- I still use a pencil and paper,
I don't have a computer--
- You old-school.
- Old-school, I've been
so busy, fortunately,
that I haven't been
able to back and retool,
because when I was studying
music, there were no computers!
First of all, life is a
great gift, life itself is,
just that we're here and we
think and we can share things.
- Johnny's the most important collaborator
I've ever had in my career,
he's made me look good,
he's made my films look better.
I get a lot credit, but really
it should be maybe John.
- He's an American composer,
conductor, and pianist.
With a career spanning over six decades,
he's composed some of the most recognized
and popular film scores
in cinematic history.
With 50 Academy Award nominations,
he's the second-most nominated
person to Walt Disney.
He's John Williams, and here's my take
on his top 10 rules of success.
Rule number 10 is my personal favorite,
and I'm curious to figure out which one
you guys liked the best.
And as always guys, as
you're watching the videos,
if you hear something that
really resonates with you,
please leave it down the comments below
and put quotes around it so other people
can be inspired as well, also,
as you are writing something down,
it's much more likely to
stick in your head too.
Enjoy!
(dramatic orchestral music)
- The first work that I did
in the Hollywood film studios
was as a pianist.
In the old Columbia
Studios, where they had
a contract orchestra, there
was an opening position
for piano, which I auditioned for,
and I was hired by the
then music director,
Morris Stoloff, who the young
people will not remember.
So that meant that every
day, Monday through Friday,
four or five days a week,
I sat in the orchestra
at Columbia Studios playing
under Mr. Stoloff's direction,
and watching him underscore
films about westerns,
or love stories, or scary
films, or comedies, or whatever,
and had a firsthand view,
as an orchestra member,
of how this process of creating
and fitting music to film went.
And two or three years into my
time in the orchestra there,
the same gentleman now
said, "Would you prepare
"the music for one scene
for next week's recording?"
So I did one scene for
next week's recording,
and apparently, it worked
out well enough that he said,
"In two weeks, will you
do two scenes for us?
"We're a little short this week,
maybe three a month later?"
So it was a series of
steps, or increments,
if you like to say, I
progressed from the piano bench,
of sitting in the orchestra
playing the piano,
to a young man sitting not
far from the music library
writing the music for
next Tuesday's recording!
- You literally are, for
many of us in this room
and watching, movie-wise,
you are the soundtrack
of our lives.
So much of your stuff
is obviously well-known,
to your point, some stuff
maybe not as well known,
but how do you know, is there
something inside of you,
how do you know when you get it right?
Do you know when you get it right?
- Very, very rarely, you
hope that you've gotten
90% of it, or get as
close with it as you can,
but at least with me, and
I think with most writers
of any kind, you really
don't say eureka, this is it.
It's working this, come back
the next week and reshape it
and do it like a, keep honing away at it,
I'm not so brilliant that I can sit down
and write a melody or a
scene or a whole scene
or a whole work, as Mozart
might've done, we're told,
dashing it off like a letter,
and the grammar's perfect.
Writing music, at least what
I, it's very, very hard work,
and for orchestra particularly,
so it's a labor-intensive thing,
I have to be in a room alone all the time,
'cause that's the way,
that's the life that it is.
- It's hard work and it's lonely work.
- It's hard work, it's lonely work,
it's labor-intensive, I
still use a pencil and paper,
I don't have a computer--
- You old-school.
- Old-school, but I've
been so busy, fortunately,
that I haven't been
able to go back retool,
because when I was studying music,
there were no computers,
we didn't have it.
These films do present a wide
range of musical challenges.
(loud startling music)
We go to great lengths
to frighten the audience,
and you sometimes advance
orchestral techniques.
A total music which would be more into
contemporary concert music,
with Bartok and others.
And people, if they heard
the music without the film,
might be shocked by it, but for me,
and for the orchestra also,
it's a pretty exciting challenge
to be still on the right
pace with what we see
and hear and feel.
