by Jenny Nelson
Zemeckis has referred to himself as a general commandeering a large army on set, but the composer prefers a naval rather than military approach: ‘I always refer to the ship analogy . . . the director clearly is, and should be and must be, the captain of a ship. Everyone else on that ship is crew and my advice to anyone who wishes to have a long-standing relationship with a director is that that must never be forgotten because as that saying goes, “You’re either part of the solution or you are part of the problem”, and the director’s job is to solve all of the problems for the film. As part of the director’s trusted crew, I think the composer needs to solve the musical problems, but in doing so not unnecessarily add to the overwhelming burden that the director is already dealing with.’
Looking back, Silvestri says he was young and anxious when they first started working together around thirty-five years ago, and inevitably leaned on Zemeckis for reassurance. But over time he learned to manage his own needs without burdening the director – an essential requirement for a successful long-term collaboration, in his eyes. Once again, the marriage analogy is apt: ‘As you spend more time with your partner – I think that’s what falling more deeply in love has to do with – [you reach an] understanding where you’re different and respect that in the person you’re in the relationship with, and inflict less of yourself on them unnecessarily!’
His advice for anyone wanting to work with a director like Robert Zemeckis and build a similarly long and fruitful working relationship with them is to continue developing one’s craft and be receptive to new creative challenges: ‘They are not standing still artistically, they are constantly growing, constantly exploring, and if you are not doing that in your particular art, you will not, at some point, be invited to go along on the journey with them because you haven’t grown. You must grow.’
Collaboration History
Romancing the Stone (1984)
Back to the Future (1985)
Amazing Stories (1985), television; episode: ‘Go to the Head of the Class’
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Tales from the Crypt (1989–96), television; selected episodes
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Back to the Future Part III (1990)
Death Becomes Her (1992)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Contact (1997)
What Lies Beneath (2000)
Cast Away (2000)
The Polar Express (2004)
Beowulf (2007)
A Christmas Carol (2009)
Flight (2012)
The Walk (2015)
Allied (2016)
Suggested Playlist
Romancing the Stone, End Titles
Back to the Future, Main Theme
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie’s Theme
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Valiant & Valiant
Back to the Future Part II, The Future
Back to the Future Part III, End Credits
Death Becomes Her, End Credits
Forrest Gump, I’m Forrest . . . Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump, Suite
Contact, I Believe Her
Contact, End Credits
What Lies Beneath, Forbidden Fruit
Cast Away, End Credits
The Polar Express, Hot Chocolate
Beowulf, What We Need Is a Hero
The Walk, Perhaps You Brought Them to Life – Given Them a Soul
Allied, Essaouira Desert/Main Title
Allied, It’s a Girl
‘Without question, John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success.’ So said Steven Spielberg, the highest-grossing film director in history, at Williams’ eightieth birthday gala in 2012.
In the world of composer–director partnerships, the collaboration between Williams and Spielberg is hands down the most seamless. They have worked together on a jaw-dropping twenty-eight films directed by Spielberg to date, creating some of the most memorable moments in cinema for more than four decades, from Jaws and E.T. to Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park, through to War Horse, Lincoln and The BFG. Spielberg has said that ‘John has transformed and uplifted every movie that we’ve made together’ and it’s far easier to list Spielberg’s full-length directorial features that haven’t been scored by Williams, as there are only three: The Color Purple, Bridge of Spies and most recently Ready Player One – which was handed over to Alan Silvestri because Williams was busy scoring their most recent collaboration, The Post.
The composer has described their partnership as a perfect marriage, and it’s certainly a profitable pairing, resulting in box-office gold as well as the most enduring and hummable musical motifs. John Williams has a rare musical gift, bringing a film to life in his scores and adding an emotional connection between the audience and the story.
It was an auspicious relationship from the start, with Spielberg describing Williams as ‘the only person that I’ve had a perfect association with’ during their first decade of working together. For Williams’ part, their collaboration has proved to be so fruitful not solely because they get on well but because of the respect they both place on a film’s score, understanding the impetus it can give the narrative. In an interview from 1975, shortly after the success of Jaws, Williams said, ‘The best directors are musical; I think part of what they do is musical. The art of editing film in my mind is a musical art.’
In 2016, when the American Film Institute presented John Williams with a Lifetime Achievement Award, the first time a composer has received that honour, Williams thanked Spielberg for having such good taste in his movie projects, as well as patience with him, while the director concluded his speech with a succinct reflection on Williams’ contribution to film – not just to his own movies but to other hits, including Star Wars, Superman and the Harry Potter series, which have been elevated by the composer’s magic touch: ‘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 Williams’ career path was set from an early age. His father, Johnny Williams, was a drummer, performing in studio orchestras and jazz groups. Williams learned to read music when he was around five or six, and assumed he’d have a career as a pianist. In fact, his entry into the world of film studios was playing the piano on classic scores such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein, and he also conducted studio orchestras – sometimes including his own father. He moved into composing when he was asked to provide orchestrations of works by legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood who were still going strong: Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann, who later became a friend.
