Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams chats with StarWars.com at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim 2015 about the joy of working with John Williams on the film’s score and creating new themes (video)
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
“Talk about collaborating with John Williams to put a brand new spin on a new Star Wars film score”
J.J. ABRAMS: It’s impossible to overstate the impact that John Williams has had on the movies that he’s worked on. Working with him on this has been maybe the most unbelievable and surreal joy of the whole thing.
What we are doing with the music needs to be very consistent with what we’re doing with the rest of the movie, which is that it needs to embrace what’s come before, but be moving forward and telling a new story.
So the new themes that you’ll hear, which co-exist with many of the old ones… is work that only John Williams could do.
More Abrams on Williams, from the Vanity Fair interview:
Bruce Handy: Tell me about what it was like working on the new film both as its writer-director and as a hard-core Star Wars fan going back to your childhood.
J.J. ABRAMS: Maybe the weirdest moment, which came months after production, was the first time I sat down with John Williams to show him about a half an hour of the movie. I can’t describe the feeling. All I will say is, just to state the facts of it: I am about to show John Williams 30 minutes of a Star Wars movie that he has not seen that I directed.
I mean, none of what I just said to you was ever going to happen in any form. John Williams—he was the DVD or Blu-ray of my childhood because we didn’t, of course, have VHS tapes of movies to watch when we wanted to. So I would buy John Williams soundtracks, often for movies I had not seen yet, and I would lie on the floor in my room with my headphones on listening to the soundtracks which would essentially tell me the story of the movie that I didn’t know. And I’d look at the photographs on the back of the album and I tried to read what I could about the movie—but really, I would just listen to these soundtracks. So it was an amazing thing to get to know him. But the weirdest thing was the idea that I was showing him scenes from a Star Wars movie he hadn’t seen yet. And the fact that they were scenes that I directed—that’s probably as surreal as it gets in my professional life experience.