TITLE: God Almighty! FSM Finally Talks to John Williams
AUTHOR: Jeff Bond
SOURCE: Film Score Monthly
DATE: January 2003
Well, we can all die happy.
Over the dozen+ years of Film Score Monthly's existence, it always seemed there were so many layers of people between us and John Williams that the odds were stacked against our ever interviewing him. Mr. Williams is busy, in demand, important--and well-protected by his people, as befits a national treasure.
But Jeff Bond finally got him. So, without further ado:
John Williams is unfailingly polite, helpful and self-effacing. When he called me 10 minutes late, undoubtedly because I'd provided someone with the wrong office phone number, he apologized to me profusely. Naturally, I was nervous about doing this interview, and when there were some odd hesitations in the conversation I started getting worried that the interview wasn't going well. Finally, Williams stopped the interview, apologized for interrupting me ... and started praising my command of the subject matter and asking where I went to school. Ah, how I love my job.
Williams had a great year in 2002, and I just wanted to talk to him about how he approached tackling four huge films in the space of 12 months. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask him anything about Harry Potter, so you'll have to find answers to your Harry Potter questions elsewhere. I did ask him one question that has been bothering people for years: Was he intentionally referencing Bernard Herrmann's "madness" theme from Psycho in Star Wars when Luke, Han and the gang emerge from under the floor of the Millennium Falcon just after they arrive on the Death Star. The answer: "No."
FSM: You generally do one or two scores a year; in 2002 you did four scores, all for very major releases, including two huge franchise scores. Did you have an idea what you were getting into?
JOHN WILLIAMS: I knew that it was going to be a full and difficult schedule. The two franchise pieces, Star Wars and Harry Potter, to some extent I had a head start [on] although both have tremendously lengthy and difficult scores. Probably 50 percent of the material in both of them was original to this particular episode, so it wasn't like starting from scratch as it was on the two Spielberg films. Having said that, with that slight leg up, it's been a very busy year.
FSM: You wrote a great love theme for Attack of the Clones that reminded me a little of your work on Jane Eyre.
JW: It was certainly unique to have a love theme in a Star Wars film. I loved having the opportunity to do that; we rarely can write a sort of sweeping, dramatic and tragic love theme in films these days. They're difficult to do and they're rewarding to try and create; these things are always in the great tradition of Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde, these love/death kinds of stories where the idea of love eternal is shared by the lovers beyond temporal life, hence this sort of tragic quality of the melody. It's along these lines that I tried to achieve that character. I particularly enjoyed that aspect of the score. I don't know what George is writing for the finale, but I'm hoping that this kind of star-crossed lovers theme, which I called Across the Stars as a kind of play on words, will be something that can be revisited and developed further in the finale. We'll see when we're able to look at what George is preparing.
FSM: You wrote an incredibly linear piece of chase music for that film, and you even put an electric guitar into it.
JW: I just basically think that we wanted a suggestion and a coloration to the orchestra of the pop-racket, traffic-din effect that's produced so much by contemporary music created on synthesizers, drum machines and probably not even played by electric guitars anymore--most of those are probably synthesized also. It was along those lines, to create a texture of the futuristic urban atmosphere depicted by the CG effects George's people created.
FSM: The first Star Wars film ended with an action sequence that was under 15 minutes long, and it was a very focused sequence with a clear goal: Blow up the Death Star. Now in the prequels there's a lot of crosscutting, and you may be writing music for climactic action that's spread across 30 or 40 minutes of the movie. How do you tackle that kind of job just from a logistical standpoint?
JW: I usually construct these things in two-to four-sometimes five-minute segments, and I can't say that I construct an arc for the whole 40 minutes at the beginning of that, but I'll do that for each template of the 40 minutes, each musical cue. Normally I work from front to back, but not always. Sometimes I'll do the finale segment first, so I'll know where I'm heading and I can sort of de-compose if a melody or an aspect of musical development is completed in some scene. I can then take that completed thing and extract elements from it and present them in a somewhat fragmented way, so that as they come together in the end, there's a sense of inevitability to it. That's one technique. All of the additive things that we can do in orchestration and in tempo play into it.
To put it very simply, you could start at one tempo and continually, gradually and imperceptibly increase that, and at the same time go through a series of modulatory processes that will move it up a third, down a fourth, up a fifth, down a sixth, this kind of manipulation of sonic material so that things are happening in an additive way that will make the 40 minutes play sensibly, we hope. It isn't done as purely by me in films as that may sound, because we also have all the distractions of sound effects, and there may be a four-minute section within that 40 minutes where the music will intentionally lay back and let the sound effects take over. So it's an almost ad hoc process, which is to say that every one of those things has its own set of problems and opportunities and they're all a little bit different. But I think every composer, we use the tools we have, the tools of texture, timbre, tempo, key and loudness and speed, and the variations of all those things to create as interesting a tableau as we can. But if you're writing a 40-minute piece for orchestra you probably wouldn't do it the same way. The noise of the film dictates so much of what we do--the collective racket of what's going on--and that contributes quite considerably to what you do.
