Star Wars composer has made a very surprising confession about the films he helped make famous

 Composer John Williams has made a surprising confession about the Star Wars films (Photo: FilmMagic)

 

Oscar winner composer John Williams has also written scores for The Imperial March, Rebel Fanfare and Overture

ByJames DesboroughHalina Watts

He penned the scores for the Star Wars films but music composer John Williams has revealed he has never watched any of the blockbusters.

The Oscar winner, who has won plaudits for his composition​s for iconic themes such as The Imperial March, Rebel Fanfare and Overture, reckons his tunes are “not very memorable.”
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John said: “I let it go. I have not looked at the Star Wars films and that’s absolutely true.

"When I’m finished with a film, I’ve been living with it, we’ve been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, “Ah, it’s finished.”
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“​Now I don’t have an impulse to go to the theater and look at it. Maybe some people find that weird, or listen to recordings of my music very, very rarely.

“I’m not particularly proud of that, but it’s also part of the fact that I finished Star Wars now and I’m already working on Spielberg’s new film and I don’t want to listen to music or see films​.”​

The 83-year-old says that while his Star Wars themes are revered around the world, he doesn’t consider them classics.​

He went on: “I don’t know. A lot of them ​are ​not very memorable and so on​. It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done.

​“​People will ask me what’s your favorite score and this and that. 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 we’re all the same in this sense that you look at your work or listen to your work and it’s children.
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“​You have three children. You love them and they’re beautiful, but you wish this could have been better here and ​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.​

“​So I’m a composer of music and I look at Mozart and I look at Beethoven and Bach, the greatest organizers of sound that we’ve ever had, and you need to be humble when the shoulders that we stand on are so great.​“

He doesn’t think he has ever got it right.

“​You hope that you’ve gotten 90% of it or as close to 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 work on this, come the next week and reshape it and do it–like honing away at it.
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“​I’m not so brilliant that I can sit down and write a melody or a theme or a whole scene or a whole work as Mozart might have done.

“Writing music is 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 because that’s the life that it is.
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“I​t’s hard work, it’s lonely work, it’s labor-intensive. I still use a pencil and paper. I don’t have a computer.​”