John Williams
Appearances
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Yeah, and sophisticated. And sophisticated, yeah. It's a tough one because there's so much variation in the training of these directors and the taste that they develop or don't develop. And their educations are all at a different level and from different angles and so on. If you talk about a Bartok violin concerto or something, most of them will not know what that is. Right.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Most film directors will know, have some familiarity with film music. They will know Bernard Herrmann and they will know Miklas Roja and so on and so forth. But they won't know Ligeti or even less esoteric things than that.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I don't know if you all remember Martin Ritt, a director who was a theater director in New York, came out here like Kazan and did some wonderful films, was very suspicious of music in his film. He'd come from Broadway where we didn't have background music or rarely had it, and he wanted people to believe music. what they were seeing and what they were hearing was real.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And so you have put a symphony orchestra behind this dialogue scene and they say, a man like Martin who says, I can't believe that. I don't need to have that. I've created the scene. My actors have done the job. You don't need to help them. And that's the opposite of Stephen who can't seem to quite get enough music in his film. So different, good for me, by the way. Yeah, right, right, right.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
No, there's such variation there. But I think what people truly recognize is that it's true what Bernard Harmon said. There's no such thing as a silent film. We go back when the silence – we had the silence. We had organ or we had an orchestra in the pit. We had somebody playing a violin, something. It would animate and – Music seems an inseparable part of filmmaking.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And whether it's contemporary electronic music or classical romantic music, we recognize the need of it. Actors will be sometimes very unhappy when you play too much music for them.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
You mean the resources in Schindler's List, more chamber music, it was a smaller... Right, yeah.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Right. Some of the most breathtaking and horrible things was just his violin. I agree, yeah. Whether it was a conscious decision to make it a more intimate chamber music kind of thing was something we must have made either unconsciously or through dialogue.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I don't think it would have worked quite well. Right, right. So we stay with this up, a much better idea.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I love it. I like doing it. Yes, it is fun. I also like not doing it. Meaning I can play the score for the audience in the Theatre Earth Bowl without the film, without the distractions.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
of the film and i can describe to the to the audience they're about to hear the kind of virtuosity they're going to hear in action scenes and so on where the music is extremely difficult to play it's a virtuoso level which when you watch the film you you can't appreciate it there's just too much right yeah so i i can take it very happily both ways with film or without it
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, you remember the last 15 minutes had started with the bike chase. That's right. The police chasing the kids. Right. The kids trying to get E-Team back to the spaceship. And they accelerate to escape velocity, which I understand is 17,500 miles an hour. Right. And we buy that. And the kids fly over the moon. I got that detail from NASA, by the way.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And they land and the spaceship lands and E.T. and his little friends, earthling children, say goodbye to E.T. and it's very sentimental. And at the end of the sequence, the ship will go up and does a whirling left turn to the flourishes of trumpets at that moment and so on. So in that 10 minutes, there's probably, in every minute of the 10, there are probably 10 sink points, okay? Maybe more.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Somebody's foot, bicycle going up, something falling, whatever. Almost like a cartoon, but you don't... You don't want to hear it that way, but you want to support, at least in the style of this thing, this film. And so on the day of recording, I had the orchestra and we rehearsed a piece and made a few takes. And I could accomplish the first two minutes, which we could have done separately.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And I had problems in four, syncing. The orchestra wanted to... bloom out or blossom out a little bit more than the film would allow me to do or some concentrated action film that sped up and sped up and arrived here so a little quicker than I wanted to get the orchestra to it and I couldn't I really couldn't get the sync the way it should be
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And I finally said to Stephen, I can't seem to be able to get this right. He said, we'll turn the film off. We know where the sync points are. The music is constructed for that end. And you record the music where all the rubati, the phrasing and so on, is done for musical satisfaction. The revival, the breathing of the whole thing.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Which is what he did. Yeah, which is crazy. And I really believe that there's a kind of a, this is not a rabbi praising himself, there's something operatic about that last 10 minutes. Yeah. That I think without that... give and take breathing of the whole orchestra and the way they wanted to and the way the bow is finished here but not here.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