FSM: It's interesting how universal your music has become, to the point where you have to be one of the few composers who works in the concert world who actually has legions of fans. I know that you're a very private person, so how do you deal with the fact that you can actually be recognized in public?
JW: In Boston, where I conducted the orchestra for 14 years, there is a recognition factor there because I've done so much in the city on television and concerts all over the place. Other than Boston, though, I think I've got anonymity wherever I go physically, so I don't really sense that. Mine is a quiet working life, and although there's a public aspect to it when I do conduct at the Hollywood Bowl or something, that's one response. But another aspect is that any conversation about this just underscores the power of film and the reach that film has and the reach that music from film can have. We do concerts for two or three thousand people in a hall, and 15,000 people may be outside, but millions of people will go see Harry Potter and at least unconsciously hear the music, and in the case of Star Wars probably many millions over the decades. So I marvel at what that says about communication and the time we live in. We see examples of that every day, and I'm grateful about the opportunity presented to musicians. None of our colleagues in past epochs have had anything like what we can enjoy in terms of the dissemination of our music while we're alive, in the short time that we're doing it and we're here. So I guess my bottom line is I'm pleased and happy and grateful that we're in a medium that's appreciated and disseminated so widely. And the quality of reproduction of recordings we have now and the quality reach that film has for people all around the world is wonderful. The other thing is, my conducting of the orchestra in Boston on television for so many years had something to do with that because it was a wonderful pulpit to bring forward not only film music, but contemporary music that wouldn't be played in subscription concerts by our symphony orchestras, but which can be beautifully done by a symphony orchestra. Film music concerts around the country have become more and more popular around the world.
FSM: You've worked with Steven Spielberg for more than a quarter of a century now, so is there really even anything to discuss anymore when you start working on another film with him?
JW: There's a lot of personal visiting that goes along with it. It's amazing for both of us to realize that this year we will have been together for 30 years and I think 20 films in the course of that time. In any kind of collaborative field I think this is remarkable, for anyone to get along that well and don't end up killing each other. It bespeaks in my mind so many positive things about Spielberg. We all know the kind of philanthropic man he is, the kind of talented artist he is, the gifted businessman that he is, and it's kind of a worn-out cliché but he's also a wonderful family man and an extraordinary person, and one of the luckiest days of my life was meeting him. We get along extremely well, and I think it would be hard for anyone not to.
FSM: With Catch Me If You Can you not only got back a little to the jazz style of some of your '60s scores, but you also develop this really obsessive motif in the main title for Tom Hanks' pursuit of the Leonardo DiCaprio character.
JW: I think "obsession" is a good word to use. Along those lines and to achieve that, we were able to establish in a series of scenes that are well-paced and separated [from] each other enough to use a musical idée fixe, which is when a musical motif or identifying melodic phrase is used repeatedly to suggest the character or suggest the obsessive--a fixed idea is the literal translation, I guess. The perfect example is the shark motif in Jaws, where we even have the shark's music when the shark is not present to suggest a red herring perhaps or to signal the shark's approach if it's a long way away and we can't see it--we can hear the music, which means we can feel its presence. I think there's a similar effect working in this film. When Frank Abagnale begins to weaken and give in to his addiction, it's almost like a drug addict going to the closet to find his fix, and they're returning unstoppably to do something they perhaps don't even want to do.
FSM: You did something a little unusual with the jazz element, too, by eliminating any improvisation.
JW: The saxophone and all the roulades and things that he does, all of which are written--they sound like improv, but they're written down. What that does is--in what can sound like an improvisation, we can plan the bass line with it and construct a counterpoint for it that's more organized than an ad-lib thing can ever be. The people who accompany the ad-lib soloist don't really know what he or she is going to do the next bar, so they will try to react to it or follow a prearranged harmonic pattern. So this was kind of a lark for me to do this, and we had this brilliant man, Dan Higgins, who played every note just as written, and every note is traced on the vibraphone played by a young man called Alan Estes, who did a really remarkable job of playing something that when you look at it seems impossible, and made it sound easy and natural.
FSM: You got to write the opening for a really wonderful animated title sequence that goes back to something like what Saul Bass used to do.
JW: That was done deliberately in the '60s style. The first thing that Steven suggested when he told me he was going to do this film, and he wanted to open it with one of those cartoons that opened the '60s sleuth pieces. It's a perfect recollection of the '60s style in graphics and dress and color.