Williams soon established himself as a fine film composer, carving a niche in the disaster-movie genre with his music for The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure. He won his first Academy Award in the now defunct category of Best Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score for Fiddler on the Roof in 1972, having received his first nomination in 1968 for Valley of the Dolls. He also formed an early fruitful collaboration with director Mark Rydell, with successes including The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972), both of which impressed a young Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg, whose mother was a concert pianist, collected film soundtracks from a young age. Movies were his passion, and after making a short western film on his father’s movie camera in order to get his Boy Scout photography merit badge, he continued experimenting with film-making at home. At the age of sixteen, he wrote and directed his first independent film, Firelight, and when he was a student he got an unpaid internship at Universal Studios in the editing department. He made a short film, Amblin’, which won some awards and impressed the studio vice-president so much that he was offered a seven-year directing contract, making Spielberg the youngest director to receive such a commitment from a major studio. Television work followed, including an episode of Columbo and some TV movies such
as Duel, but his first feature-length film for cinematic release was The Sugarland Express (1974).
Spielberg had spent so much time listening to Williams’ earlier movie music that he wore out the LPs, and later admitted to having written a screenplay while listening to The Reivers ‘because I found the score so inspirational’. Williams’ music sounded like the Golden Age greats, so the young film-maker had assumed that the composer would be in his seventies or eighties, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that John was only fifteen years older than him. Williams recalls meeting Spielberg at a glamorous Beverly Hills restaurant, as the director was keen to make a good impression, but his initial thoughts were also about age: the composer has described him as looking about seventeen years old, still at high school. As he said in 2012, however, he realised very quickly he was speaking to someone who knew a lot about movies and film music.
The Sugarland Express is a crime drama based on a real-life incident about a couple on the run from the law in a bid to prevent their son being put in foster care. Partially set in Sugar Land, Texas, Spielberg had envisaged a sweeping, American score, in a similar style to The Reivers. However, after watching the film, Williams had a different idea, and persuaded the director to consider the small-scale, human story, focusing on the couple rather than the expansive landscape. He suggested an intimate score performed by a small ensemble, and placed the film in Texas by incorporating harmonica solos, and the bluesy theme is a woozy, wistful treat.
The story of a shark terrorising a seaside resort was the defining moment in launching Steven Spielberg’s career, and it was Jaws (1975) that cemented his collaboration with John Williams. The composer created such an iconic score with those repeated low notes that the director remarked in 2000, ‘To this day, I think that his score was clearly responsible for half the success of the film.’
Williams has put the success of the film and his music down to our primal fear of monsters. The shark was the focus of his discussions with Spielberg about the score, as the director wanted a musical identifier for the creature. He watched the film in a projection room at Universal Studios, leaving the screening in a state of excitement to set about composing a deceptively simple score, with the aim of creating music that feels instinctive, just as a shark moves instinctively – in effect, making a character out of music.
It’s well documented that the making of Jaws was fraught. The project nearly never reached cinemas because the estimated budget was soon vastly exceeded, the scheduled 55-day production ran past 150 days, and there were plenty of technical and logistical problems – not least the shark itself. Named Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, the mechanical shark sank when it first entered the water. It was such an unreliable device that the director needed alternatives, and the problem was eventually solved by including point-of-view shots from the shark’s perspective, which were then given extra impact by the music.
Spielberg initially thought Williams was joking when he played him the now famous notes on the piano: ‘At first I began to laugh, and I thought, “John has a great sense of humour!” But he was serious – that was the theme for Jaws. So he played it again and again, and suddenly it seemed right. Sometimes the best ideas are the most simple ones and John had found a signature for the entire score.’ Williams convinced Spielberg that the cellos and basses in the orchestra would make the music menacing, and explained that the effect of quickening the repeated notes and building the volume would increase a sense of panic. The bass ostinato – the repetition of two notes – and the unexpected introduction of a third note is as central to cinema as Herrmann’s strings in the Psycho shower scene. When Williams conducts the Jaws theme in concert, he says the audience recognise it from the very first note – and that their reaction is often to giggle, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps due to its ubiquity or the incongruity of hearing a horror film theme in a classical concert setting.
