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Above: Shortly after Steven Spielberg (left) and John Williams (right) made a breakthrough with 1975’s
Jaws
, their second film together,
they began work on 1977’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Williams visited the set during filming (pictured) while working on the score,
particularly while developing the recurring five-note motif for communicating with the visiting aliens.
Below: Unlike most film composers of his time, Bernard Herrmann (right) insisted on final creative control of the music in his scoring projects,
so he too would visit the sets during filming to take in the visual tone. The busy schedule could catch up with him, however, and while in the
studio where 1958’s
Vertigo
was being filmed, Alfred Hitchcock (left) caught Herrmann in the midst of an impromptu nap.
“He’s never once said, ‘I don’t like
that.’ Or ‘This won’t work.’ Or, ‘We need
to do something else’,” Williams said of
Spielberg. “He’s enjoyed everything I’ve
done, as I have with him.”
“I have absolute trust and faith that
John is right when he sees my movie
for the first time,” Spielberg said. “He
enhances it and takes it to an entirely
different level.”
So, what secret did Williams/Spiel-
berg possess that enabled them to
outlast and outperform Herrmann/
Hitchcock?
In a word:
style.
Herrmann
supplied a
defined musical
style to Hitch-
cock’s pictures,
and the compos-
er’s unwillingness
or inability to
adapt eventu-
ally eroded his
relationship with
the director.
(“What do you
want with me?”
he reportedly said
to Hitchcock. “I
don’t write pop
music!”)
“John is
different,” Spiel-
berg said of his
musical sidekick.
“John doesn’t
have a style like
Dimitri Tiomkin
has a style. I can
close my eyes
and recognize a
Dimitri Tiom-
kin score. John
is much more a
chameleon. He changes his style to suit
the picture that we’ve made. That’s the
most amazing thing about working with
John. I don’t get the same John Williams
twice.
“Unless it’s a sequel.”
In 2011, the dynamite duo did some-
thing they had never done before—they
sat down with each other to talk about
their incredible collaborations before
a studio audience at the Conservatory
of the American Film Institute. (
NB
:
Most of the quotes in this article come
directly from that exchange, broadcast
by Turner Classic Movies.) Spielberg
and Williams selected examples of their
favorite scenes merging music with
visuals.
Williams picked the iconic scene
from
E.T.
in which young Elliott (Henry
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