I have sketches to play for you."
I cannot wait for that day.
I'm never nervous. I'm never thinking it's not going to measure up to my hopes.
[stammers] This is Michael on his bike.
- Racing to find E.T. in the forest. - Racing to find E.T. in the forest.
- [Spielberg] Elliot's come home alone. - It's-It's played off of this figure.
[♪ piano playing]
And we eventually get into this key with this one.
[♪ both humming]
There is a consistency in our collaboration
where he always sees the film in the same way,
but in a way, after he does music for my movie,
I start to see my movie in his way.
I see my movie the way he sees my film.
[E.T.] Home. Home. Home.
Home. Home. Home.
"Yoda's Theme" is a... is a sweet surprise. It is.
Is anybody gonna get it?
About 200 million people.
- Really? - [laughs]
One twenty-five.
Oboes and instruments that play... [♪ humming]
Accent two and three please.
So we have more rhythm.
Try to concentrate.
Don't be... Try not to be disturbed by Steven's...
[laughing]
...filming.
[indistinct]
- [chattering] - [chuckles]
No, it's just weird.
It's like having a camera in your bathroom.
You know, when you're taking a shower, you know?
I'm glad I'm dressed.
Beginning please with mutes.
I played violin on E.T., and I'm just hiding out in the back of the violins.
So I'm sitting in the back playing, but I'm listening and watching,
which was, I cannot tell you how thrilling that was.
There is an extended harp melody in E.T.
that is indicative of E.T.'s connection with Elliot.
The harpist's name was Dorothy Remsen, and I remember John working with her.
[Williams] Dorothy, in the trill beat... [♪ humming]
Can you... Can you finish the trill that way?
You know what I mean? [♪ humming]
If I can leave out the trill in the left hand.
- [Williams] Sure. - All right.
And there was a great session pianist player named Ralph Grierson,
- who John used all the time. - ...to the left, Ralph.
Second to last measure, two quarter notes.
[♪ humming]
And the end title for E.T. is this big flowing thing.
And he gave Ralph this
and he let him practice it for four days before he played it.
E.T., I think, was the first movie I ever saw in the cinema, in the movie theater.
I'm from a band called Coldplay.
And on our tour at the moment, we are coming on stage
or in fact, through the audience to the stage, to the sound of E.T.
For me, going on stage for a concert,
I wanted something that had the feeling of flight.
And so I was thinking about Elliot riding his BMX.
So I wrote to John and Steven to ask if we could use E.T.
And they said yes.
[♪ E.T. theme playing]
It just makes me feel, uh, excited.
That's also 'cause I've come on stage to it many times now.
Every piece that he does, to me, has a sort of whole family of melodies.
Okay, here we come. Back to the main theme. Here we go.
Perfect.
[Williams] This is Tanglewood.
Tanglewood is many things.
It's an educational institution.
It offers a unique opportunity to the best students to come.
It's a concert venue for the Boston Symphony.
And it's an inspiring landscape.
In the whole history of American musical life, this is Mecca.
This is where the best students come to study.
They are able to perform with the greatest conductors who come and visit.
The schedules of film had been good.
Because we usually just work in a very busy part of the year in the spring.
And you may have a summer off,
because of release schedules of the film.
And suddenly there's three weeks where you're not working
and you have time to do something.
So that's worked out very well.
Every year I've been here since 1980, which is 43 years.
It's part of my life.
I come now, I do maybe two concerts a year at the most.
I used to do more when I was conducting the Boston Pops.
It's energizing.
[Dudamel] John is an amazing conductor.
He really connects with the soul of the orchestra
because... [stammers] ...that knowledge that he has.
The main theme of, uh, Jurassic Park
was one of the pieces that make me a musician.
You know, I remember I went to the theater with a friend of mine.
I saw, I don't remember, ten times I went to listen to them, to see the film.
Beautiful. It was amazing.
But to listen to that music.
I've heard so many people say this.
I remember the theater, the time of day when I saw Jurassic Park.
And I heard those trumpets play.
[Hooten] I just remember coming out of that theater juiced.
Just excited to play my instrument.
John really wanted to put the dinosaurs where they belonged,
with that same kind of, sort of,
admiration and respect that little kids have
when they go through a natural history museum
and they see the relics of this era, of this Jurassic or later Cretaceous era.
And they... they're in awe of just the bones.
I think that John scored this movie with the heart of a child
that knew how to create a sense of wonder about these amazing, magnificent animals.