But there’s more to the score than the shark motif, and the composer is fond of his music for the barrel chase sequence: ‘Suddenly, as the shark overpowers them and eventually escapes, the music deflates and ends with a little sea shanty called “Spanish Lady”. The score musically illustrates and punctuates all of this dramatic outline.’ Jaunty jigs represent the seasoned shark-hunter Quint, and these fit well with high-spirited elements that are reminiscent of pirate scores from the 1930s by the likes of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
John Williams won a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, a Grammy and an Oscar for his score for Jaws, and the film was a staggering box-office success. It was the highest-grossing movie of all time – a title it held for a couple of years until the release of Star Wars – and made Spielberg one of the youngest multi-millionaires in America.
The director and composer were planning their third collaboration, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), before the second was complete. Spielberg, who had written this story of aliens communicating with humans, recalls ‘even before he wrote the score for Jaws, we were having meetings about Close Encounters’. Music was even more vital to this film because the two life forms use it to speak to each other, and as the signature theme needed to be played on-set by the actors, Williams was required to work on this score before he had finished yet another project, Star Wars. He used atonal orchestral effects to help place the UFOs in their ordinary settings on earth, and in 1978 compared the two sci-fi scores: ‘Close Encounters is more atmospheric and impressionistic; more abstract; and certainly less romantic than Star Wars.’
It is a consciously disorienting score. Many of the special effects were put on in post-production, and there was a lot of back and forth between the effects team and the editors, so there was no finished film for Williams to work from. As a result, he is said to have used a lot of ‘blind-writing’ techniques when composing sequences, taking inspiration from sketches or descriptions from Spielberg. The main task was to create a memorable musical message between scientists and aliens – a conversation between the two. The composer wrote a five-note motif, although he was originally keen to use seven notes so that it would fit with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ from Pinocchio, which is referenced early in the film and had been the film’s original end titles. However Spielberg was keen for five notes, so it sounded more like a greeting, or a signal, and their next challenge was to decide which notes to use.
Speaking to Film and Filming magazine in 1978, Williams recalled: ‘I wrote about two hundred motifs; you know, just sat down at the piano and figured out examples for him. We started to get confused, because one sounded better than another, this one was more melodic, that one was better as a signal, etc. Steven asked a mathematics friend how many combinations were possible within the twelve-note scale and found out it was something like 134,000! So I’d hardly scratched the surface with my two hundred!’
They kept returning to one particular sequence that ends on the fifth note of the diatonic scale, known as the dominant, and a musical formation that the composer compares to ‘ending a sentence with the word “and”’. Such an ambiguous structure is significant in a film that explores possibilities and interactions with other life forms: the sequence can be repeated on loop, the music can move into something new or simply end, leaving the listener hanging.
Everyone’s favourite adventurous archaeologist, Indiana Jones, is set to return to the big screen in 2020, which will mark Spielberg’s and Williams’ twenty-ninth collaboration as composer and director, and it will be a welcome return for one of the composer’s best-loved marches. That’s high praise when you consider the ‘Imperial March’ from The Empire Strikes Back or his often overlooked but brilliant ‘March’ from a rare Spielberg misfire, 1941. But the ‘Raiders March’ from Indy’s first outing, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), is near perfection, paying homage to adventure films from the 1930s with a feel-good sincerity. The key to the Indiana Jones scores, as intended by creator George Lucas, is that they are celebrations – not send-ups – of matinee romps with feats of derring-do that were so popular decades before.
Williams is typically modest about the ‘Raiders March’, admitting it was a struggle at first. In the short film The Music of Indiana Jones, directed by their go-to documentary maker Laurent Bouzereau, the composer confesses he spends a huge amount of time working through all possible permutations of the most simple motifs, to ensure he has exactly the right notes and can make those tunes seem ‘inevitable’, explaining that the ‘little simplicities are the hardest things to capture’. He composed two possible themes and played them to Spielberg, who claims his only input was to ask, ‘Can’t you use them both?’ – which he did. Williams credits the comedy and swagger of Harrison Ford’s performance for assisting in his composition process while Ford, in turn, told us he has been ‘blessed by the scale of talent of John Williams’ in his iconic screen roles as both Indy and Han Solo: ‘I am often introduced with John Williams’ music to accompany me, which is not a bad thing to have happen!’
The ‘Raiders March’ features the sweeping and romantic ‘Marion’s Theme’, another stand-out cue from the first film, but as Ford pointed out in his speech to mark Williams’ Lifetime Achievement Award at the AFI in 2016, this theme does not represent Marion herself but rather Indy’s feelings for her. It does not appear when he meets her in a bar, but when a car blows up and he thinks she is dead, encouraging the audience to be aware of the hero’s sense of loss – a great example of how Williams uses music to reinforce the emotional connection between audience and film.