For the Star Wars films, seven of them,
I don't know how many
films I've done, Travis,
maybe 100, I don't know, a lot of them
not very memorable and so
on, as we all have done,
it is probably the most
popular music that I've done,
and people will ask me,
"What's your favorite score,"
and this and that, and I've
done concertos and symphonies
and other things that are,
some good, some not so good,
some are played and many
are rightfully forgotten,
but I think, I don't know,
I think we're all the same
in this sense that you look at your work,
or listen to your work,
and it's like children,
you have three children, you
love 'em and they're beautiful,
but you wish this could've
been better here, and that,
you know, maybe as parents
we don't want to reflect that
to the children, but the
sense is whatever we do,
it can always be better, always be better!
What I would say to young people
is really what I say to myself,
if you can find the joy in music,
and first of all, life is a great gift,
life itself, is just that
we're here and we think
and we can share things
and see what's beautiful,
hear what's beautiful, music first among
all of the sounds, we think,
some of us, musicians do,
but find the joy in music,
find the joy in life,
find the joy in each other,
find the joy in the work,
and life becomes really very,
very beautiful that way,
I think, go out and find the joy.
People who have great ambitions,
I guess all of us to
be, design a spaceship,
or to become president or a senator,
and there's so much disappointment,
so few people can ever really
achieve what their dreams are.
I'm sometimes suspicious
of these great goals
that we have in mind for ourselves,
because we can get tripped
up and become disappointed
and cynical and depressed about it all.
Few of us can design spaceships
or become presidents,
or become Steven Spielberg.
Maybe better to get outside of ourselves,
and confront with joy and pleasure
and a sense of opportunity
every little simple task
we're given, rather than
to try to do the big task,
rather than to try to
shoot a gun with the wind,
but do a postcard, and
then grow from there,
you can go, our eye is
on the gun with the wind,
maybe where it shouldn't be,
maybe that should be something
that's a result of a path
that leads to a goal.
- I remember the first time
when John called me up,
and he was saying to
me, "Itzhak," he says,
"I'm doing this music score for a film
"called Schindler's List," and I said,
tell me a little bit about it,
and he just gave me a little
synopsis about it, and he says,
"I hear a violin, that's
what I hear," he says,
"Will you play that?"
And I said to myself, well, I don't know,
let me think about it, I
actually thought about it
instead of just saying,
"Yeah, I'll do it,"
it took me a few hours
to realize what it was
that he was talking about,
and then I always kind of,
I said to myself, I wonder
what he's going to do,
because, after all, it's
John Williams, who wrote ET,
wrote Star Wars, that's, what would he do
with a Jewish theme?
And he was quite amazing, and
then I looked at the score
and I played the music, and it was
such an amazing experience,
and I can tell you
that wherever I go, around the world,
it doesn't matter whether
it's in the Far East,
or whether it's in South America
or whether it's in the United States,
they ask me to play the
theme from Schindler's List.
That's like the only
piece, and everybody gets
so engrossed in this piece,
and it's a very simple tune,
but John just did something to it
that gave it this feeling
of an emotional happening,
and that's more power to the
way he composes, it's amazing.
- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,
the recipient of the 23rd
AFI Life Achievement Award,
Steven Spielberg.
(clapping)
(rousing orchestral music)
- How does he do it?
The truth is, we'll never know,
but after making 27 films together
across 43 years, yeah.
(clapping and cheering)
I think I can at least try
to explain what he does,
and it goes something like this.
First, everybody except
John makes the movie.
Thousands of people,
from all over the world,
working together for
months, sometimes for years,
and then finally, we
show our work to John.
And in fact, I think that's
why it's called a work print.
And he doesn't begin immediately.
In fact, one of the most
important steps in the process
often goes unnoticed, and it's
called the spotting session,
and it's when we decide what
scenes should have music,
and what scenes should not have music,
and it sounds simple, but
great composers like John
know that the power of music also lies
in the absence of music,
so that would be step one.
Now look at a scene like this.
This is the kind of shape our films are in
when we finally show it to
John for the first time.