So many times we'd-- We talk about John Williams
we talk about scores that are 180s of each other.
And films that are 180s. So they have the year of Jurassic Park
and Schindler's List by the same filmmaker.
That is the best example of that.
There is a sense of wonder in that Schindler's List score,
but a kind of a baleful wonder, how can humanity be this?
[Williams] I was... had been working on Schindler's List at Tanglewood,
I think in the summer of that year...
and Steven was shooting in Poland somewhere.
[Spielberg] I had to have the winter to shoot in Kraków, Poland.
So for the first time, I missed Johnny's scoring session to Jurassic Park.
That's how... that's how the films overlapped so completely.
[Williams] The contrast in styles couldn't have been more welcome to me.
I loved it.
[Spielberg] I wasn't thinking musically when I made the film.
I didn't put temporary music in
to make suggestions to Johnny about how I felt about certain scenes.
I just focused on telling the story.
And then I showed the film to John.
The list is an absolute good.
The list is life.
My immediate reaction to the film was so staggering. I mean, I couldn't speak.
I was just too overwhelmed. I was almost, well, weeping.
And I went outside and walked around the building a little bit
and came back, and five minutes later and said to Steven,
attempting to start the meeting to discuss the music,
I said, "Steven, this a great, great film.
And you need a better composer than I am to do this score."
And he said, "I know, but they're all dead."
[audience, Williams laughing]
Fortunately for me and Steven's tenacity,
I had to stay with it and do the best I could.
But I truly felt that way. I thought this film is beyond
almost anything anyone could create
that would be worthy of what the film is telling us
and the history of what the film was revealing to us.
[Spielberg] One of the greatest experiences I ever had with John,
and certainly the most emotional experience I've ever had with him,
is when he was up in the Berkshires composing Schindler's List,
and he asked me and Kate to come up
and hear the sketches on the piano for the first time.
Johnny always sits down at the piano and says,
"Now I don't play piano very well, so don't expect much,
but I'm going to try to pick this out."
And of course, he's a beautiful piano player.
And he had the music. It was handwritten up on the piano,
and we're standing at the piano. And he starts.
[♪ piano playing]
Yeah.
I'll never forget it.
I cannot remember a time where I was so emotionally devastated
by these very simple, melodic, soulful, anguished sketches
he was performing for Kate and I on the piano.
Johnny hadn't gotten five notes out where Kate began crying.
Nine notes later, I was crying, and then... [chuckles] ...Johnny was crying
and playing at the same time.
It was a mitzvah.
He had honored that story of the Shoah through music.
[Williams] I knew Itzhak Perlman, the violinist,
for a couple of decades, I guess.
And the minute Steven and I realized we needed a violinist, I just said,
"We should get the best one right now that's playing is Itzhak Perlman."
The ironic thing was that Itzhak, for many years,
I would see him at concerts here and there and he would always say to me,
"John, when are you going to give me a film with a violin solo?"
I said, "I will, it'll come, Itzhak. One day we'll have it."
And finally, I called him up about Schindler's List.
I said, "Itzhak, I have a movie for you. Finally found one."
And I said, "Let me think about it."
So, then... [chuckles] ...then I told my wife, Toby, and I said to her,
"Toby, this was John Williams, and he was..." And I told her about this story.
And I told him that I was gonna think about it.
Then she said, "You told him that you were gonna think about it?
A film score by John Williams, a movie by Steven Spielberg,
and you're gonna be involved and you told them you were gonna think about it?"
So the next day, I think I called him up and I said, "Okay, I'll do it." [laughs]
And boy, was I happy that-that I said "Yes."
All I can tell you is that I can go all over the world,
and the only thing that people ask specifically from me,
is "Can you play the theme from Schindler's List?"
Everybody just gets so moved by that theme.
[audience applauding]
[Howard] The first time that I worked with John on Far and Away,
I said, "Why does music work the way it works?"
[chuckles] He said, "I don't really know."
He said, "There are a lot of theories and one I kinda subscribe to
that it gets back to primal sounds."
That in our origin story as human beings, sounds meant a great deal to us.
They could bring us peace and a sense of serenity
or they could alert us to danger and the need to run.
Percussion could be an earthquake.
It could be rocks tumbling down.
Birds could signal a sense of romance in the air.
And here's an artist who understands, in the most nuanced terms,
how to support a story through music.
[Mangold] He is the greatest champion of orchestral music in the world
because his scores reawaken in us the beauty of the orchestra.
