Film and television scoring
In 1952, Williams wrote his first film composition while stationed at Pepperrell Air Force Base for You Are Welcome, a promotional film created for the Province of Newfoundland tourist information office. Williams's first feature film composition was for Daddy-O (1958), followed two years later by Because They're Young. Williams also composed music for television, including Bachelor Father (1957–59), the Kraft Suspense Theatre (1963–65), Lost in Space (1965–68), The Time Tunnel (1966–67) and Land of the Giants (1968–70), the latter three created by producer Irwin Allen. He also worked on several episodes of M Squad (1957–60) and Checkmate (1960–62) and the pilot episode of Gilligan's Island (1964–67).
The American-Japanese anti-war epic None but the Brave (1965) marked the beginning of Williams's full transition from television to major Hollywood film composing, and shaped his style for future blockbusters. A Variety reviewer highlighted his score for providing "excellent background". The film was also Williams's first collaboration with Frank Sinatra, who directed and starred in it. He later conducted for Sinatra at venues such as a Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center gala.
Williams called William Wyler's How to Steal a Million (1966) "the first film I ever did for a major, super-talent director". He received his first Academy Award nomination for his score for Valley of the Dolls (1967), and was nominated again for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969). His first win was for Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score, for Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971). He scored Robert Altman's Images (1972) and The Long Goodbye (1973). Of the latter, Pauline Kael wrote, "Williams' music is a parody of the movies' frequent overuse of a theme, and a demonstration of how adaptable a theme can be." Altman, known for giving actors free rein, had a similar approach to Williams, telling him to "do whatever you want. Do something you haven't done before."
His prominence grew in the early 1970s thanks to his work for Irwin Allen's disaster films The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno and Earthquake (both 1974). Williams named his Images score as a favorite; he recalls "the score used all kinds of effects for piano, percussion, and strings. It had a debt to Varèse, whose music enormously interested me. If I had never written film scores, if I had proceeded writing concert music, it might have been in this vein". As it happened, two of Williams's scores shaped the direction of his career.
Williams's scores for The Reivers (1969) and The Cowboys (1972) impressed a young Steven Spielberg, who was getting ready to direct his feature debut, The Sugarland Express (1974). He requested Williams, who recalled, "I met what looked to be this seventeen-year-old kid, this very sweet boy, who knew more about film music than I did—every Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin score. We had a meeting in a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant, arranged by executives. It was very cute—you had the feeling Steven had never been in a restaurant like that before. It was like having lunch with a teenage kid, but a brilliant one". They reunited a year later for Jaws. Spielberg used Williams's score for Images as a temp track while editing Jaws. When Williams played his main theme for Jaws, based on the alternation of two notes, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke. Williams explained: "the sophisticated approach you would like me to take isn't the approach you took with the film I just experienced". After hearing variations on the theme, Spielberg agreed: "sometimes the best ideas are the most simple ones". The score earned Williams his second Academy Award, his first for Best Original Score. Its ominous two-note ostinato has become a shorthand for approaching danger. The ostinato is derived from Ravel's La valse; the score also quotes Debussy's La mer and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
Spielberg and Williams began a two-year collaboration on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, crafting the distinctive five-note motif that functions both in the score and in the story as the communications signal of the film's extraterrestrials. Darryn King writes: "One moment in that film captures some of Spielberg and Williams' alchemy: the musical dialogue between the humans and the otherworldly visitors, itself an artistic collaboration of sorts". Pauline Kael wrote of the scene: "the earthlings are ready with a console, and they greet the great craft with an oboe solo variation on the five-note theme; the craft answers in deep, tuba tones. The dialogue becomes blissfully garrulous ... there is a conversational duet: the music of the spheres". Williams says the surprise of the final two notes comes from the fact that the first three notes of the theme are already resolved, adding "I realized that twenty years after the fact".
