The Hollywood Reporter 最新Johnny访谈

2006-01-12 20:26:27 来自: 赵辛楣

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Dialogue: John Williams
In a typically prolific year, Hollywood's preeminent film composer tackled 'Munich,' 'Memoirs' and another journey through the stars.

It would be an understatement to assert that John Williams has reached the pinnacle of film scoring -- most assume he did so during the late 1970s -- but when one asks other film composers about music they like from their contemporaries (as The Hollywood Reporter does each year), Williams' work invariably tops the list. With 43 Oscar nominations to his credit, Williams is only two shy of becoming the most-mentioned movie composer (Alfred Newman holds the record with 45), and at 73, an age when many would be long-since retired, he maintains a busy schedule of conducting, writing for the concert hall and composing for film. Williams' rewarding professional relationship with director Steven Spielberg has yielded 22 feature projects -- including some of the most popular and critically lauded movies of the past few decades -- and the composer reached a special landmark in 2005, wrapping up George Lucas' "Star Wars" epics by scoring Fox's "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith."

Interestingly, just as Williams followed the original 1977 "Star Wars" film with Spielberg's 1977 release "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," he followed "Episode III" with Spielberg's Paramount actioner "War of the Worlds." The indefatigable composer then followed those popcorn epics with Sony's "Memoirs of a Geisha," a long-in-gestation project he tackled with director Rob Marshall, and Universal's "Munich," Spielberg's year-end tale about a Mossad agent (Eric Bana) tracking Palestinian terrorists responsible for the assassination of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics. Williams spoke recently with Jeff Bond for The Hollywood Reporter about his busy year, his fruitful collaboration with Spielberg and his enduring love of film music.

The Hollywood Reporter: Weren't you originally going to work with Steven Spielberg on "Memoirs of a Geisha"?
John Williams: He acquired the rights to (Arthur Golden's) book five or six years ago, and he had every intention of making it and probably directing it. I mentioned to him that I loved the book and would like to write the score, should he do it, and things sat there for several years until Rob Marshall was chosen to do the film. Steven introduced me to Rob Marshall, and I was able to tell him how much I loved the project and wanted to write the music. We arranged to have lunch and talk about it, and a few weeks later, he called me with the news that he wanted me to do it.

THR: In a case like that, where you are a fan of the book, have you ever thought of musical ideas before you've seen the film?
Williams: I don't remember sitting down and trying to work on music from a book or a script; it's more of a visual stimulation with me. Several years had transpired, and I had forgotten a lot of the details of ("Memoirs") until I saw the film, and it reminded me of all that. It's more a stimulation that comes from the whole visual presentation, all the textural aspects and the rhythmic aspects of what the film means, the editing speed, the whole kinetic of the film and the atmosphere of it. It's more than just seeing a picture; it's experiencing an event in time and visuals that eventually translates into time and sound -- i.e., the music.

THR: You wrote a great theme for "Memoirs." On a theme like that -- where it's played in whole and ties the entire film together -- do you respond to the movie as a whole, or is there an image or a character that inspires that type of melody?
Williams: Melodies or melodic identification are, for me, the hardest things to do, and I spend a lot of time on those melodies that will sound very simple or inevitable when they're heard. In a case like this, it's weeks of tinkering around with various approaches and different ideas and trying to manipulate one or the other to make it feel like it lives or wants to belong in the film in a very natural way. It's not easy for me, and I spend more time doing that than orchestrating or developing or doing contrapuntal workouts of the material -- once I have the material, all those other things are relatively easy. Beyond that, it's always hard to say. If we talk about the genesis of these things, a lot of it has to do with the way you feel and how you respond to the material.

I think that Rob did a beautiful piece visually; it seems to me you could stop it on any frame, and it looks like a museum-quality photograph. That's one aspect of it, and another is, writing themes or creating these melodies which are fairly simple in the end and are so difficult to find and create -- in the process of doing that, I knew that I was going to have (famed cellist) Yo-Yo Ma to write for, and I've worked with Yo-Yo for 25 years on one kind of project or another. I think when you sit down to write for someone whose voice you know so well, that in itself is an inspiration. And although there's not a lot of violin writing in the film, the thought of asking anyone other than Itzhak Perlman wasn't an option -- so, again, writing material for the film and knowing these performers were going to deliver it is not only an inspiration but also a guide.

