Film still via Lucasfilm
When most people think of Star Wars, the first image to pop into their head is not an image at all but rather John Williams‘ iconic title theme, which has anchored all seven saga films to date and might be the most instantly recognizable music in cinema history. One would think that the Oscar-winning composer might want to see what all the fuss is about, but in a new interview with The Mirror, Williams admits that he has never actually watched a single Star Wars movie.
“I let it go,” he explains. “I have not looked at the Star Wars films and that’s absolutely true. 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.” He continues: “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.”
To be fair, Williams is a busy man and has only had, oh, four decades to squeeze in a viewing of A New Hope. Perhaps the problem is not a lack of time at all, but rather Williams’ low estimation of the Star Wars franchise on the whole. The 83-year-old composer admits that he doesn’t imagine the films to be modern classics. “I don’t know,” he says, “A lot of them are not very memorable and so on. It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done.”
If only we could all have such monumental achievements to be flippant about. Williams is currently working on the score for Star Wars: Episode VIII, which arrives in theaters on December 15th, 2017. We would tell him, “May the Force be with you,” but we’re not sure he’d get the reference.