Spielberg chose Williams to score 1941 (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). For the latter, Williams wrote "The Raiders March" for the film's hero, Indiana Jones and separate themes for the eponymous Ark of the Covenant, Jones's love interest Marion Ravenwood and the Nazi villains. Additional themes were written and featured in his scores for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023). Spielberg emphasized the importance of Williams's music to the Indiana Jones pictures: "Jones did not perish, but listened carefully to the Raiders score. Its sharp rhythms told him when to run. Its slicing strings told him when to duck. Its several integrated themes told adventurer Jones when to kiss the heroine or smash the enemy. All things considered, Jones listened... and lived." Williams's work on Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) won him a second Oscar for Best Original Score. Spielberg liked Williams's music for the climactic chase so much that he edited the film to match it.
After The Color Purple (1985), scored by Quincy Jones, the Spielberg-Williams collaboration resumed with Empire of the Sun (1987) and continued through Saving Private Ryan (1998). Williams also composed the theme music for, and scored several episodes of, Spielberg's anthology television series Amazing Stories (1985). Schindler's List (1993) proved to be a challenge for Williams; after viewing the rough cut with Spielberg, he was so overcome with emotion that he was hesitant to score the film. He told Spielberg, "I really think you need a better composer than I am for this film". Spielberg replied, "I know, but they're all dead". Williams asked classical violinist Itzhak Perlman to play the main theme for the film. It earned Williams his fourth Oscar for Best Original Score.
Williams composed the music for the opening logo to the DreamWorks Pictures film studio, which was co-founded by Spielberg. The logo made its debut in the studio's first release, The Peacemaker (1997). In 2001, Williams scored Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was based on an unfinished project Stanley Kubrick asked Spielberg to direct. A. O. Scott argued that the movie represented new directions for director and composer, writing that Spielberg created "a mood as layered, dissonant and strange as John Williams' unusually restrained, modernist score". Per Kubrick's request, Williams included a quotation of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in his score. Williams's jazz-inspired score for Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002) alluded to works by Henry Mancini. For The Terminal (2004), Williams wrote a national anthem for the fictional nation of Krakozhia.
In 2011, after a three-year hiatus from film scoring, Williams composed the scores for Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. The former was his first score for an animated film, and he employed various styles, including "1920s, 1930s European jazz" for the opening credits and "pirate music" for the maritime battles. Williams won an Annie Award for his score for Tintin. In 2012, he scored Spielberg's Lincoln, for which he received his 48th Academy Award nomination. He was also set to write the score for Bridge of Spies that year, but in March 2015, it was announced that Thomas Newman would score it instead, as Williams' schedule was interrupted by a minor health issue. Williams composed the scores for Spielberg's The BFG (2016) and The Post (2017).
In 2019, Williams served as music consultant for Spielberg's West Side Story (2021) and scored his semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022). In June 2022, Williams announced that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, scheduled for a 2023 release, would likely be his last film score as he planned to retire from film and focus on solely composing concert music. However, he reversed this decision by January 2023, stating that he had at least "10 more years to go. I'll stick around for a while!". He compared the decision to Spielberg's father Arnold, who had worked in his field until he was 100. In October 2025, it was announced that he had been hired to score Disclosure Day, his thirtieth collaboration with Spielberg.
Spielberg recommended Williams to his friend George Lucas, who needed a composer for his space opera Star Wars (1977). Williams delivered a grand symphonic score influenced by Antonín Dvořák, Gustav Holst's The Planets and Golden Age Hollywood composers Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Williams's score is often described as Wagnerian due to its frequent use of leitmotifs. Williams downplays this influence: "People say they hear Wagner in 'Star Wars,' and I can only think, It's not because I put it there. Now, of course, I know that Wagner had a great influence on Korngold and all the early Hollywood composers. Wagner lives with us here—you can't escape it. I have been in the big river swimming with all of them." The Star Wars theme is among the most widely recognized in film history, and the "Force Theme" and "Princess Leia's Theme" are well-known examples of leitmotif. It won Williams a second Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 1980, Williams returned to score The Empire Strikes Back, introducing "The Imperial March" as the theme for Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire, "Yoda's Theme" and "Han Solo and the Princess". The original Star Wars trilogy concluded with Return of the Jedi, for which Williams provided the "Emperor's Theme", "Parade of the Ewoks" and "Luke and Leia". Both scores earned him Academy Award nominations.