THR: How much feedback did you receive from Rob Marshall? Did he ask you for specific things, and how did you demonstrate your ideas for him?
Williams: I don't work with computers or synthesizers; I'm sort of unreconstructed in that way, and I just write with pencil and paper. I think we had one meeting in my office, and I played on the piano for him two or three items that were going to be part of the score. He loved them and was very encouraging, and the next time we met was at Royce Hall (on the UCLA campus in Westwood), on the recording stage. He was again so encouraging there, and actually, after recording was done, he had some wonderful ideas about the use of the music. We didn't rerecord any of it, but he changed the places of some cues, and having heard the theme for Sayuri (the film's main character, played by Zhang Ziyi), he wanted to use it in other places I may have overlooked or had another idea about -- so he was a wonderful collaborator in that way. Rob has been very successful in theater, and he has worked with composers before on original music and seems to be very comfortable with the process.

THR: How did you approach the period and setting of "Memoirs"? There is some evocative use of traditional instruments in the score.
Williams: It's all written out, and we have wonderful drummers in Los Angeles who have kabuki instruments and taiko drums of all sorts -- wood and metal, used in traditional Japanese theater -- and they were all available to me. Although we didn't do a lot of layering or overdubbing, we did some with the percussion, which gives it energy but also a kind of glow. There are koto bits and pieces in there -- which is a Japanese 13-stringed instrument -- and most of those are ghosted by a conventional Western chromatic harp, where you might have 70% of the energy coming from the koto and the rest coming from the harp, where you're not really even aware of it. But the combination of the two things gives the koto a kind of glow -- it's different from a reverb; it's prettier than that. You could add any other instrument to do that, but the harp is very close to the koto, and it's fascinating because the koto's able to do a lot of things that the harp can't -- and vice versa -- because of the pedals and the tuning.

THR: Your career launched into the stratosphere in 1977 with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters," and this year you did the final "Star Wars" movie -- by far the darkest in the series -- and "War of the Worlds," which for Spielberg was very much like the dark side of "Close Encounters." Were you thinking at all about how "Episode III" and "War of the Worlds" relate to their 1977 counterparts?
Williams: It's probably something that we all recognized after the fact; I don't know that when Steven made "Close Encounters" or "War of the Worlds" that he knew there was going to be a comparison or a contrast or even an ironic opposite side, so to speak. But we can look back on our lives and think how profound sometimes even coincidence can be, and we might even argue that all of us, as we go through life, become more and more conscious of things like that. In the case of "War of the Worlds," something like our fragility -- not only the excitement of having extra-terrestrials visiting us, but at the same time the tremendous fragility of our resources and the support we have from Mother Earth -- may even represent a certain growth on the part of Steven as well.

THR: How would you say your style has evolved since "Close Encounters"? That movie had its own scenes of fear and menace, so you were treating very similar ideas in some parts of "War of the Worlds."
Williams: Whatever evolution it has gone through is just the result of all of these steps -- these films and moments in life and music that I've encountered -- and, again, not through planning. I think I've been very fortunate in having wonderful opportunities and very imaginative and talented collaborators -- and the time, energy and health to give to it. Also, my love of music hasn't diminished in any way; on the contrary, it has intensified over the years, and performing with great soloists and orchestras has been part of whatever evolution there has been. Of course, I don't recognize it because we all live in the present. I just do the best I can do today -- and I hope it's as good as what I could do 10 years ago. Maybe it's better, and maybe it isn't; all I can do is produce the best I'm able to, and what supports that is loving music and loving the process of making it and enjoying these collaborations I have in film.

THR: The advent of Dolby sound dates back to 1977, and many composers who began working when you did experienced difficulty adapting because, in a lot of ways, it pushes music further back in the mix. Have you developed a strategy for dealing with that on action-packed films?
Williams: No, I can't say that I have -- though maybe I should have. The best sound, for me, is the live performance -- the best we ever hear is on the soundstage or in the concert hall -- and technically, we're trying to catch up and make improvements. Some of the digital recording we have now simply isn't as beautiful as the old mag six-track would have been, particularly in strings -- and I think most of my colleagues would agree with me. The experts we complain to about this are saying, "Well, we're getting so many more cents per semitone, and the technology is coming where it will be more beautiful than ever -- and theaters and homes will be able to receive that." That's a day that I hope to live to see because there's so much beauty in music in general that people aren't receiving in the theater or in their homes because the technology, as good as it is, needs to be improved very much.