This is, of course, also a great gift to us musicians.
That he is one of the few,
one of the last composers who uses a big symphonic orchestra.
And there is a huge difference, if you have humans play,
and not the synthesizer, which can make up for a group of string players.
But just also acknowledging the craft of the musicians,
and the need of that craft to be preserved for generations to come.
The thing that I'm really proud of is we have not, in our career,
gone to electronic music.
We value the orchestra, we value the individual players
and what Johnny's written for them.
He hasn't brought in the synthesizer.
There's been a couple of occasions where a synth has been an adjunct
to a full orchestral score, like in Munich, for instance.
So many filmmakers and so many contemporaries of mine
have gone all electronics.
But I love that, that we're staying true to orchestras.
[Williams] The electronic compilation of things doesn't have a moment,
a performance moment of creativity.
But in an orchestra, we make four takes of every scene.
Each one is different. Every performance is different.
And that particular take has some life or some blood in its veins.
He is forcing the modern audience to contend with the orchestra.
Because he is making those instrumentalists play faster,
harder, quicker, more dynamically
than you've ever heard before in some of his scores.
- Okay, good. - [Spielberg] Good, yep.
Next one.
And he has a true love of the orchestra,
and a true love of-of that kind of nonverbal communication it is
to raise your arms and to say, "Oh, everyone downbeat."
And then to get something back. I mean, that is a thrilling thing.
You can really see the... You know, the smile creep over John's face
when-when he conducts an orchestra.
This piece, ladies and gentlemen... [stammers] ...it can't be too polite.
It is vulgar.
[orchestra laughs]
So, trombones will be ready for that.
I'll give you the biggest one-two ever in the world.
[audience applauds]
[Mutter] It's unique how happy people are... [chuckles] ...around him.
[laughs] How happy orchestras are, you know?
You see John is coming onstage.
There's immediate awe because we have such great memories of his music
that we are like children in a candy store, you know?
When The Force Awakens came out, it's not like John changed his style.
He didn't. He-He wrote the same way he would have written in the '70s.
- And then you have... - [♪ playing "Rey's Theme"]
[Abrams] He's never lost the honest curiosity.
He somehow is able to tap into this unbelievably resonant emotional truth,
but then he's confident enough to be vulnerable
and then to ask, "Is that all right? What do you think?"
[stammers] He's literally asking you, do you think this is okay?
And it makes me laugh, because when John Williams plays you a piece of music
that he's written, and he asks you if it's okay, there is one answer.
Audiences are still there for it. That's the incredible thing.
So it makes you wonder, like, why aren't we hearing more thematic scores?
Why aren't we hearing scores that burst off the screen the way John's do?
The audiences are clearly hungry for it.
So why isn't there more of it?
It's a difficult time right now in music
because, in my sensibility, the orchestra is an instrument to deliver music.
And so, music as I understand it, in terms of the great literature
that we've had in the last three or 400 years of music,
you could almost say it's dying.
Young composers, they want to work in electronics and spatial effects and so on.
Bless them, they do fantastic work
and I would love to be around another 50 years to see what they're doing.
But are we going to have another Brahms or another Wagner in the theater?
Right now, the way things are going, as we see the art of music developing,
it's a time for questions, a time for wondering.
There's another side of John, which is his great concert music.
This is not the kind of blockbuster Hollywood themes
that you would hear in the movie theaters.
These are more abstract, more refined, more searching music.
[Gruska] His movie scores are so cohesive, so concise,
and his concert music is... To me, is actually more fragmented
and separate from time, and a linear quality.
His concert music, that's probably a huge outlet for him.
He can explore the atonal and the textural.
It's really revealing another side of him.
Writing for films, I'm limited. I can only do what the subject will allow me to do.
I can't go crazy for eight minutes with brass... I'd like to, but I can't.
For our student orchestra at North Hollywood High School
here in California,
I played the bassoon.
Friend of mine, Harold... Late Harold Hansen tried to teach me,
and I got good enough where I could play in a band rehearsal or two,
second bassoon, a little bit.
But who would imagine, like, 40 years later, I would write a bassoon concerto
for the New York Philharmonic?
But that was the connection, you know,
my trying to play it and loving the instrument,
and then having an opportunity to write it for one of the world's greatest players,
Judith Leclair.
Anne-Sophie Mutter has gotten music from him.
Yo-Yo has played his music.
These pieces, they're challenging.
His command of their instrument
is overwhelming.
