Gosh. John Williams is 80 and still working as Spielberg's composer: he's doing the music for Lincoln.
This profile paints a picture of a modest man, who clearly has had an excellent working relationship with Spielberg from day one. I enjoyed this passage:
He recalls the moment they met, at a lunch, when the 23-year-old director, who was seeking a composer for The Sugarland Express, stunned Williams by “knowing more of my music than I did”.
Right from day one, he says, he and Spielberg have worked together with a rare level of trust. One of their early projects, Close Encounters, required the composer to step in much earlier than usual, and Williams’ memory of it reveals a creative process that is still flourishing. “We had to establish that five-note motif before filming, so that Steven could shoot the arrival of the ETs,” he explains. “I remember to this day – I still have my notebooks – writing out countless combinations of five notes. We had several meetings, we circled this one and we kept coming back to it. We never really had a moment where we said: ‘Eureka! A melodic signal that’s travelled across the cosmic void!’ But from the outset, Steven has been a director who is comfortable with music in his films, and with that process with me. We’ve never had problems. It combines a loyalty, a friendship, trust, security; a set of shared aesthetic notions.”
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