THR: You have taken imaginative approaches to action scoring. For the last "Star Wars" movie, you scored a montage in which the Jedi are being wiped out with almost an elegy, instead of an action cue.
Williams: I think George (Lucas) and I talked about that, just the idea that that particular sequence would be treated as a lamentation. It's the kind of thing that seems like a very good idea -- and I wrote it that way -- but it also has to be dubbed that way, and it has to be an across-the-board cooperation between dialogue, sound and music, so that particular emotion of an elegy is put across despite some pretty horrific things that we're looking at.

THR: There is another great montage in "Episode III" that cuts between Padme dying and Darth Vader being born. A piece of funeral music you first wrote for 1999's "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace" plays through that, and it sounds wonderful.
Williams: I had the sequence later in the process and (the score) was fairly complete, and we decided to use that funeral music from the earlier film -- the death of Qui-Gon -- and agreed that it was the right music. I could have written another piece that might have as much impact or possibly more, but George and I felt it would be good to recapitulate themes where they would have the most impact for people -- and that funeral cortege piece seemed to work equally well in this new piece, so all I had to do was extend it and reorchestrate it a little bit.

THR: Did you identify other such moments early in the process, where you might have wanted to refer back to earlier material?
Williams: Well, (the latest "Star Wars" film) is unique; I've never had an experience like this, where you're going back to do the third part of something that you did the fourth part of 20 years ago. I don't think it has been done anywhere (else), that I know of. I was able to, in one or two cases, sort of decompose something I had written a long time ago. I was writing backwards, in a way: I had the ending before I had the middle part because I had already written the ending. It's a process I had never experienced before, and it was the result of the way George did these prequels.

THR: What was your schedule like on "Munich," and which musical ideas did you want to play with in the score?
Williams: I went directly from "Geisha" in September and spent September, October and November doing "Munich." Musically, there are several things; one is, there are areas where we felt would benefit from certain atmospherics of the Middle East, Israeli music and some Palestinian music. That meant that some instrumental coloration, the use of an oud -- which is a Persian instrument -- and combinations of cimbalom, orchestral clarinets and so on that were used in an effort to create the atmosphere of Israel. When most of us think about Jewish music, we think in terms of the European experience of Russia, Poland, Germany and so on; (Spielberg's 1993 epic) "Schindler's List" is a good example of music that has a Jewish atmosphere, but it's from the European experience that we know so well.

I felt what was needed (on "Munich") was a different expression of the locale and ambience of Israel and Palestine itself, so instrumental coloration particular to the film was challenging and couldn't be more different from "Memoirs of a Geisha." It was a 180-degree turn, which was helpful in the sense that if you have to go from a comedy to a comedy, that's hard -- (but) if you have to go from a comedy to a space opera, that's easier because of the contrast.

There's a theme that I called "Avner's theme" that is melodic and identifiable, and I actually completed it as a (stand-alone) piece. I think it will live as an end-credit in the film, and I just called it "Prayer for Peace." There are other experiences musically in it that have to do with the enormous suffering and guilt and, eventually, paranoia that Avner (Eric Bana) experiences because of what he has been asked to do. Those scenes are done brilliantly by Steven, and the music, while it's quiet, digs pretty deeply into a lot of layers of grief that go with this film.

THR: Has your working relationship with Spielberg changed since you first worked together on 1974's "The Sugarland Express"?
Williams: No, it's wonderfully the same: He has the same enthusiasm, the same youth and generosity of spirit and the same excitement about everything he does, and he's a great workmate. Thirty years of collaboration in anything is probably also unheard-of and just the result of good fortune and the fact that we get along so well.

THR: You have managed to conduct and write for the concert hall and move back and forth between that and film music, though there has always been the feeling that those in the concert realm look down on music written for film. Is that still the case?
Williams: The landscape is changing, and the generational shift is happening all the time: A lot of the old prejudice against media music isn't held in the same way by people who have grown up a little bit differently. Another part of it is that the performance organizations realize that film music has a tremendous reach: A lot of it is likable, and some of it's performable -- and it's even legitimate for the Chicago Symphony (Orchestra) to play some of it. Every university music department now teaches film music, and every composer you meet in those programs, if they don't want to do it as a career, they want to know about the practice so they have those skills as part of their professional toolbox. Thirty or 40 years ago, professors wouldn't want their students to have any truck with commercial media music, but that has all changed. We're realizing that we are all visual addicts to our TV screens and computer screens and that the future of art music itself will, in some degree, be connected to audiovisual coupling -- whether we like it or not.

Published Jan. 10, 2006