John Williams Documentary to Premiere Wednesday at AFI Fest: ‘When You Talk to Him About Music, He Will Talk to You About Anything,’ Director Says
Composer John Williams never wanted a film made about him. For years, the five-time Oscar winner consistently turned down every offer; he even declined an invitation from the Motion Picture Academy — which has nominated him a record 54 times — to do a career interview for its oral history program.
But he has finally relented, and the result is “Music by John Williams,” by documentary filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau, which will open the 38th edition of the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest on Wednesday. It will have a limited theatrical release in New York, Los Angeles and London, and then premiere Nov. 1 on Disney+.
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The film chronicles Williams’ rise from high-school jazz bandleader to studio pianist to TV and film composer, rocketing to prominence with his scores for Steven Spielberg and George Lucas films in the 1970s; and his eventual embrace by the classical community via a 13-year stint with the Boston Pops, subsequently conducting symphony orchestras around the world.
Bouzereau shot new interviews with Williams, Spielberg, Lucas and nearly 30 other directors, producers, composers, musicians, family members and more to round out his portrait, which also features previously unseen footage of Williams recording some of his most memorable scores (including “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”) and “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial”).
The French-born filmmaker, whose other credits include the acclaimed “Five Came Back,” about Hollywood filmmakers during World War II, and the recent “Faye,” about actress Faye Dunaway, has known Williams for 30 years, when he started making behind-the-scenes featurettes for Spielberg movies.
This project started out two years ago as a three-minute salute to Williams on his 90th birthday. Bouzereau interviewed several directors who had worked with him, including Spielberg, Lucas, Chris Columbus (“Home Alone”), J.J. Abrams (“Star Wars: The Force Awakens”) and Ron Howard (“Far and Away”). He hoped to expand it into a full-length look at the composer’s life.
Williams initially rejected the idea, Bouzereau tells Variety, quoting Williams as saying “I don’t think people really care to know about me.” The director countered by telling him: “It’s not about you, it’s about your music, and all the musicians who have collaborated with you.” The result was a series of personal interviews conducted over a three- or four-month period last year.
The composer has often given interviews over the years but, until now, has rarely discussed his youth (playing trombone at North Hollywood High), his TV career (scoring shows like “Lost in Space”), his first wife Barbara Ruick (whose tragic death at 41 left Williams with three young children to raise) or the kerfuffle when ill-mannered Boston musicians led to his (temporary) resignation from the Pops in 1984.
Spielberg recounts their first meeting, prior to Williams’ agreeing to score his first feature, “The Sugarland Express”; Lucas recalls telling Williams he wanted a “Peter and the Wolf” approach, including character themes, for “Star Wars”; Ke Huy Quan fondly remembers the “Short Round” theme Williams wrote for the second “Indiana Jones” film; violinist Itzhak Perlman admits that he almost said no to playing “Schindler’s List”; and conductor David Newman recalls playing in the violin section of “E.T.” and being wowed by Williams’ music.
Bouzereau had access to Spielberg’s own Super 8 movies of the ’70s and ’80s recording sessions and also drew on a handful of existing films, including a 1980 BBC documentary on “The Empire Strikes Back,” the 2016 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony and a 2023 American Cinematheque conversation between Spielberg and Williams.
But for the most part the footage is new. Bouzereau captured Williams relaxing on the golf course; making his annual pilgrimage to Tanglewood, Mass., summer home of the Boston Symphony; being greeted by thousands of light-sabers at the Hollywood Bowl; and the dedication, earlier this year, of a Sony music building newly named after him (drawing laughter from the crowd when he remembered first visiting it in 1940, saying “I looked around at the room and thought to myself, someday this will all be mine!”).
The key to getting Williams to open up, says Bouzereau, was to focus on his work. “When you talk to him about music, he will talk to you about anything.”
His favorite moment in the film is when Williams talks about creating the five-note alien-communication phrase for “Close Encounters.” Williams doesn’t play any of the dozens of discarded variations they tried before settling on G, A, F, F (an octave lower) and C, but rather talks in more abstract terms about how and why these seemed right to him and Spielberg.
Providing broader context about Williams’ impact on both music and film are producer and big-band singer Seth MacFarlane, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, L.A. Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, film composers Thomas Newman and Alan Silvestri, and jazz composer Branford Marsalis.
Williams’ classical compositions, including his recent violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter, are also covered. Williams, now 92, has just finished a piano concerto which pianist Emanuel Ax will debut next year at Tanglewood.
Says Bouzereau: “His music conjures memories of the movies, of childhood, of discovering cinema. He really belongs to our collective lives. I would easily compare him to Mozart; he’s the same sort of genius (in terms of) the amount of work and the humanity. John is timeless. He’s stayed very truthful to what he believes in: music. And I truly admire that.”
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