Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  The next film in the series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), was darker in tone than Raiders of the Lost Ark and the music reflects that, with overpowering choruses during scenes in the temple, and represents the north Indian setting with instruments such as sitars and tabla drums. Spielberg is particularly fond of the trek music as Indy and his gang move across the country on elephants. Williams composed a more tender, at times melancholy, score for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) to focus on the father–son relationship between Indiana and Henry Jones Sr. In The Music of Indiana Jones, Spielberg says it’s his favourite of the three scores due to the evocation of that relationship, but there are also energetic moments within the music, such as the opening scene with a teenage Indy involving snakes on a train and a later chase, fittingly called ‘Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra’.

  The three original Indiana Jones films are considered a near-faultless trilogy, so it was somewhat surprising to learn that a new instalment was on the horizon for 2008, breaking a nineteen-year absence from the big screen. Spielberg was keen to do another adventure-friendly film for all the family, something he hadn’t done since Jurassic Park in 1993, and Williams likened the experience of returning to his earlier scores in his preparation for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to getting back on a bicycle. The composer has even said in some interviews that long-awaited additions to franchises are useful to revive the life of the original movies. It’s certainly an easier scoring process for him than starting with nothing – and he would know, having returned to the galaxy far, far away twice after distinct hiatuses.

  John Williams’ office on the Universal Studios lot is a bungalow, steps away from Spielberg’s production company. He will sit and work at his piano, preferring the instrument and a notepad and pencil to any digital composing software. ‘I’m a great rewriter,’ he explains. ‘I scribble over things and change them. That’s my own method. I started life as a pianist so I rely on the instrument more than most composers probably do.’

  Spielberg tends to give Williams the book or script at the start of the project, but the composer is generally more keen to discuss the story with the director, to determine his outlook on the characters and narrative, and to watch footage of the film: ‘I’d rather go into a projection room and react to the people and places and events – and particularly the rhythm – of the film itself.’ After shooting the film, Spielberg will make a rough assembly of it to show Williams, and this first viewing is crucial for the composer to assess his initial response to the movie; he likens it to ‘a doctor trying to diagnose somebody’s physical condition’. Spielberg has spoken of Williams’ gift for ‘spotting’, knowing innately where to place music within a movie, and that the spotting sessions are, for him, one of the most enjoyable parts of the film-making process. They discuss whether a scene requires music, and if so, ‘we talk about tempo, not so much in a harmonic or melodic context, but how fast or how slow the music should be. Tempo is the first thing a composer has to get right. The next thing has to do with how loud or how soft the music should be. Then, we determine the harmonic ambience and talk about emotions, texture.’

  After the spotting sessions, Williams breaks down the scenes that need scoring onto a cue sheet and works on themes for characters or settings, and from there he’ll tackle specific sequences. Here Williams is free to create, as Spielberg described in an interview in 1978: ‘Once Johnny sits down at the piano, it’s his movie, it’s his score. It’s his original overdraft, a super-imposition.’

  While Williams works on the score, Spielberg will regularly pop round to his office, have a chat, and perhaps hear some themes played by John at the piano. Williams often has several themes in mind for a character, and Spielberg provides steers about which elements are most effective. Sometimes they will discuss combining the themes, or reassigning one to another character, but on other occasions a conversation might not even be necessary as the composer has said he can tell by Spielberg’s reaction what he thinks about the music: ‘I’ll play two or three ideas for him in no particular order. Sometimes I have a favourite, sometimes I don’t, but it’s funny how you can always tell from people, from a glance, from their body language, how they feel about what they’re hearing.’ This intuitive approach, and the atmosphere of complete trust, makes their collaboration special, and the director is still clearly in awe of the composer’s gift: ‘I’ve always felt that John Williams was my musical rewrite artist. He comes in, sees my movie, rewrites the whole thing musically, and makes it much better than I did. He can take a moment and just uplift it.’

  Now in his mid eighties, Williams has expressed shock in interviews when asked about retirement, stating that to him, composing is just as natural as breathing. He spends a couple of hours at the piano every day, and on the odd occasion when he doesn’t have a pressing project, he continues to jot down ideas in his notebooks. His dedication to his art and to the process of composition is remarkable, as is his continued quest for the perfect music that will make the right connection between screen and audience.

  One of the best examples of the extent to which Spielberg defers to his collaborator’s musical vision is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a story of the friendship between a young boy and a creature from another planet. Spielberg has likened it to a sequel, of sorts, to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the music plays an important role, highlighting the bond between E.T. and Elliott. Williams compares the two: ‘What makes them both successful is the fact that they affirm the fact that we are not alone in the universe. In the case of Close Encounters, the beginning of the film is much more terrifying because we don’t know who these aliens are. But there is a great kind of uplifting feeling of almost religiosity, I think, at the end when we suddenly recognise that we have brothers and sisters. And so, there’s a relief in the music. E.T. is also a bit scary in the beginning, but the minute we meet the little creature, the film becomes much more of a love story. That makes for a very different kind of musical challenge in E.T. as compared to Close Encounters.’

