Mark Kermode on… composer John Williams, master of unforgettable blockbuster soundtracks

Some years ago I interviewed the British director Edgar Wright about his favourite soundtrack albums. I mentioned that, in the age before videos, I had owned and learned by heart the spoken-word-and-song soundtrack for the Magic Roundabout feature film Dougal and the Blue Cat. Wright reminded me that, in the 80s, there had been a tie-in Storybook album for Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, with Michael Jackson narrating the film and breaking down in tears when ET appears to die. The record also included John Williams’s score, which, as Wright noted, “told the story better than any narrator ever could”.

Now streaming on Disney+ is a new documentary, Music By John Williams, in which the French-American film-maker Laurent Bouzereau (creator of umpteen behind-the-scenes movie docs) interviews the American composer, who has defined the face of modern orchestral movie music. Williams’s recollections, from his earliest days as a hard-practising pianist (he has a background in jazz) to his blockbuster collaborations with film-makers such as Spielberg and George Lucas, are as clear and concise as his earworm theme tunes for Superman (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Star Wars (1977) – the last of which spawned a double-LP soundtrack that became the biggest selling symphonic album of all time.

Williams is undoubtedly the greatest “whistle test” composer of his age – a purveyor of instantly memorable tunes that both capture and breathe life into the movies they accompany. In Bouzereau’s documentary we see archive footage of the late Christopher Reeve (also the subject of a new film in cinemas: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story) declaring that “I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to John Williams. Without his music, Superman’s powers are greatly diminished.” Reeve adds that Williams’s score in effect enabled him to fly. Elsewhere, Spielberg confirms the oft-told story that when Williams played him the two-note theme for Jaws (1975) on the piano, “at first I thought he was joking” – only to realise that “his musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark!”. And we hear the violinist Itzhak Perlman sheepishly admit to telling Williams that he would “think about” playing on his 1993 Schindler’s List score, the Oscar-winning strains of which reduced Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, to tears after just 10 notes.

Born in New York in 1932 and classically trained at the city’s Juilliard School, Williams played in Hollywood studio orchestras for many years – he’s there on hits as diverse as West Side Story and To Kill a Mockingbird – before turning to orchestration and composition. On his early film scores he was credited as “Johnny Williams”, becoming John only when a colleague told him he needed a name that people would take seriously. And how they did; to date, Williams has racked up five Academy Award wins and a whopping 54 nominations, most recently for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) at the age of 91, making him the oldest nominee in any competitive category in the awards’ history.

The range of Williams’s film scores is extraordinary, from the old-school twang of The Reivers (1969) to the experimental edginess of his work with Japanese percussionist and keyboardist Stomu Yamash’ta on Robert Altman’s 1972 psychodrama Images (which Spielberg used as an early temporary soundtrack to Jaws), to the jazzy sounds of Catch Me If You Can (2002). He has also scored disaster movies – The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), Earthquake (1974); Hitchcock’s last feature, Family Plot (1976); prime-period Oliver Stone hits Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and JFK (1991); and the first three Harry Potter movies (2001-4).

More remarkable still is the influence Williams continues to have on a diverse range of fellow composers. When MM Keeravani won best score last year at the LA Film Critics Association awards for RRR, the Indian composer noted that: “I learned a lesson when I happened to watch the movie Jaws. Whenever the shark was approaching, there was an indication of danger. I was expecting an intricate and complicated melody with a rich orchestration, but I was shocked as it was very humble and simple.”

Meanwhile, the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, who provided the brilliant electronic score for Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, spoke to me for a book I’m writing about film music (out next year) and said: “I remember seeing Jaws when I was quite young. I saw it with a friend who said: ‘You’ll know the shark’s coming because of the music!’ I remember latching on to that, and hiding under my seat whenever the music kicked in. In a way that was the dropping of the veil of childhood. I remember realising there and then that not everything was designed to make you feel good, or feel secure.”

Fifty years after Spielberg thought he was joking about those two notes, John Williams’s most famous film theme continues to resonate through modern movies.

• All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.

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