It begins with Jaws. Of course it begins with Jaws. Has any composer in history utilised two simple notes — an alternating pattern between E and F — so effectively? So iconically? It feels obvious to begin a documentary entitled Music By John Williams with perhaps his most famous work, but it also feels like there would be no other way to begin.
This film comes from Laurent Bouzereau, a prolific author and documentarian who has made making-of films for Steven Spielberg for decades, and has written at least three books on the filmmaker, including last year’s Spielberg: The First Ten Years. Bouzereau has even made a documentary on Williams before — 2017’s TV film Steven Spielberg & John Williams: The Adventure Continues. So, there is certainly a sense of well-trodden ground here, and it’s a fairly cosy portrait between regular collaborators, rather than a probing journalistic inquiry.
Does an excellent job of capturing his importance.
Still, this is John Williams we’re talking about. There are few figures in our culture who inspire such universal devotion and reverence. “It’s unique how happy people are around him,” notes one contributor — and that’s because his music has soundtracked our childhoods, our adulthoods, has seeped into the DNA of our cultural consciousness. For all its occasional weaknesses, this film does an excellent job of capturing that importance.
Given Spielberg is his longest and most important collaborator — and given the film is partly produced by Amblin — the focus is understandably on The Beard. Williams was already 40 when he met Spielberg and that’s where the story picks up, the filmmaker already a fanboy before he had even made his first film.
Then the narrative darts back to Williams’ early life, growing up in a family of musicians. As a young man he expected to forge a career as a pianist, obsessed only with jazz. “The fact that I ended up composing,” Williams says in one of his many warm musings, “was a series of fortuitous accidents.”
The work that gets the most attention is about what you’d expect — Star Wars (which he initially found “a little kooky”’), Close Encounters (heavily shaped by the death of his wife, aged just 41), E.T., Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones — which leads to a joyful moment from Ke Huy Quan, giddy with excitement that his character in Temple Of Doom has his own theme. “How many actors can say that they have a theme composed by the legendary John Williams?”
The film also briefly demonstrates the peppy opening sequence of The Last Crusade with and without the score, and how differently it plays. Williams’ music was never just background noise — it was storytelling in its own right. “It’s the purest form of art I’ve experienced from any human being,” Spielberg says.
There’s a starry line-up of contributors singing his praises, including George Lucas, Ron Howard, J.J. Abrams, and somewhat pointlessly Chris Martin, whose tenuous connection is that Coldplay would sometimes come on stage to the theme from E.T.. Williams himself is genial company, too, even now in his nineties. But it’s his music that is the real star here. That’s what you’ll be humming, long after the credits have rolled.