Director Laurent Bouzereau On His Oscar-Contending ‘Music By John Williams’: The Maestro Is “Our Mozart, Our Beethoven”
When Steven Spielberg first heard John Williams’ shark music for Jaws – the menacing “dunh dunh dunh dunh” signalling the approach of the terrifying beast – he wasn’t blown away. He gave “dunh dunh” a “meh,” more or less.
That’s one of the revelations in the Oscar-contending documentary Music by John Williams, director Laurent Bouzereau’s exploration of the work of the maestro. Eventually, Spielberg came around, of course, recognizing the brilliance of the score that became integral to one of the great Hollywood blockbusters of all time. Alluding to the struggles he faced getting the motorized fish to function as intended, Spielberg says in the film, “His musical shark worked a lot better than my mechanical shark.”
More from Deadline
Bouzereau approached the documentary having absorbed Williams’s scores in his youth growing up in France. In the 1970s, a big Hollywood movie like Jaws came out in the U.S. first and it might take months to cross the Atlantic and arrive in French theaters. A film’s soundtrack would become available way before the movie itself.
“One could say that I discovered all of the great American films of the ’70s through the music first, and it was always John Williams,” Bouzereau tells Deadline. “I said to him, ‘You conjured in me images that then were reproduced when I saw the films.’ Really, I could walk into Superman and hum the theme before the movie started… He was my introduction to cinema in many ways.”
Superman, the 1978 film directed by Richard Donner, exemplifies the composer’s breadth within a single motion picture.
“Krypton – so, that’s kind of like science fiction. And then you have Smallville and that’s like an Americana kind of thing. And then it goes to the city and Metropolis, and suddenly it’s the hero’s theme and you tag onto this love theme,” Bouzereau observes. “You have really a tapestry of music there that is like no other.”
The director continues, “The range is gigantic… Particularly at the time I discovered John in the ‘70s, you can really hear the jazz influence in a score like The Eiger Sanction for example, or even Earthquake. Those scores are really remarkable. He’s classically trained, and so you sense that symphonic approach to all the great scores that we love so much. But then you discover some of his original compositions that have nothing to do with films, and it’s totally baroque. I think you get a hint of that in the Close Encounters score — the whole beginning of the film where you don’t know if the aliens are good or bad is very baroque, very abstract music, and it develops and forms into a melody at the end when we realize the aliens are actually good. And so that’s his range.”
Bouzereau interviewed many of Williams’ collaborators and admirers for his documentary, including Spielberg and George Lucas, Ron Howard, and J.J. Abrams. Filmmaker James Mangold describes the composer’s scintillating fanfare that opens the original Stars Wars as “the most famous opening in movie history.”
“There’s so many scores for films that, of course, we love, but also scores done for movies that people have forgotten or never seen that are really standalones,” Bouzereau notes. “I’m thinking about Monsignor, which is not a film that anybody remembers, but the score is spectacular. And The Fury, for example, the Brian De Palma movie, or the John Badham version of Dracula. It’s not just Star Wars and Jaws and the things we know — there’s a palette there that is absolutely incredible. You can look at his body of work and sort of retrace the history of music as it exists, really.”
Music by John Williams is not simply the maestro’s CV brought to the screen, but a subtle exploration of the man behind the music – a creator who has always preferred to remain in the background.
“He’s someone who lives by music and through music and has not really shared his journey,” Bouzereau says. “And it’s one that is super inspiring. He’s an eternal student, has a curiosity that is inspiring and exciting and having been witness to him talking to musicians is so delightful.”
Williams, 92, was born in New York City to musical parents; Johnny Williams, his dad, was a percussionist who can be heard on the soundtracks to On the Waterfront and From Here to Eternity, among other films. The documentary gentley touches on a tragic moment in Williams’ life, when his wife, the actress Barbara Ruick, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1974, at the age of 41. The composer describes her spirit guiding him back to music in the years that followed her passing. “I felt like she was helping me,” he tells Bouzereau.
Music by John Williams premiered at AFI Fest in Los Angeles in October and won Best Music Documentary at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards. Among the film’s producers are Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, and Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy – the latter two whose relationship with Spielberg and Williams goes back more than 40 years. The film is now streaming on Disney+.
Paradoxically, when the rare individual reaches success on the level of a John Williams (an admittedly small group) it becomes easy to lose track of all of their accomplishments, because there are so many of them. Williams even wrote the theme music for NBC’s Olympics coverage, as well as the theme to the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. In the realm of cinema, his extraordinary contributions include not only Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but the Indiana Jones movies, the scores for the first several Harry Potter films, Catch Me If You Can, Schindler’s List, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Angela’s Ashes, Hitchock’s Family Plot, and so many more.
“The range is gigantic, and I really feel he is like our Mozart, our Beethoven. He is is all that,” says Bouzereau. “He’s definitely modest to a fault. I just think that that’s part of who he is. And at the same time, you really sense that sort of humble, relatable humanity in his music.”
Best of Deadline
Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
