would've-You know, worked, uh, together and not in this mediated postmortem sort of, uh, relationship that now, [laughs] uh, uh, we have and, and happened.

I find...

I mean, uh, it would've been so interesting to have a Steven Spielberg directed film produced by a living Stanley Kubrick, of course.

I don't know if that, if that was logistically or emotionally possible, uh, for Spielberg to, to do.

Um, but what we have is in some ways more fascinating to me.

I, I think about the, the last act of the film, the advanced robots, the super MECA, uh, retrieve all the memories from David, and they recreate his home and his environment based on all his memories, and I feel like that's what Spielberg did.

He sort of...

But it adds a, a layer of complexity to what we are seeing, almost to the point that it seems like John Williams is given a kind of a glacial introspection, but adding also a heart-wrenching lyrical sensibility that otherwise wouldn't have been present if Kubrick would have made the film because it would have been very likely, uh, accompanied by repertoire music, by classical music quotation.

It was beauty killed the beast.

King Kong has become sort of the textbook definition of the beginning of modern film scoring.

I think it's a little bit inaccurate in that there were attempts before that, even by Steiner, that introduced a lot of the same concepts and, and approaches.

And of course, he and people like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and their contemporaries were kind of borrowing ideas from opera and the whole idea of having a character theme or a leitmotif attached to different characters in the story, and sort of this aria recitative approach where there's big music moments that really, uh, you know, sing out, and then others that are more like just connective tissue or glue underneath scenes.

But King Kong announced a lot of these ideas and the philosophy and the sound of like, you know, European romantic opera-type scoring in a big way that had effects on people like Danny Elfman and Jerry Goldsmith.

And a lot of people that came after point to King Kong as like the dawn of their awareness of what film music could do and how exciting it could be.

So it's definitely like a, a staple, a very early staple of what we think of as film scoring in Hollywood.

Right.

And I went outside and walked around for four or five minutes and came back in to start our meeting, and I said to him, "Steven, this is a great, great film, and you need a better composer than I am to do this score." And he said, "I know, but they're all dead." [laughing]

Schindler's List was a tricky challenge because they're dealing with real history and some of the most, like, daunting, sobering history of the 20th century, and so they felt this real burden and responsibility to do it right.

And part of the idea with Schindler's List was let's not over-score it.

Let's leave a lot of it clean and, and without any music at all.

The whole visual approach to that was make it feel like a documentary almost.

It's in black and white.

There's not a lot of fancy...

Through those sessions, Tim got to know John in a way that probably no other journalist has.

And I went outside and walked around for four or five minutes and came back in to start our meeting, and I said to him, "Steven, this is a great, great film, and you need a better composer than I am to do this score." And he said, "I know, but they're all dead." [laughing]

Schindler's List was a tricky challenge because they're dealing with real history and some of the most, like, daunting, sobering history of the 20th century, and so they felt this real burden and responsibility to do it right.

And part of the idea with Schindler's List was let's not over-score it.

Let's leave a lot of it clean and, and without any music at all.

The whole visual approach to that was make it feel like a documentary almost.

It's in black and white.

There's not a lot of fancy...

Through those sessions, Tim got to know John in a way that probably no other journalist has.

Initially, Spielberg wanted something similar to what John did for the Robert Altman movie, Images.

Spielberg had it in his head that Jaws needed a strange, avant-garde, creepy score like Images, and he put Images' music on the rough cut of Jaws as, like, a, a reference for John Williams.

And John Williams said, "This is all wrong.

This is not some cerebral intellectual drama.

This is a popcorn movie," is what he said.

[two piano notes] So he came up with that simple, repeating [two piano notes] kind of brainless motor [two piano notes] for the theme for the shark.

[two piano notes]

[instrumental music]

Initially, Spielberg wanted something similar to what John did for the Robert Altman movie, Images.

Spielberg had it in his head that Jaws needed a strange, avant-garde, creepy score like Images, and he put Images' music on the rough cut of Jaws as, like, a, a reference for John Williams.And John Williams said, "This is all wrong.

This is not some cerebral intellectual drama.

This is a popcorn movie," is what he said.

So he came up with that simple repeating, [piano playing] kind of brainless motor for the theme for the shark.

[dramatic music]

Star Wars takes John Williams into the stratosphere.

The film was a phenomenon.