From Jaws to Star Wars to Schindler's List to Oppenheimer. The composer who has, more than any other figure, defined what mainstream cinema's emotional content sounds like.
John Williams has, since the mid-1970s, been the dominant film composer in American cinema. His filmography includes Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977 through 2019), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Superman (1978), the Indiana Jones films, E.T. (1982), Schindler's List (1993), Jurassic Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), The Book Thief (2013), Lincoln (2012), The BFG (2016), and dozens more. He has been nominated for 54 Academy Awards (more than any other living person) and has won five.
This essay tries to lay out what specifically he has done and what his influence has shaped.
Williams's working method is rooted in the late-19th-century Wagnerian leitmotif tradition — the practice of assigning a specific recurring musical phrase to a specific character, location, idea, or emotional state, and developing those phrases across the work's runtime. Williams did not invent the technique; it has been used in cinema since the silent era. He extended and refined it to a degree that has shaped almost every subsequent significant film score.
Star Wars is the most-elaborate working example. The original trilogy contains roughly forty distinct leitmotifs. Each principal character has a theme (Luke, Vader, Leia, the Force, Yoda). Each location has a sub-theme (the Death Star, Cloud City, the Rebel base). The themes interact across the films — the Force theme is heard in the opening of Episode IV; it returns at every significant turning point across the trilogy; its variations track the dramatic shifts. The audience, after one viewing, can recognise the themes by their first few notes.
Williams has scored every Spielberg film since The Sugarland Express (1974). The collaboration is, by significant margin, the longest-running director-composer partnership in cinema history — roughly fifty years across forty films. The two artists have, by both their own descriptions, developed a working method that requires minimal pre-scoring discussion. Williams sees a rough cut, composes against it, presents to Spielberg, and Spielberg has, in their telling, almost never asked for significant rewrites.
The collaboration's specific gift is that Williams's scores have shaped what audiences experience as 'Spielberg cinema.' The opening of Jaws is, structurally, the score before the threat. The five-note Close Encounters communication tune is the film. The Force theme is, in some sense, what the Star Wars audience is responding to. The Schindler's List violin theme. The Indiana Jones march. The Saving Private Ryan hymnal restraint. Each is the structural foundation of the film's emotional architecture.
Williams's working register — full symphonic orchestration, leitmotif structure, melodic-line emphasis — has been progressively challenged across the last twenty years by an alternative tradition rooted in Hans Zimmer's working method. Zimmer's approach favours: synthesised and synthetic-orchestral hybrid scoring, drone-and-pulse rhythmic foundations, less-explicit leitmotif structure, and more emphasis on atmospheric texture over melodic memorability.
The two traditions now coexist. Most contemporary mainstream blockbusters use some hybrid of Williams-tradition orchestration and Zimmer-tradition texture. The Marvel Cinematic Universe scores tend toward Zimmer; the Disney animated features tend toward Williams; the prestige dramas split case-by-case. The Williams tradition remains the foundational reference point even when individual films choose the Zimmer alternative.
Almost every working contemporary film composer has, in some sense, learned the craft against Williams's catalogue. Michael Giacchino (Pixar's composer for most of the studio's significant features, also recent Star Wars films) has openly cited Williams as foundational. Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, Tenet, Oppenheimer) has too. Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Avengers films). James Horner (Titanic, Apollo 13, Field of Dreams, Avatar). The list extends to almost every significant working film composer of the past forty years.
Williams's specific influence is, in some sense, simpler than the technical details suggest. He is the composer who proved that mainstream cinema audiences would respond to elaborate symphonic scoring with the same emotional intensity they responded to dialogue and image. Before Williams, film scoring was, on balance, a supplementary element. After Jaws, after Star Wars, after E.T., film scoring became part of the film's primary emotional content. The audience came to the cinema expecting the music to do significant dramatic work — and the composers who delivered that work, Williams above all, became as recognisable to the audience as the directors and the stars.
For more on contemporary film music, see our essays on sound design and visual homogenisation in blockbuster cinema.