"Music by John Williams" is a documentary that will remind you to hone your craft

Before that story, here’s what you should also know this week

• A new highly-anticipated video game called Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is starting to get previewed by media. Here’s an early review of a preview. The game launches on December 9 for Xbox, Windows, and Steam.

• runDisney continues to hold its races at both Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts. Here’s a look at the medals for the 2025 Disneyland Half Marathon Weekend.

• ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro is building the sports media brand for a new generation with the inclusion of AI to bolster its stats, and new coverage on women’s sports and video game streaming and competition. Read more here.

Behind the [John Williams] Music.

The moment you hear the name ‘John Williams’ and you are immediately making a connection to his movie music. But did you know that before his cinematic scores, he was an accomplished jazz pianist and composer?

And before all of that, did you know that he had a classical piano background and played the piano almost constantly when he was a kid to the point that his mom was quoted as saying that he’d break it because of how much he practiced on it?

Nobody apart from maybe his frequent collaborator Steve Spielberg did anyone know who John Williams was apart from his themes for “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” and so much more. In a way, the maestro to the movies didn’t want to be put into the spotlight.

“I’d been asking him for years about doing a documentary on him, and he always said no,” said director Laurent Bouzereau. “It wasn’t until I offered to make a documentary on the music did he begin to let his guard down.”

With that focus and some encouragement from friends like Spielberg and Ron Howard, Bouzereau directed the first-ever documentary on John Williams that would be about John’s life, but more about his full life of music, including his humble beginnings of writing music for TV shows like “Gilligan’s Island.”

Music by John Williams is first and foremost a documentary about the craft of music and music-making. In a world filled with YouTube tutorials and technology that allows anyone the ease-of-access to make a song, Williams reminds audiences that nothing replaces hard work at the piano. Literally.

One of the music memorable parts captured of Williams’ life was a segment toward the beginning that just has a camera pointed at Williams in the part of his house where his piano and adjoining music stand are. Williams played a score while Bouzereau asked about how he can write something so catchy and beautiful. Williams responded by simply reminding people that while it might be more efficient to use computers to write his music, he uses a simple pencil, barred line paper, and his analog piano to create. “It might be faster to use what’s new, but I’d much prefer doing it the way I’ve written all my scores,” he says matter-of-factly.

That call to musical craft is often his response to many creative process questions. Throughout the documentary, you are reminded that Williams got to be so great in making music because he was a musician who loved performing and wanted to get better all the time. Like Bouzereau’s promise to Williams, the documentary focuses less on Williams’ life and times and more about how his life experience informed how he wrote his music.

For example, there’s a part in the documentary that goes over the death of Williams’ first wife due to an aneurysm. Through a soundbite from one of Williams’ grandchildren, it goes into how his movie music shifted in writing and tone (like in Schindler’s List), “It was as if he was using his compositions to grieve and fight for something better,” said one of his grandchildren.

This back-and-forth dance between life experience and composition gives way to giving audiences a peek into how his craft also was bundled into emotional expression in a lot of his iconic scores. There’s a segment in the documentary the feels like almost a ‘greatest hits’ section for scores that Williams wrote for big culture-shifting films like including “Jurassic Park,” “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Home Alone,” as well as the lesser-known films that had equally memorable soundtracks like “The Terminal,” “War Horse,” and “Lincoln.”

By the end of the hour-and-a-half documentary, you’ll come away with not only knowing the breadth of music that he writes, but that if you have a creative craft, you should hone it until it’s the way you like it- and not to be more perfect. And that’s difficult considering that maybe all of us would say that Williams’ music is perfect.

But the maestro to our life’s soundtrack had the final word in his documentary that sums it all up- “Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”

Special thanks to AFI Fest for inviting us to the world premiere of Music by John Williams to write this review.

STILL TO COME: A look at the largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia in the world!

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