Bobby Roberts
Banned
Interesting bit of news regarding The Last Jedi just dropped this morning, courtesy of writer/producer/general genre entertainment gadfly Robert Meyer Burnett's twitter.
Robert Meyer Burnett said:LAST JEDI scoring update. Last Thursday was John Williams' 85th Birthday. He's conducting. Rian Johnson wants to use the score for editing.
For people following the film's production, Williams going into the studio around December was already known, and some people (including myself) were theorizing that this was due to a couple factors: Maybe he's just recording a trailer score like he did for The Force Awakens. Maybe there's already a rough cut. Maybe Williams isn't being precious about his age and figures the sooner the better. And maybe some of that stuff still appliesbut:
A lot of people consider one of Williams' high points (and I'd argue Williams himself believes this to be the case, too, considering he ends a lot of his concerts with this piece) to be the last 15 minutes of E.T.
Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye
A big reason this works as well as it does is due to the unorthodox way it was done: Typically, scores are written & recorded once the film is in some sort of edit, preferably the final edit. The last reel of E.T. wasn't edited, however, until Williams had written the music for it. Williams & Spielberg did it backwards: Make sure the music is an emotional tour de force all on its own, and then cut the imagery to that.
Apparently, this is the approach that Rian Johnson will be taking with the entirety of The Last Jedi.
That means it's very possible a large amount of this film's emotion is going to be pure John Williams, not boxed in by imagery or timing. Granted, there's still going to be aspects of that, I'm sure. He's not gonna go untouched (and even the last 15 of E.T. were massaged after the fact, I believe). But this is just yet another detail that has my faith in Rian Johnson affirmed.
I'd already thought this had the potential to give Empire a run for its money. But finding out that John Williams is being given this much freedom to just compose for mood and emotion, for this Star Wars movie?
man.