  Steven Spielberg and John Williams during a rehearsal for the score of Saving Private Ryan, 1998.

  Williams composed an emotional score with a lyrical sense of wonder. The love theme feels tentative at first, but becomes more confident within the film as the relationship between the boy and the alien grows, building to fifteen minutes of continuous musical accompaniment in the closing scenes, ‘Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye’, and the story behind the finale offers a remarkable insight into the working partnership between the two: ‘That sequence involved a lot of specific musical cues. An accent for each speed bump of the bicycles; a very dramatic accent for the police cars; a special lift for the bicycles taking off; sentimental music for the goodbye scene between E.T. and Elliott; and finally, when the spaceship takes off, the orchestra swells up and hits an accent as the spaceship whooshes away. So you can imagine in the space of that fifteen minutes of film how many precise musical accents are needed and how each one has to be exactly in the right place. I wrote the music mathematically to configure with each of those occurrences and worked it all out. Then when the orchestra assembled and I had the film in front of me, I made attempt after attempt to record the music to exactly all of those arithmetic parameters. But I was never able to get a perfect recording that felt right musically and emotionally. I kept trying over and over again and finally, I said to Steven, “I don’t think I can get this right. Maybe I need to do something else.” And he said, “Why don’t you take the movie off? Don’t look at it. Forget the movie and conduct the orchestra the way you would want to conduct it in a concert so that the performance is just completely uninhibited by any considerations of mathematics and measurement.”’

  For a director to tell the composer to ignore his film and create music that felt right is practically unthinkable. Yet Spielberg had such faith in Williams’ ability to enhance the emotional experience for the audience that he was happy to re-edit some par
ts to fit with the score as required. The result feels effortless, as the music places the audience at the heart of the action, from the bicycle chase and ride through the sky to Elliott’s tearful farewell to his friend. It’s hard to watch without being drawn in emotionally and the music plays a large part in that, swelling as the spaceship door closes, E.T. leaves and Elliott is left on earth.

  The year 1993 was significant for Spielberg and Williams because they worked simultaneously on two projects and it would be hard to find two more different films. One, a harrowing historical drama about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved over a thousand Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during the Second World War, and the other an adventure about a theme park inhabited by cloned dinosaurs. Both excellent in their own ways, but what a contrast.

  Spielberg was editing Jurassic Park (1993) while shooting Schindler’s List (1994). He was on location in Poland and would work three nights a week, via satellite, on post-production, having asked his good friend George Lucas to oversee some of the day-to-day technical tasks. He was also corresponding with Williams about the Jurassic Park music and the composer worked on both scores over a period of eight or nine months. The score for Jurassic Park is the more ‘typically’ Williams of the two, with a stirring, graceful theme to denote the dinosaurs and a secondary, brass-filled theme to underline the adventurous elements of the film. Director and self-confessed John Williams fan J.J. Abrams expressed his awe for the music: ‘If you listen to the Jurassic Park theme, it begins with this incredible, very specific, memorable score, and you go, “Oh, of course, that’s the Jurassic Park theme”, but then it moves into the secondary piece and you go, “Oh no, that’s the Jurassic Park theme”, but they’re both the Jurassic Park theme, so there’s a level of incredible complexity but also emotion that he’s somehow able to tap into. The fact that they co-exist is one of his remarkable gifts. Most composers, if they ever could even do one of those themes, would just do that one theme, and have a kind of secondary passage that would lead you back to that primary theme, but he is able to combine both.’

  Despite the impact of the theme, it’s worth noting that there is no music during the more dramatic set pieces, such as when the Tyrannosaurus rex attacks the children in the Jeep. What more do you need than dinosaur stomps and roars amid the lashing rain and screams of terror? Williams proves that a great film composer knows equally when not to score a scene as when music should be central to it.

  In contrast with the Jurassic Park score, Williams’ music for Schindler’s List is an exercise in grief as well as hope. His aim for the main theme, which could easily be the slow movement of a violin concerto, was for it to be a lullaby of sorts, and it does provide an aching sort of comfort. Famously, the composer nearly did not score this film. He watched a screening of the whole movie, without music, and was so moved by it that he needed some fresh air before sitting down to discuss it with Spielberg. He went for a walk around the block to gather his thoughts and then told the director he needed a better composer for this film, to which Spielberg offered the now infamous comeback: ‘I know, but they’re all dead!’ In the absence of Golden Age greats such as Max Steiner – often referred to as ‘the father of film music’ with scores for Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1942) to his name – Williams was, in the director’s opinion, the next best thing.

  Both films amassed a total of ten Academy Awards in 1994, with Jurassic Park winning three technical awards and Schindler’s List picking up seven, including the coveted Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Score. That film marked a sea change in their respective careers, with Spielberg finally receiving recognition from the Academy for his work, which many critics had previously dismissed because of its blockbuster appeal. For the composer, the accolade – his fifth Oscar from fifty-one nominations – proved his power does not solely lie in rousing, brassy marches but also in understated emotion, and over the decades that followed he has stretched his skills between the two.