This kind of kinetic, if you like, is more satisfactory, seems to be more satisfactory than a take that is slavishly in sync.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I could say it glibly. But to reduce it a little bit, I would say The Close Encounters, I had that kind of feeling about it. something about that grammar. I think it was 1977. And I had done first Star Wars and Close Encounters the same year. And it was, talk about a head turn thing. You know, I had really struggled to get out of Star Wars and into Close Encounters.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Talk about spiritual aspects of, I mean, the whole end of that film took us to a place a high place, and the orchestra had to, it almost has a religious quality to it.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And where Star Wars is all fun and fanfares and action and comedy and all the rest of that, but this was a more serious thought about our circumstance in the universe. where we are and where we may be going.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think the script asked for five notes, I believe. And my first sort of attempts at that, I kept saying to Stephen, it's much easier to do seven. But seven, five is like a doorbell. It's like a signal.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Where seven notes, you just get over that thump, and now you've got, when you wish upon a star, if you like, I don't know how many notes that is in the phrase, but it becomes a melody rather than a signal.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
That was the response, yeah. Oh, that was such a language. So then... Then I took some paper, I still have the papers, and I think I wrote about, I don't know, a hundred or more five-note motifs in any intervallic relationship up-down, so to speak, and no consideration of length of the notes. It isn't... It doesn't do that. And I kept playing them for Stephen.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
He'd come over to my piano and we'd go through these things. And we both kept circling this one without deciding. And finally one day in frustration, we weren't getting anywhere, and he said or I said, let's just use this one. It seems fine. Yeah, fine.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
That's right. Wow. That's true. Well, there's a lot of the conversation that we now know back and forth between this computer, Truffaut and his group, and the ship's answers was much more elaborate with color and lights. Stephen eventually correctly cut it down a little bit so it was more manageable. But it's a wonderful idea.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I mean, there are... Like Kodály was a Hungarian composer with this idea of hand signals that's almost like deaf people would hear notes. And Scriabin, a Russian composer, who was obsessed with the idea of color and red is a certain kind of note or a certain texture and so on. So a lot of work had been done. And, you know, not really very scientific work at all, but...
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It's just incredible. It was all written out. I have a saw and then put into a computer to produce it.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
You're a return. He told me that just last week. One thing I would say at this point is that it's probably true that music is older than language. And that's deeply embedded in all of our structure. And you understood it, not linguistically, but musically or spiritually in some way.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Oh, that's so difficult. Beethoven Ninth, Ode to Joy. I'd start there, I guess. One thing I wanted to add about the five-note signal, which is an after-the-fact rationalization. But you have what is re, do, do, do, sol, okay? Re, do, do, that's the tonic note. Do, again the tonic note down, and sol. Sol in music, which is the fifth degree, is an equivalent in language to a conjunctive but or and.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Hello, gentlemen. How are you today? I just saw pictures of all three of you, and you looked healthy to me, like three NFL players on their day off.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It's what you remembered as a child somehow that you know is part of a sentence.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think once you realize that, there's great power in the fact that it doesn't settle.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It absolutely works, and you don't need to think about it. Yeah. It does that for us.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, I think a lot of Lenny's music was awkward, frankly. You played it, so you know why and how that is said. But it's a lot of part of the... animated energy that he left in his music.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I never frankly planned to develop as a film composer at all. My father was, one of the things that he did in his professional life as a musician was to play in Hollywood studio orchestras. And so as a teenager, and I was a serious piano student, I really wanted to be a concert pianist.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
He took me to recording sessions there in the studio, and I became fascinated by what people were doing to score the films, how it was orchestrated, written, and so on.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And eventually I... My job was playing piano in those orchestras. You mentioned that I played in Western Story. I also played way back Some Like It Hot. Do you remember that? Yeah. That was you playing in the movie? Yes, I played on that. And The Apartment. Do you remember The Apartment?