In 1999, Lucas launched the first of three prequels to the original Star Wars trilogy. Williams was asked to score all three, starting with The Phantom Menace. Along with themes from the previous films, Williams created new themes for Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). In 2020, Williams won the Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Composition" for composing Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge Symphonic Suite, He received his 52nd Oscar nomination for "Best Original Score" at the 92nd Academy Awards for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Williams scored the first three film adaptations of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The most important theme from Williams's scores for the Harry Potter films, "Hedwig's Theme", was used in each of the subsequent films. Williams was asked to return to score the film franchise's final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, but director David Yates said that "their schedules simply did not align", as he would have had to provide Williams with a rough cut of the film sooner than was possible.
In early 2013, Williams expressed interest in working on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, saying: "Now we're hearing of a new set of movies coming in 2015, 2016... so I need to make sure I'm still ready to go in a few years for what I hope would be continued work with George." In 2015, Williams scored Star Wars: The Force Awakens, earning him his 50th Academy Award nomination. In 2017, he scored Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the eighth episode of the saga. Williams contributed "The Adventures of Han" and several additional demos for the 2018 standalone Star Wars film Solo: A Star Wars Story, while John Powell wrote the film's original score and adapted Williams's music.
In March 2018, Williams announced that following Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), he would retire from the Star Wars franchise: "We know J. J. Abrams is preparing one Star Wars movie now that I will hopefully do next year for him. I look forward to it. It will round out a series of nine, that will be quite enough for me." Williams also makes a cameo in the film as Oma Tres, a Kijimi bartender. In July 2018, Williams composed the main musical theme for Disneyland and Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park attraction Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge. William Ross, who conducted the symphonic recording of the theme with the London Symphony Orchestra on Williams's behalf, additionally arranged Williams's original composition in different musical contexts for use, recording nearly an hour of musical material at Abbey Road Studios in November 2018. Williams won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for his Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge Symphonic Suite. In 2022, he contributed the theme music for the Star Wars miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi, which was subsequently adapted further by William Ross.
Williams scored Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976). Hitchcock told Williams to remember one thing: "Murder can be fun." Williams took inspiration from Hitchcock's frequent composer Bernard Herrmann, and Hitchcock was pleased with the result. Williams followed a similar approach when scoring Brian de Palma's The Fury (1978). Kael called Williams "a major collaborator" on the film, writing that he had "composed what may be as apt and delicately varied a score as any horror movie has ever had. He scares us without banshee melodramatics. He sets the mood under the opening titles: otherworldly, seductively frightening. The music cues us in".
Williams scored Richard Donner's Superman (1978). Donner reportedly interrupted the demo premiere of the opening title by running onto the soundstage, exclaiming, "The music actually says 'Superman'!" King writes that "Donner had a theory that the three-note motif in the main theme—the one that makes you want to punch the air in triumph—is a musical evocation of 'SU-per-MAN!'". When asked if there was anything to that, Williams replied "There's everything to that." The score's heroic and romantic themes, particularly the main march, the Superman fanfare and the love theme, "Can You Read My Mind?", appeared in the subsequent Salkind/Cannon film sequels. The main march returned as part of John Murphy and David Fleming's score to James Gunn's Superman (2025), the first film of the DC Universe.
In 1985, NBC commissioned Williams to compose a television news music package for various network news spots. The package, which Williams named "The Mission", consists of four movements, two of which are still used heavily by NBC today for Today, NBC Nightly News and Meet the Press. In his Oscar-nominated score for Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist (1988), Williams developed the two main theme sections in different ways, turning the mood lighter or darker through orchestration and an unexpected use of synthesizers.
Williams scored The Book Thief (2013), his first collaboration with a director other than Spielberg since 2005. The score earned him an Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. It was his 44th nomination for Best Original Score (and 49th overall), setting a new record for the most nominations in that category (he tied Alfred Newman's record of 43 nominations in 2013). In 2017, Williams scored the animated short film Dear Basketball, directed by Glen Keane and based on a poem by Kobe Bryant. In 2023, he was commissioned by ESPN to write an original composition, "Of Grit and Glory", for the 2023 College Football Playoff National Championship.