[Williams] "The Elegy for Cello and Orchestra,"
we recorded together many years ago.
Every time I present it to another cellist,
I say, "Have you heard Yo-Yo's recording?"
And they all say, "Yes. Oh, my God."
Like they couldn't possibly equal what the master has done with it.
- So don't blame me. - [both laugh]
That's wonderful.
I get worried when he's not working. [laughs]
He must work. [stammers] He's somebody that just loves it,
and does it and has such a good time.
The most important thing
about my relationship with my father right now is golf.
So what's your favorite thing about golf?
- The golf? - [Jenny] Yeah.
- My favorite thing about golf is walking. - [Jenny] Ah.
Play golf is really the wrong verb. I don't play it, I destroy it.
I never really played very well,
and I usually go late in the afternoon when the real players have finished,
and it's quiet, and I could contemplate the real, true beauty of the place.
It's a beautiful way to spend a few hours together with your dad.
If I can do that a couple times every week for as long as he wants to be around,
I'm a very, very happy camper.
Oh! It's a mean game.
There are so many great moments, moments that he's composed,
that remind us about how movies thrill us.
And how movies reach to the child in us.
He's done more of those moments than any other living composer.
But he's also done so many other kinds of moments that are more than that,
that are more nuanced than that,
that are more powerful than that,
that are more dynamic than that, that are more gripping than that.
John Williams is extraordinarily flexible
and is just sort of master of so many different musical languages,
especially the weightier historical movies.
[Williams] As a fan of history, my mind runs quickly to Steven's films,
and to Oliver Stone, and films that I've done with him...
like Born on the Fourth of July.
The subject of the Vietnam War was so personal to him,
but I think one felt a-a profound, uh, message in his work.
And certainly in JFK.
JFK is a fantastic example of doing,
to a certain extent, the music before the film was done.
Oliver said to me, "Write three pieces of music.
I won't show you any film. I'll just show you the film of this reaction,
that reaction, and that reaction. And then you do freely your pieces."
And in the end, I think what he did was cut together
these various things and use the music from each one of them to a certain degree.
Uh, that was a unique opportunity for me to approach something historical...
[stammers] ...in an attempt to dramatize it in a way that Oliver is-is famous for.
[Spielberg] I love the kind of
noble sobriety of Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln.
You know, those beautiful American themes, those really, really, beautiful
feelings that you... That instill all of us with a great sense of
belonging to a great country and patriotism.
Saving Private Ryan is one of the greatest World War II films,
if not the greatest of all.
The first 15 minutes of that film are so...
beyond description, so extraordinary,
it certainly didn't need any music.
[Spielberg] John feels that the absence is as important as the inclusion of music.
So we have these spotting sessions where we try something
and we say, "Maybe music here, maybe not music here."
We decided, of course, early on to have no music
for the invasion of Normandy.
The music would only come in when we see the body of Sean Ryan on the beach.
And we end the film with "Hymn to the Fallen"
which was done with the Boston Symphony Tanglewood Chorus.
Tom Hanks was there.
Very exciting for the orchestra because he sat up in the balcony.
You know, we were on stage... [chuckles] ...and they were all looking up there
and I said, "You can't be... [chuckles] You have to look at the music." [laughs]
[Spielberg] Musically, it honors all of the veterans,
both today and yesterday.
And-and I think what you did musically is such a great honor
and that's why the military is always asking if they could play...
Perform this score.
This is one of the most requested scores
throughout our entire United States Military,
because it has the deepest reverence and respect for those
who have laid their lives upon the altar of freedom.
John's capable of scoring any genre of film
whether it's Saving Private Ryan or Home Alone.
I made my family disappear.
[Columbus] We were shooting Home Alone, and we had already hired another composer,
and we got into post-production, found out the composer was no longer available.
We got a call from John's agent,
who said, "I'd like to show it to my client, John Williams."
And I almost literally dropped the phone.
I was stunned.
I loved it. I thought the film was wonderful.
The little boy was fabulous,
I thought, wonderful opportunity for Christmas textures, and flutes and bells.
[Columbus] We decided to preview the film utilizing John's score.
That preview was the best preview we had had up until that point.
The film tested 500% better than it did the first time.
He's reaching out from the screen and pulling the audience into the film.
[Williams] When Chris asked me to do Harry Potter,
I was very, very happy to do it.
Wonderful opportunity for music.
It was about children, magic and so on.
Children and magic equals music.
When I agreed to do Harry Potter,
I was called first to do some music for a trailer.
