Seventeen thousand people in the Hollywood Bowl cheer as an unremarkable-looking man in a white jacket with a neat grey beard and bright blue eyes walks on stage. John Williams raises his baton and the Los Angeles Philharmonic begin the theme for Star Wars’s Imperial March. Thousands of lightsabers beat time along with him. The atmosphere crackles.
Williams’s music is part of our collective psyche. Superman, Harry Potter, ET, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List – how many other films are so instantly recognisable from a few notes of their soundtracks? Laurent Bouzereau’s documentary celebrates the legendary film composer, now 92. The music, with its lush orchestral richness and unashamed emotion, is front and centre. Musicians Chris Martin and Yo-Yo Ma and directors including George Lucas, Ron Howard and Chris Columbus are among the stars offering paeans, while interviews with his most famous collaborator Steven Spielberg (a co-producer here), are the film’s backbone, the affection between the two men manifest. Williams himself is a benign, wry and unassuming figure. He is always scribbling away, says his daughter Jennifer. “He expresses himself through his music,” his grandson Ethan Gruska says.
The best moments are when Williams sits at his piano and picks out his tunes. For Jaws, says Spielberg, he was “expecting something tremendously complex and [what Williams played] was almost like Chopsticks with a couple of fingers … I thought he was joking.” Williams explains why his five-note phrase at the heart of Close Encounters of the Third Kind works. “There is something spiritual about it … it’s a conjunctive phrase that ends with an ‘if’ or a ‘but’… creating an expectation with the fifth degree of the scale.” A piece of manuscript paper with 50 other rejected five-note phrases show his workings. Spielberg marvels at the nuances and detail of his writing: in the snake sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “Johnny was scoring for individual snakes,” he says.
Glimpses of footage of Williams conducting recording sessions (the London Symphony Orchestra’s Star Wars score among them) are fascinating but fleeting, as Bouzereau zips through the seven decades that Williams has composed for film, television and concert halls. Was his every choice a wise one and his every working relationship happy and successful? Such is the narrative offered here, with no examination of how and why he so brilliantly understands the relationship between pictures and sound; nor are there insights into his composing methods, or indeed his own musical influences and icons.
Williams says he was never a movie buff and watches films only rarely, and he still writes out every note of his scores by hand, having never had the time to get to grips with technology. He likes golf – “I don’t play it, I destroy it,” he quips – but the man behind the maestro remains elusive.
• Music by John Williams is on Disney+ from 1 November