(wind blowing)
- [Elliott] Not so high, not so high!
- Now, John watches the movie, and he goes
back to his house, and he sits alone
with a yellow pad and a pencil,
and his 100-year-old Steinway piano,
and he begins to write.
The violins play these
notes exactly this time
and exactly at this
tempo, the flutes do this,
the brass plays here, then
the percussion comes in
over there, and some
of these orchestrations
are as complex as Debussy,
and as accomplished
as Stravinsky, but at last, he hands
this gigantic mathematical puzzle
to an orchestra of nearly 100 people.
And it is during this arranged
marriage of image and music
that audiences fall in
love with these movies.
Now, this footage nobody
has ever seen before.
This is from 1982, the
scoring session for ET,
and I'm behind the
camera, a Super 8 camera,
doing my best to capture John at work.
So here's the man behind the curtain,
he's scoring the scene where
the mom played by Dee Wallace
first sees ET.
Now, this is what I
really want to show you,
with rough audio and bad focus,
because you will hear, and you will see
the very moment that John waves his baton,
and creates movie magic.
(rousing orchestral music)
- Not so high, not so high!
(birds chirping)
(eagle screeching)
Aha!
Don't crash, please!
(ET and Elliott groan)
(clapping)
- Without John Williams,
bikes don't really fly.
Nor do brooms in Quidditch matches,
nor do men in red capes.
There is no force, dinosaurs
do not walk the earth,
we do not wonder, we do not
weep, we do not believe.
John, you breathe belief
into every film we have made,
you take our movies, many of them
about our most impossible dreams,
and through your musical
genius, you make them real,
and everlasting for billions
and billions of people,
so it is my honor to be up
here tonight to say to you,
my lifelong friend and my
colleague, congratulations.
(clapping)
- One of my great good fortunes
is that work for me is fun,
and it's what I do every day,
I write something every day,
whether it's good, bad, or indifferent,
just the habit, the practice of truly
6 1/2 days a week,
something goes on paper.
- I always tell young people
that are starting out writing,
to, either if they're writing
script or music, slop it down,
just get it down, and then
you can always go back
and work on it some more.
- Well, I usually play these
themes for him in the piano,
and he has very good reaction,
a very good sense of
what's musically right,
and he helps me a lot too, a
lot of times I think when I,
you know this thing I
was just playing, ET,
it used to finish dee-ro-ree-ro,
that was the end of the music,
and Steven said it needed another phrase,
other kind of section, and
that's where this thing,
(whimsical piano music)
maybe something like that?
And he said, "Yeah, yeah,
go ahead, keep it going,"
that kind of thing that he does with me.
I think he's very special, as a filmmaker.
And also as a person, as
an interesting person,
it's why he's such an
interesting filmmaker, I think.
And tremendous insight into
what makes an entertaining film,
and tremendously musical,
if you don't mind
my saying it, Steven.
Musical in the sense of rhythm.
I think Steven has a wonderful
sense of rhythm in his films,
and as a musician, it's
something that I appreciate.
Every film, the action
has a kind of tempo,
or rhythm in it, or it
doesn't have it, you know?
And I look at the film,
I'm trying to find out
just exactly how fast
is it or how slow is it,
because the film is telling
me what the tempo is,
and with Steven's film I
find it all very rhythmical,
and in a funny way of
saying it, easier to score,
easier for me to make music for,
than a lot of other people's films,
because the films themselves
have a singing musical quality.
Particularly a thing like
ET, it's fabulous for music,
because the picture has
phrases, almost, you know?
- That's because I make my
movies with Johnny in mind.
(chuckling)
Temple of Doom was exactly
what George wanted.
It was Indiana Jones, it's
where he goes to hell,
and then returns to fight
and love another day,
and Johnny saw it, and I think
he reacted appropriately.
You know, dark and strange
with all the choral,
the dark male chorus with
all the stuff happening
inside the actual Temple of Doom itself.