And they asked me to do something magical.
I understood what it was but I hadn't seen a single frame of film.
And so, I wrote the theme, which is "Hedwig's Theme."
[♪ humming "Hedwig's Theme"]
I have to confess to you, the easiest thing in the world to write.
[Columbus] I went into where he was composing, into his office,
and he said, "Would you like to hear the main theme?"
And I said, "Of course, yeah." So he played...
[♪ humming "Hedwig's Theme"]
So he's-he's adding that darkness, right?
He gets you with that lovely, beautiful theme and then it gets dark,
within seconds. How brilliant is that? [chuckles]
We knew when we got into the world of Potter
that each film was going to get subsequently darker and darker and darker.
Your scar is legend,
as of course was the wizard who gave it to you.
John and I discussed that for a long time,
and his score for the second Harry Potter film, Chamber of Secrets,
is the beginning of what will happen for the next seven films.
Expecto Patronum!
I have to say that I-I've never been entirely comfortable with doing sequels.
I would rather have done a fresh story
with a fresh opportunity for a fresh score.
But Star Wars, for example, and Indiana Jones particularly,
I just felt that I didn't want some other composer,
very frankly, to come in and change that.
That it was something that I would... If I could do it,
t-to preserve the integrity of that piece,
if I could have the time and energy to do all that,
particularly in the case of Star Wars where I did the first nine.
We finally got to Harry Potter, and those films were so wonderful and so difficult,
I think I did three of them.
I couldn't possibly have done...
How many did they make, eight? Something like that.
I would love to have been able to do it for just all those reasons.
Other people came along, did them very well.
So, when I could do the sequels, I tried to do them.
But I was... I use the word jealous, of keeping the integrity
of what I've already done.
Not that I thought that it was so precious or so timeless
that it couldn't be touched by another composer.
But I felt that if I could keep it consistent with my own work,
that would be the best thing to do.
[Lucas] I'm not sure I would have done Episodes I, II and III
if I couldn't have gotten Johnny to do the music for it.
You know, 'cause he was such an integral part of the creative process.
By the '90s, he'd become kind of a brand name.
[♪ Indiana Jones theme playing]
[♪ "Imperial March" playing]
[♪ humming "Indy's Very First Adventure"]
It's in most people's DNA, a lot of his stuff.
[Mitchell] Just when you think you've exhausted it all, there he is.
Oh, it's the theme for NBC News.
For John, it wasn't enough just to write the great blockbusters.
He wanted to have a variety of work. And you think of the Olympics.
I remember watching the Olympics as a young child...
and noticing the music
and how amazing it was.
[Williams] They called me and said,
"John, will you write a piece for the opening of the Olympics?"
I loved all the pageantry of it and the heraldic aspect
of what the athletes do and how inspiring they are.
And then I've done three or four of them since.
I think that, in a strange way, he's kind of the biggest pop star ever.
Today is actually my 45th year at the Hollywood Bowl.
Forty-five years.
I started there in 1978.
And I'm... [laughs] ...still here with it!
At first, I was very shy about it, I guess I can say.
I said to the management of the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
"You don't need me, you have Zubin Mehta,
he's the greatest conductor in the world. Why do you want..."
"But no, the audience wants you to do it."
[Williams] Hey! Gustavo. Simpatico.
[both chuckle]
I don't think that would have happened without Star Wars,
which established this practice, now worldwide,
of people doing concerts of film music.
Not just my music, but current film composers and past ones.
[Bouzereau] Lightsaber.
Wonderful. Oh, they're not too heavy.
- No, it's good. - It's good.
[lightsabers buzz]
- Oh, that's cool! - Like so.
- [♪ humming "Imperial March"] - [chuckles]
This is Bing Wang.
She'll be soloist tonight. Most fantastic violinist.
- I am so excited... - [laughs]
...to perform with Maestro John Williams.
These are the victims.
This is the magic stick.
That's it!
[laughs]
So.
[MacFarlane] He's the only one who can do what he can do.
I mean, how many composers do you know who write so classically
and yet are so popular?
[Newman] None of this would have been possible without John.
It's amazing. I mean, it's 17,000 people.
So this is the white jacket.
And I put it on. These are my work clothes.
[chuckles] This is... This is what I do my hammering with.
That's the way.
[MacFarlane] Anyone who's been to see John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl
performing his scores
recognizes that what you're effectively seeing
is a classical orchestra.
And yet the audience cheers like it's The Beatles.
