Hollywood’s maestro looks beyond movies
Williams stepping away from film, but isn’t slowing down
At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, when film production came to a halt and recording studios shuttered, John Williams, the storied Hollywood composer and conductor, found himself, for the first time in his nearly sevendecade career, without a movie to worry about.
This, in Williams’ highly ritualized world — mornings spent studying film reels and improvising at his Steinway; a turkey sandwich and glass of Perrier at 1 p.m.; afternoons devoted to revisions — was initially disorienting.
But in the months that followed, Williams came to relish his freedom. He had time to compose a violin concerto, immerse himself in scores by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, and go for long walks on a golf course near his home in Los Angeles.
“I welcomed it,” Williams said. “It was an escape.”
Now the film industry is back in action, and Williams, who recently turned 90, is once again at the piano churning out earworms — pencil, paper and stopwatch in hand.
But Williams, whose music permeates popular culture to a degree unsurpassed by any other contemporary composer, is at a crossroads. Tired of the constraints of film — the deadlines, the need for brevity, the competition with sound effects, the work eating up half a year — he said he will soon step away from movie projects.
“I don’t particularly want to do films anymore,” he said. “Six months of life at my age is a long time.”
In his next phase, he plans to focus more intensely on another passion: writing concert works, of which he has already produced several dozen. He has visions of another piece for a longtime collaborator, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and he is planning his first proper piano concerto.
“I’m much happier, as I have been during this COVID time, working with an artist and making the music the best you can possibly make it in your hands,” he said.
Yet the legacy of his more than 100 film scores — the “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and “Harry Potter” franchises among them — looms large, to say nothing of his fanfares, themes and celebratory anthems for the likes of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Sunday Night Football” and the Olympics.
“He has written the soundtrack of our lives,” said conductor Gustavo Dudamel. “When we listen to a melody of John’s, we go back to a time, to a taste, to a smell. All our senses go back to a moment.”
Williams’ music harks back to an era of Hollywood blockbusters, when crowds gathered at theaters to be transported. He has excelled at creating shared experiences: instilling in every member of an audience the same terror about a menacing shark, conjuring a common exhilaration in watching spaceships take flight.
The pandemic has robbed Hollywood of some of that magic. But Williams’ admirers say his music, with its appeal across cultures and generations, is an antidote to the isolation of the moment.
“We need him more now than we’ve ever needed him before,” said Hans Zimmer, another storied film composer.
Williams — a fixture in the industry since the 1950s, with 52 Academy Award nominations, second only to Walt Disney, and five Oscars — recognizes that he might be the last of a certain type of Hollywood composer. Grandiose, complex orchestral scores, rooted in European romanticism, are increasingly rare. At many film studios, synthesized music is the rage.
“I feel like I’m sort of sitting on an edge of something,” he said, “and change is happening.”
Born in New York, Williams became interested in composing as a teenager, entranced by the orchestral scores and books brought home by his father, a jazz percussionist.
After stints as a studio pianist in Hollywood in his 20s, he found work as a film and television composer, making his feature film debut at 26, in 1958, with “Daddy-O,” a comedy about street racing.
In the 1970s, Williams’ work caught the attention of Steven Spielberg, then an aspiring filmmaker.
The two began a partnership that has spanned a half-century and more than two dozen films, including “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Schindler’s List” and “Jaws,” for which Williams’ two-note ostinato became a cultural phenomenon.
“When everyone came out and said ‘Jaws’ scared them out of the water, it was Johnny who scared them out of the water,” Spielberg said. “His music was scarier than seeing the shark.”
In 1974, when he was 42, Williams suffered what he called “the tragedy of my life” when his first wife, actor Barbara Ruick, died suddenly.
“It taught me who I was and the meaning of my work,” he said, but added that the next several years were difficult, and he struggled
as a single parent of three children with a busy career. “Star Wars,” which premiered in 1977, brought a new level of fame and marked the beginning of a four-decade-long project that has encompassed nine films, dozens of musical motifs and more than 20 hours of music.
George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” said Williams was the “secret sauce” of the franchise.
This year, Williams will complete what he expects to be his final two films: “The Fabelmans,” loosely based on Spielberg’s childhood, and a fifth installment in the “Indiana
Jones” series.
At the end of his film career, Williams is making time to pursue some longtime dreams, including conducting in Europe. His works were once considered too commercial for some of the great concert halls. But when he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2020, players asked for photos and autographs.
Williams said he tries not to fixate on age. And he said he does not fear death; he sees life as a dream, at the end of which we awaken.
“Music has been my oxygen,” he said, “and has kept me alive and interested and occupied and gratified.”
Williams recalled a recent pilgrimage to
St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach once worked as a cantor. He listened intently as a pastor described the efforts to protect the great composer’s remains during World War II; he marveled at the dedication to preserving Bach’s legacy.
On his way out of the church, he paused. An organist was filling the grand space with the hymnlike theme from “Jurassic Park.”
Williams, beaming, turned to the pastor.
“Now,” he said, “I can die.”