SmartLess
"John Williams"
and Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. So my introduction to writing for film was through the influence of older colleagues for whom I played the piano. And they said, can you orchestrate? And I said, yes. Well, here's a piece for next Tuesday. Orchestrate this for me, which I did. And then just at that point in my development, television became very, very popular.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It was such a slow, unplanned process. and the process, I must say, really moving from television to feature films. I think at that time in my life, it was wonderful because I had so much more time to work on the feature film. Television show, if you did Alcoa Theater, for example, it was an hour show,
SmartLess
"John Williams"
you would have to write it within a week, 25 minutes of music or so, orchestrate it and conduct it. Wow. And so that was hard. To do a feature film may have 25 or 30 minutes of music, but you have six weeks to do it and a higher fee and a better orchestra and so forth. So it was a gradual step up that was evolutionary rather than anything planned.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It's a very unifying thing. Yeah. One of the things that draws our humanity, congeals it. I think what you say about listening presents something very hopeful, I think, about music. We mentioned before that it's not language, it's something general. It may be in the end that Bernstein was right, that it is international. It goes beyond language.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
We're talking about the divisions of the Oxford and Fifth, and the Fifth being the conjunctive language. It's something that I think we can place a little hope in, that it's something we all may share at an intellectual level that isn't particularly linguistic.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Yeah. We all do that. Yeah. I wish that could be better or a change of note or phrase or whatever timing. Absolutely.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think probably the latter, what was required at the moment. Although one of the things that I... I did have a wonderful opportunity in service to orchestrate for military band because there were not a lot of publications for that instrumental combination available beyond Sousa and a few other earlier lights.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, presently, our military bands, Marines and Army in Washington, are superb. Superb, yeah. The Marine band in Washington, there's a brass section that is equivalent to the Chicago Symphony. I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say. Wow, wow, that's cool. It's absolutely fantastic. Our principal trumpet, Tom Hooten, in L.A. Philharmonic, is the former Marine trumpeter.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
He did, I don't know, two or three years in the Marine band there and then came here and auditioned in one Los Angeles Philharmonic. So it's been a big tradition in our country, band-to-band tradition.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Hey, look, there he is. I've been going up there for close to 50 years. You would never know it by the way I play. I never did play well. It's gotten worse over the years.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
But I sit all day at the piano from early in the morning, lunch, just to keep working. And to keep this old bag of bones moving, I have to walk. And I'm living very close to the course, so I can go up there and walk. I try to walk for an hour, so that could be holes one, two, three, and four, or one, two, six, and seven, depending on the traffic and so on.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And I get a cart so that I can stay out of the way of people like you guys who can really play.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
It's very relaxing. You don't have to entertain anybody or be entertained. I can mull and meditate things flashing through my mind.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Also, any golf course, such a piece of beautiful work, particularly when there's nobody on it. You can see the contours of this glorious green. It's a big park. It's a beautiful invention. Greatest possible luxury in a crowded urban area.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Don't even possibly think of 60 as an age to retire. No, no. I'm just throwing it out there. That's a teenager.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
You guys have got years and years of productive work. From your lips. Enriching everybody. You do. Absolutely do. Enjoy. It's there. You have it. Thank you so much, guys. A great, great pleasure. Thank you, John.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Now, Sean, who did the first performance of the Piano Concerto of Gershwin?
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, the books are wonderful. Yeah. His wit and the whole thing. I met him once. Oh, you did? Yes, in the office of Louis B. Mayer. Oh, wow. Accompanying Howard Keel and a woman, his name I can't remember. And they were auditioning Howard and the girl for... Louis B. Mayer, and he had people from the music department, including Oscar. That's crazy. At this audition.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And it was in Mayer's office where there was a piano. And I just came in, you know, sheepishly through the back door to accompany these people and then leave before the discussion started. Really? I've always adored Oscar Levant.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
That's fantastic. He's great. You know, he was a student of Schoenberg. Did you know that? Wow. You were? No way. Oscar was. Oh, yeah, he was a very serious musician. Well, Oscar was.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
No, no, no, Michael. Oh, Oscar was, yes. I knew that. But how can I help you guys? What on earth can I possibly give you? You've already done plenty by agreeing to do this.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, of course, I really didn't have contact or access to them. I did have a relationship with Lou Wasserman, actually, but he was of a younger generation than the Warner Brothers.
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"John Williams"
Jack Warner, I used to go to the previews of the Warner Brothers films that I did, and Jack Warner always went to those, and I met him three or four times at those previews, and he knew I had something to do with music. I never knew my name, so he referred to me as Beethoven. Yeah. At the end of the preview, we say, we need a little more music in reel five. And I just say, yes, sir, we'll do that.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
But the other moguls, I'm afraid, were a generation beyond me. But what I would say about them, I think, is they were all ideologues in a way. early motion picture entrepreneurs, probably a little, when I say ideologues, they were probably a little bit naive in their approach to the world.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
More than anything, you know, from Eastern Europe, from Brooklyn, from across the country to Hollywood. And really creating from the ground up the business that has been so wonderful all through the last century. Now, of course, threatened by all kinds of forces, technology of all kinds and worldwide production of film that...