(ominous male chants)
John did an amazing score, and
really brought the movie up
in my eyes, and I love his track music,
I love the kind of track score
where the elephants run across Sri Lanka,
I thought that was some
of the most beautiful
track music I'd ever heard.
(Eastern music)
(classical orchestral music)
When it came time for
John to write the music
for Last Crusade, John said, "You know,
"this is a father-son story,
so I'm going to write music
"that might be more appropriate
"for a less action-oriented picture
"about a father and a son,"
so he did very intimate
subtle themes for the
Indy-father relationship.
Yeah, perfect time for that.
I thought at first it could be earlier,
but that's fine.
- [John] You like that between them?
- Oh, it's wonderful!
(music drowns out speech)
It's alright, it's alright, yeah.
This for me is my
favorite of all creators.
Easily my favorite of all creators.
The one with, I think the deepest score,
and it's the most evocative
of a relationship.
(orchestral music)
- Good, good, 36, winds,
little tenuto tongue
every eighth note.
(orchestral music)
(music drowning out speech)
- Aha!
- Well, John and I have
had a 40-year relationship
this year, this is our 40th
anniversary working together,
we started working together in 1972,
it was Sugarland Express,
so this is year 40,
and we started our next
score in about three months,
Johnny's score came in three months,
that will be our, I
think, I don't remember,
(mumbling) get a lot.
John is the most important collaborator
I've ever had in my career,
he's made me look good,
he's made my films look better.
I get a lot of credit, but
really it should maybe John.
Johnny does make a contribution
that goes right to your heart.
A lot of the contributions
of my other collaborators,
you don't really single
them out for credit,
although without them,
the film wouldn't have
the impact, some of
the films wouldn't have
the impact that they
have, but John certainly
has the most considerable impact
because the music immediately bypasses
the brain and goes right to your heart,
and that's the way it's
always going to be,
he's an amazing talent.
- Everybody knows from music, one,
you have a minor chord, and a major chord,
minor being sort of unhappy and the major
being happy and clear.
Darth Vader's tune, you
may remember, is this one.
(solemn piano music)
(ominous orchestral music)
That's a sort of stately,
imperial, ominous theme
for a not very nice guy,
done in all low brass
and trombones and tubas and so on,
very different from
Luke Skywalker, who is,
(lighthearted piano music)
which is all sunny and up,
and positive, our hero!
(uplifting orchestral music)
The first little piece in this suite
is called Hedwig's Flight,
and people who know the book
and the film will know that Hedwig
is that wonderfully beautiful white owl,
so Hedwig needed some music
that was gossamer, light,
and so I thought, celeste,
which is the little keyboard,
and it's like a mini
piano, and each note on it,
you play it like a piano, but each note
is kind of like a bell, and
it has a pedal like a piano,
so if you play five quick
notes and put the pedal down,
you get this beautiful little blur,
it's kind of like a bird
feather that just would float.
(whimsical orchestral music)
Reflection of themes, musical themes,
that the wonderful opportunity of the book
and the film gave me to write,
and at the end of the film,
I was able to put
several of these together
in a kind of, not a suite exactly,
but an orchestrated finale,
where all the themes
in the picture, many of
them were brought together
in a kind of medley at
the end of the film.
- John, he'd actually
written two Raiders themes,
he'd written (whistling
Indiana Jones theme),
play that for me, (whistling
Indiana Jones theme)
which I freaked out
over, I loved it so much,
then said, "Here's another
possible Raiders score,"
Raiders main theme, and he played.
(whistling)
And so he had had two choices, and I think
my only input was to
say, can't you use both?
And he did, he made
the latter, the bridge,
and the made the former, the main theme.
- That's a perfect example
of the kind of collaboration
that we have done with these things.
Interesting about that
(humming Indiana Jones theme),
very simple little sequence of notes,
but I spend more time on those little bits
of musical grammar, to get them just right
so that they seem inevitable, seem like
they've always been
there, they're so simple,
and I don't know how many permutations
I will go through with a
six-note motif like that,
one note down, one note
up, and spend a lot of time
on these little
simplicities, which are often
the hardest things to
capture, I think for anybody.