FSM: On Minority Report you got to go back to a style I really hadn't heard from you in a long time; you've done a lot of action films, but they tend to be more adventures like the Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies and not harder-edged thrillers. This harkened back a little even to Jaws, I think, in that it was action with a much heavier psychological feel.
JW: These two films this year were, both of them to some extent, anomalies in terms of the kind of thing we've done together. Minority Report is a very interesting film and a compelling one, I think, with wonderful ideas about futurism and the pharmaceutical world of the future, to pick one aspect of it, all of it sort of wrapped in a film noir setting. But it also has, not sentimental qualities, but the story of the little boy and the wife mixed in, which you wouldn't have in a film noir piece, and they all seem to join the cat-and-mouse game and the sleuthing all in one way, and a fascinating way, I thought.
FSM: I think you said in an interview once that Close Encounters was at least at the time the closest to your personal composition style, rather than a style or sound you would adapt or work around for a specific film. Do you think you got back into some of that in Minority Report?
JW: That's possible. For Close Encounters it was a kind of harmonic idiom that to some degree was less tonal than what is usually required for these lighter pieces. So the idiom may be more dissonant. The connections you hear are probably the result of thumbprint or handwriting, it's a personal preference for certain textures. More than any of that it's a question of sitting and looking at the film and asking yourself, "What should this one sound like?" There's a lightness to some of it. I think the mechanical spyder section, although it's incisive and sharp and has a little levity to it also, I enjoyed working on that piece extremely. I was particularly fascinated by the character of Anne Lively, the long-ago-murdered woman, and I used a voice as a texture within the orchestra to evoke the memory of the moment of her death, which is referred to several times in the piece, and is what we see and hear when the real culprit is revealed at the end of the piece.
FSM: I have to ask you about AI, which I thought was an incredible score and a very powerful film, but one that seemed very tough on audiences.
JW: It's a very unusual piece, haunted by Kubrick I think. I know Steven had a lot of contact with Kubrick about that. To some extent it was an homage to Kubrick by Spielberg. The one area that has any musical connection to Kubrick at all was the quote of Der Rosenkavelier as the car crosses over the tunnel going into Rouge City. The only thing Steven said to me was that we had to use the quote of Rosenkavelier somewhere because that's the one thing that Kubrick said he wanted to use in the film. The problem was finding a place for it, but it seemed to fit and work in that special-effects sequence. I think what I saw at least critically was fairly complimentary; I think critics seemed to think Steven was not resting on his laurels, that he was continuing to grow and that while the movie was not entirely successful in every way, it had some memorable and wonderful things about it. This is exactly in line with the way I felt about the piece. It was a particularly inviting challenge for me, in that sense somewhat like Close Encounters, because I felt like I had a finer set of brushes or opportunities and I was offered a considerable amount more freedom of musical expression. So much of what we have to do in film is restricted by the length of the scene or the texture and style of what the music needs to be to really marry with the scene itself. In the case of AI it was a broader canvas that offered the opportunity to stretch a little more than usual, and where I had that opportunity I enjoyed it a lot.
FSM: The ending of the movie is really devastating and also really open to interpretation. A lot of people thought it was a maudlin, happy ending about this robot boy being reunited with its mother, but to me it was more like something out of Sunset Boulevard, where the boy may believe it's gotten what it wanted, but that's based on its own programmed, warped perception of the world.
JW: The way I felt about that ending was that this little automated creature who finally briefly finds his mother and achieves a biological death with her, that he is then able to die with her tells us that in the end he's able to achieve a measure of humanity. The two things we all share in common are birth and death and those are things that ultimately define our humanity as creatures, as animals. And his being able to slip off to the place where dreams are made humanizes him in a way that nothing else is able to do, and that made it a very lyrical moment for me.
FSM: You've won five Oscars, you've received something like 37 Oscar nominations, you've been nominated for multiple films in the same year 10 times ... do you ever get blasé about the Academy Award?
JW: This thing about Oscar recognition is an amazing success story--the concept of the Oscar. When you go around the world people are interested in that--they may not know what an Emmy or a Grammy is, but they know what the Oscar is. We need a trained sociologist to explain this phenomenon. For me, I've never been blasé about these things. The cliché has it that the nomination comes from one's peers and therefore has a little more gravitas and a little more weight to it, and I believe that that's true and I feel that. It's something that's a little like winning baseball games, I think: It's the one you're playing that you want to win, and wins and losses in the past sort of fade away. It bespeaks something of our perhaps flawed humanity that it's something that we're compelled and fascinated by. I think it's a human thing that describes us--each time seems like the first time. I don't think one gets blasé about that--other people might find it a lot less important than those in the film industry, but it seems to be something that captures the imagination.
Thanks to Hollywood Reporter editor Noe Gold; publicist Ronni Chasen; Jeff Sanderson, and Jamie Richardson at Gorfaine-Schwartz.