  Spielberg won his second Best Director Oscar for Saving Private Ryan (1998); he recalls that ‘restraint was John Williams’ primary objective’ in this film. There is only one hour of music for the film, which exceeds two hours, and there is no score for the long opening scene depicting the assault on Omaha Beach during the Normandy landings of 1944. The composer places music within the pauses that allow space for emotional reflection, such as the aftermath of the Omaha battle. The sparing use of music creates a richer whole, adding to the impact of the closing piece, ‘Hymn to the Fallen’, with its solemn brass and chorus, gradually fading out with a mournful military drum. The music serves as a memory: ‘He did not want to sentimentalise or create emotion from what already existed in raw form. Saving Private Ryan is furious and relentless, as are all wars, but where there is music, it is exactly where John Williams intends for us the chance to breathe and remember’.

  Williams’ gift for restraint has added depth and dignity to war films and political dramas where a more showy score would feel smothering, such as his work with Oliver Stone, including Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and his later Spielberg projects, Munich (2005) and War Horse. He assesses the requirements of the film, working out whether, and how, the music will enhance our emotional connection to the story. For Munich, a thriller based on the aftermath of the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, in which the Israeli government sets out to find the Palestinian terrorists allegedly involved in the attack, the composer wanted to incorporate authentic sounds. He used the oud, a Middle Eastern lute, along with the cimbalom and a Hungarian zither. Steven Spielberg described the film as ‘a prayer for peace’ in that it set out to humanise both sides, and Williams’ stand-out piece of that name provides a contemplation with sorrowful but understated strings that are imbued with hope.

  Williams was inspired by the setting of the British countryside for War Horse (2011) and paints a bucolic picture with the opening flute of ‘Dartmoor, 1912’, followed by strings that are reminiscent of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Unlike earlier collaborations with Spielberg in which one or two themes take centre stage, his music for this film offers a variety of motifs, taking the audience from pastoral peace to the trenches and back again, all the while reflecting the atmosphere of the period. The themes are woven throughout and tied together in the end credits suite, ‘The Homecoming’, in which the flute solo returns and Williams proves he really is the master of the orchestral score. Interestingly, Spielberg has described the music for War Horse as ‘a stand-alone experience and it affected me deeply’, indicating that it can take the audience on a journey without the film – surely not something most directors would care to admit.

  The Spielberg–Williams collaborations during the 2000s offer up yet wider variety of genres and styles. Some did not have the same impact on the box office or the critics as, say, Jaws or Jurassic Park, but the sheer range demonstrates a movie-maker and a musician who enjoy getting their teeth into new ways of storytelling.

  The decade started back in science-fiction territory with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report. Eyebrows were raised when it was announced that the typically ‘happy-ever-after’ Steven Spielberg was going to take over from the late, great Stanley Kubrick and direct a film about a robot who is programmed to love. Kubrick’s intention may have been to create a more cold and clinical movie, whereas Spielberg and Williams explored the central question of the story: what it means to be human. The score can be divided into more atonal and minimalist sections, involving synthesisers and electric guitars, and a more ‘human’ angle, with a lullaby for soprano and orchestra. Kubrick, a master at selecting classical pieces for inclusion in his films, had planned to use Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, so Williams includes a quotation from it, all the while nodding to minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

  For Minority Report (2002), a neo-noir film set in 2054 where people can be punished for crimes they have not yet committed, the composer and d
irector wanted a score that was reminiscent of the Golden Age, like Adolph Deutsch’s music for one of the first major film noirs, The Maltese Falcon (1941). This might seem counter-intuitive for a story based in the future, but Spielberg and Williams wanted to use the music to reflect the parts of the film that are based on memory and looking back to the past. The composer created a more adult-sounding, thrilling score, with hints of Jaws in its atmospheric foreboding, and shades of Bernard Herrmann, who he described as ‘the grandparent of the score’.

  There was further experimentation with earlier sounds in their twentieth collaboration, Catch Me If You Can (2002), which, with its 1960s setting, allowed Williams to revisit his jazz background. He composed a light and entertaining score that he described as a musical bonbon, and the saxophone and finger-snaps of the opening cue have a real swagger to them, instantly drawing the viewer into the film. The tune returns as the FBI gets ever closer to the conman Frank Abagnale, adding a sense of menace as the tension builds towards his arrest.

  Williams returned again to jazzy styles with The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011), his first animation score – and Spielberg’s first animated film, using motion-capture techniques, with Peter Jackson stretching his visual effects skills in the role of producer. Made in the same year as War Horse, the two projects were a refreshing contrast for the composer, as the heft of the war drama juxtaposed neatly with this send-up of early adventure films. Not dissimilar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tintin is reminiscent of Golden Age scores and the opening titles offer a charming homage to the era.