- When he finally played the
music for me on the piano,
he previewed the main Jaws theme,
I expected to hear something
kind of weird and melodic,
kind of tonal but eerie,
and of another world,
almost a bit like outer
space inside inner space
under the water, and
what he played me instead
with two fingers on the lowers keys was,
(humming Jaws theme)
and at first I began to
laugh, I thought he was,
he had a great sense of humor,
thought he was putting me on.
And he said, "No!
"That's the theme to Jaws!"
And I said, play it
again, he played it again,
and he played it again, and
it suddenly seemed right,
and John found the signature
for the entire movie.
- One could alter the
speed of this ostinato,
it could be note, note, note, note.
(ominous orchestral music)
Any kind of alteration of
speed, very slow, very fast,
very soft, very loud.
There were opportunities in the movie
to advertise the shark with the music,
and also opportunities where
we don't have the music,
and the audience has
the sense of an absence.
They sense the absence of the shark
because they don't hear the thump-thump,
because we've conditioned them to do that.
But then you may go one step further,
and we know now the shark really is there,
but we haven't advertised it with music,
so his attack comes out silence,
and now because you've been conditioned
to have the music every
time and you don't,
when the shark arises,
it's even more terrifying!
It's one of the beauties of film medium,
that it's the combination of the visual
and the situation, this being the shark
or the knifing scene in Hitchcock's Psycho
combined with the notes,
that combination of sound
and image forming a memory.
- One of the last pieces to
come into place was the music,
by composer John Williams.
Williams' score brought
a soul to the movie,
and a musical voice to Superman.
Still today, the music remains
ingrained in American culture.
- One of the great thrills is to go in
after you've cut the movie,
and you've done all the work,
and you think it's working and stuff,
and suddenly, you go
into the scoring stage
and this composer strikes
up, and the orchestra starts,
and the movie comes alive.
- One of the essential
things about the film to me
was the fact that it was
fun, and didn't take itself
too seriously, and the way
Richard had directed it,
and particularly the way Chris and Margot
had played the parts,
that it had an almost
kind of theatrical camp, if you like to,
it didn't take itself too seriously,
and if one could strike a level of theater
and sleight of hand and tongue-in-cheek
in the creation of the themes,
that it might be the right idea.
- [Man] When somebody has the
command musically that he has
gets with 100-piece
orchestra and starts to go,
it's just so thrilling,
when you have a great score
for a movie, it just
brings everything to life.
- The day we went into a recording studio,
and we ran the opening credits,
and as Superman came on the screen,
I swear to God, if you listen carefully,
it literally, the music speaks the word.
(rousing orchestral music)
I screwed up his take, because
I just ran off yelling,
genius, genius, fantastic,
the orchestra applauded him
and everything, but it was, if you listen,
you can actually hear
the music say the word.
- The hero theme, which
is Superman himself,
which is made up of several parts
is kind of a fanfare.
Each time he opens his shirt,
you get this three-note
Superman musical motif that precedes
the exposure of his shirt,
so that if he's going
through a revolving door, the music,
whatever the six or eight
seconds preceded that,
it would establish the
kind of modus operandi
that each time he revealed his shirt,
there was this musical
balletic preparation.
- Thank you guys so much for watching,
I made this video because
Nicholas Bennett asked me to,
so if there's a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it down the comments below,
and I'll see what I can do.
I'd also love to know what did John say
that had the biggest
impact on you and why,
what are you going to take from this video
and immediately apply to your
life or to your business,
leave it down in the comments below,
and I'm going to join in the discussion.
I also want to give a quick
shout-out to Shin ai do Karate,
thank you so much for
picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, I really
appreciate the support
and that YouTube video you made as well,
thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
So thank you guys again for watching,
I believe in you, I hope you continue
to believe in yourself and
whatever your one word is,
much love, I'll see you soon.
(sonic boom)
