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Star Wars composer John Williams has never watched any of the Star Wars films

He doesn't think his music for the films is his best work

Christopher Hooton
Friday 23 December 2016 04:28 EST
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John Williams
John Williams (Getty)

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With The Imperial March, Rebel Fanfare and Overture, John Williams has written perhaps the most famous themes for a films in existence, but he doesn’t find them “very memorable” and has never actually seen any of the Star Wars in full after he’s finished working on them.

“I let it go. I have not looked at the Star Wars films and that’s absolutely true,” he told The Mirror.

"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.”

“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, I have to say,” he added, “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 .”

Williams, 83, acknowledged that his work on Star Wars is “probably the most popular music that I’ve ever done”, but said that personally he finds many of the pieces “not very memorable”.

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He explained that he rarely has a ‘eureka!’ moment when writing, and can’t write a whole “melody or a theme or a whole scene or a whole work [in one sitting] as Mozart might have done.”

“Writing music is very, very hard work,” he added, “I have to be in a room alone all the time because that’s the life that it is.

“It’s lonely work, it’s labor-intensive. I still use a pencil and paper. I don’t have a computer. ”

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