[audience cheering, applauding]
You know, these aren't musical elitists who go to these shows,
these are everyday folks who just want to hear great music.
The music of John connects many generations, you know...
[stammers] ...and that is something that is beautiful.
[chuckles] I mean, there's ages from young to old.
You know, you look back and you just see nothing but lightsabers.
And everyone loves the music.
To be surrounded by thousands of people
who are waving lightsabers and celebrating this man and what he has done.
It's such a beautiful and obviously well-deserved thing to see every time.
The atmosphere, it goes beyond what we think about a regular concert.
The people, they went crazy, was like a rock concert.
[Williams] The thing about "The Imperial March" and the lightsabers,
it's something that has evolved over the years, you know.
Used to have two or three in the audience, you know, many years ago,
and then a few hundred.
Now we have, I don't know, how many thousand out there.
It's fantastic.
[Dudamel] They know John. They know John's music.
And it was an explosion.
An explosion of happiness.
[audience applauding]
- That was fun, hey? - That was fantastic.
It works. It works! [laughs]
[Williams] I've been impossibly lucky in life.
I have remarried, yes.
To Samantha Williams.
She's wonderful.
I met her 50 years ago.
And we've been together through a lot of wonderful things.
And I'm deeply grateful.
[indistinct chatter]
There are so many things that have given me great honor.
The Oscars are a mark of achievement in most people's minds,
and I have enjoyed and very proud of the ones that I have received.
I've had 54 nominations.
And I have to express a great bit of gratitude
to the music branch of the Academy,
which is really recognition from your peers.
Thank you.
The main reason I think it's important to celebrate him
is just to say thank you for that amount of joy.
To make something that brings joy everywhere it goes
is rare and precious.
And nobody has a worse day from hearing some of his music.
John Williams has that great ear for music.
And he writes what he hears, more so than writing what he knows.
And I think that's why it's so powerful and it will always endure.
[Kennedy] The minute John raises his baton,
and plays the first theme, you just go oh, my God,
here's another one.
Every single time.
He has this unbelievable superpower
of being able to create melodies that you will hear for the first time,
and feel like it was inevitable.
And you can't forget it.
[MacFarlane] As long as there is orchestral music,
you're gonna see orchestras that devote entire evenings to his music.
Just as they would with Beethoven or Gershwin or Mozart.
When I'm making a movie, especially when I'm making a really tough film,
it's a tough production, I think about, well, someday this will end,
and I'll be able to sit down, just in front of the orchestra
and behind the podium.
And for six or eight days,
listen to fabulous new compositions by John Williams.
It's what I look forward to on every single movie.
I've never asked Johnny, "Could I conduct his orchestra?" Never once.
But I would like to take the baton today in your honor,
and if everybody would direct their attention to the marquee.
Mazel tov.
First time I came to this studio was in 1940,
when my father brought me here to show me the stage.
And I went on to... Say, I was about nine or ten years old,
and I looked around at the room and I thought to myself,
"Someday this will all be mine."
It's finally come to be!
My life and career has been so diverse,
going from comedies, to space, to more or less so-called serious work.
In the end, what I'm completely happy with
is the finale of the Cello Concerto.
Or completely happy with second movement of the First Violin Concerto.
But not the whole piece! [chuckles]
Some of the themes in Star Wars, like "Yoda's Theme"
for example, I think is especially good.
The way the intervals go, it's original, it's very simple.
There are parts of E.T., I think the "Over The Moon" theme is especially good.
So that's the closest thing I can come to saying, "This thing describes me."
I think all the things I mentioned do describe me,
but not completely.
The various stages of my career of piano playing and arranging
and orchestrating and television and film,
I have to say it was a progression that was unplanned.
I had a few setbacks, but I was very, very lucky,
especially after meeting Steven Spielberg, probably the luckiest day of my life.
People say, "How do you do so much work?"
I was busy all the time, but I was filled with the love of music,
and the pleasure of doing it with great musicians, great orchestras.
I couldn't write fast enough to bring them something to play.
Music for a musician is like breathing.
It supports us, sustains us, gives us energy.
I write every morning, something.
You can imagine writing all these notes,
and then having the opportunity to get up in front of an orchestra and conduct it,
and hear it all brought to life, what you've put on the page.
That's a thrilling thing.
Music is enough for a lifetime,
but a lifetime is not enough for music.
[♪ "Flight to Neverland" playing]
[♪ "Yoda's Theme" playing]