SmartLess
"John Williams"
that not eclipses Hollywood, but it puts it in a different kind of a frame of lighting and creativity.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, probably the access and the easy availability to all manner of things on film and whatever that is available at home. Right. And so the great, I mean, just to flip about it, I mean, the great impediments might be said to be traffic jams and parking lots. Yeah, yeah. become more difficult I think for people and the alternatives more easy to access. But we lose something. I think there's a...
SmartLess
"John Williams"
The old movie theaters were kinds of sort of temples where people would gather. It was a communal connection. Once a week you'd go to the movies or twice a week in this special atmosphere that had a spiritual vibe to it. And people would collect them there. It was almost like going to church in a way. The proscenium, the beautiful theater and so on.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And there was a magic in all of that, I think, that attracted people. And we don't have that anymore. Even in newly constructed theaters have far less, they're utilitarian, of course, but far less imagination in the way the stages are constructed and so on.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think in terms, I don't know if this is off the subject, but we think of the music of Bach three or four hundred years ago. there were no concert halls. If you wanted to hear music, you had to go to church to hear an organ, to hear people sing. And that's where you received your music. You wanted to hear a Bach cantata, you heard it in church, not in the concert hall.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
The concert hall is in a way constructed to ring the antiquarian bells, I guess you could say, of our collective memory. that we're gathered for something very, very special and we listen to Beethoven in this atmosphere. Right. Or we go and we watch Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in that atmosphere.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think all of the social changes and pragmatic aspects of all of this has changed so much that... I think that spiritual aspect of the experience of seeing films is largely gone. A complex series of reasons for that.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
I think the answer has to be no because what I'm working, I'm thinking of some kind of ideal that I know is ever going to be there. It makes me want to say there are other differences. I think the technologies and special effects that can be accomplished
SmartLess
"John Williams"
make it unnecessary to do a 10-minute, one take, complicated dance number by Fred Astaire, where the actual performance is something that is breathtaking. We don't know that it's not edited, but we can feel that aspect of physical exertion and mastery of one's body. Same is true of singing. The same can be said of orchestras, I think, also.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
The difference between so much beautiful work, by the way, of sound design that's done in combination with orchestra is now a wonderful development. However, if we have a scene that's four minutes long and the orchestra is going to play that in the studio, we may make five takes of that four-minute scene. And each one is different.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
One take is alive, is a performance that is above and beyond spiritually all the other four. And you have to believe that the audience will respond to that. It's like live performances, as you all know, are different every night. Some night it's full of magic and the next night it's flat. We say the audience isn't good.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
So I think technology has affected the performance aspect of film, making it very easy to sort of mock up something that is beyond most people's ability to do.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Yeah, is there a temp? It's good if possible not to even read a script or see anything until the thing has been edited when we can form first impressions that will lead us in our work more effectively than almost anything else. You read a book, you cast it, you develop the... the atmospheres and so on, and you can be very disappointed if you see a director's impression of what that would be.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Or delighted and surprised also. It's not always possible. We have to discuss certain things with the directors maybe before it's been finished. Your second question about, maybe I can call it thematic inspiration, if you like. That is not something I just pick up immediately when I see the film.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
In my case, it's going back to the piano, working a theme or two or three, manipulating them into something that seems inevitable, like it's been there always.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And that's the hardest part, I think, of the work, The simplest thing is the hardest thing, you know?
SmartLess
"John Williams"
Well, it is true. I wondered what to do about the shark. But he came in and I played boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It was a D, the third note, if you remember. Oh, right, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, right. Yeah, yeah. Right. And he looked at me and said, really? You think that could work? I thought maybe I had lost my mind.
SmartLess
"John Williams"
And I don't really remember the conversation, but it must have been something like, well, Stephen, I think when the cellos and basses and the orchestra would do it, it could be very ominous. And what is good about it is that it can be very slow. It can speed up as the shark is approaching or the red herring is approaching. Right, right. And the orchestra can join.