Jurassic Themes of John Williams with Neil Brand (Broadcaster & Film Composer)

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This week I’m excited to bring you an episode all about the wonder of John Williams.

Joining me is composer, pianist, writer and broadcaster Neil Brand.

We discuss Williams' influence on film music, the collaboration between Williams and director Steven Spielberg over the years, and the thematic elements of wonder and life present in the score for ‘Jurassic Park’.

You can follow Neil on Instagram

and Threads

And please visit his website here: www.neilbrand.com

Also Neil has a very fun and informative YouTube channel if you want to know more about the process of scoring a film: https://youtube.com/@neilbrandsbellsandwhistles?si=RjFzxqp9s9UdufT-

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And he can create a theme which absolutely sums up what it's about. And often, as you say, in a matter of a few notes, arguably endures two notes. That's that's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Hello and welcome back to Road to Rebirth with me, Roland Squire, and I'm thrilled to dive into today's topic, which is the music of John Williams and his iconic score for Jurassic Park. Joining me today is someone who I'm very excited to be able to get onto the podcast. He's a pianist, composer, broadcaster, dramatist, and a passionate advocate for teaching the importance of film music. Please welcome to the podcast, Neil Brand. Hi, Neil. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Wonderful. I just can't wait to talk about John Williams today. But I was wondering if you could just tell the people listening who are not familiar with your work a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Um, yeah, I'm a musician and composer. I started life as a silent film pianist, and I still do do that. That's still my day job. But that has also taken me into other areas. I'm a radio playwright and a writer, and I write about music a fair bit. And I've div I've done five TV series in the sound-of idea of how music works with lots of different styles of drama. Uh how music woes to tell stories, basically, is how it comes down to it. And uh I kind of I wear lots of hats and I quite enjoy that. I don't like being pegged as just doing one thing. And I do think that uh John Williams is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, film composer of all time.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Do you remember the first time you watched Jurassic Park? What was your takeaway from the film?

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Weirdly, I think because I'm not a big dinosaur fan, I didn't see it when it came out.

SPEAKER_02 1:51

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I saw it quite a long time after. Uh and also I'm my kind of formative years were slightly before Jurassic Park. So I got into John Williams through Star Wars and Close Encounters and Superman.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Which was the kind of, you know, the sort of decade of wonders when he was creating so many of those iconic scores. And I was less interested, I think, in Jurassic Park. So I've really only got into the score since my son's been around. He's now 16, and he got into Jurassic Park really early. So I first sat down and watched it with him probably eight or nine years ago. And since then I've seen a couple of them, of the sequels as well. Um, and you know, I'll put my hand up. Dinosaurs don't do it for me. And I think there's also a reason why I wasn't that interested from reading the reviews, and this is absolutely not to dish on John Williams, but it is slightly to dish on Steven Spielberg, because the thing that I realize with Spielberg quite early on is that what he trades in is childlike wonder. Yes. Now, if you're watching with a child, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Because that's what you want. If you're watching yourself, and particularly if you've become a slightly cynical, hard-bitten cinephile like I was around the time that Jurassic Park came out, there's a bit of you going, Yeah, I'm feeling massively manipulated here. You know, yeah, they look amazing, but bottom line, the story, I don't know. I'd read the novel. Oh, okay. Yeah. I found the novel absolutely horrifying. Uh and it is, because the, you know, the novel basically doesn't just doesn't stint on the fact that your average dinosaur has got nothing cuddly about it. It is, you know, it's a it's a killer, it's a brilliant apex predator. And, you know, I think almost the first ones you meet in the Crichton novel are are sitting there eating a baby out of its cob.

unknown 3:53

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 3:54

Not very Spielberg, that.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

No, no. What Spielberg then comes up with is something completely different. And when I first heard the score for it, I think I thought, wow, this doesn't sound anything like what I was expecting from this film. I honestly thought that this film was going to be more of a horror movie. But bottom line, I think this is what surprises me most about how Spielberg and Williams work. And the key to it was really only sort of dropped into my lap reading, I think, an interview with John Williams fairly recently, within the last couple of years, in which he's because obviously John Williams isn't someone to blow his own trumpet. No. Even though, my god, he's got a trumpet to blow. You kind of gleaned that what he was saying in this interview was that when Spielberg brought him Jaws, Spielberg thought he was making a psychological horror film. And it took John Williams to not only tell him, but then subsequently score Jaws, that it was actually a rollicking maritime adventure.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

It's a pirate movie in which the pirate happens to be a shark. Yes. So if you can see Jaws like that, and that's obviously how how Williams saw it from the start. Yes. Then taking the Crichton novel to the screen via John Williams's very kind of cinematic take on what the music's doing, his kind of Hollywood take. His Hollywood idea on what sells as a piece of entertainment for a for an audience, is that Jurassic Park is actually about wonder.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

It's not about horror, it's not about the genetic facts of getting dinosaurs back. The way Spielberg puts it, the whole of Jurassic Park is summed up in that one shot where Sam Neil is looking at something and then turns his wife's head around to look at it. The entire movie, and indeed myself score, uses that as the fulcrum on which it manifests. And I think that's that's why I'm saying weirdly, and I'm being entirely truthful here, that's what put me off seeing it originally. But I get it, and I don't think there's any way I thought it was going to be a franchise, and of course it's actually a massive franchise. And Williams' score is probably I think the most uh obvious example of the relationship between him and Spielberg and the idea of childish wonder or childlike wonder. Um I remember reading somewhere that someone had kind of reduced Spielberg's stories to people with stuff chasing them they don't understand. Which is a sort of interesting take, albeit I think it's too ri reductive. But that whole thing of seeing something, I remember Spielberg saying that he wanted people he wanted to make films that made people forget they were chewing gum. They were so hooked to the screen that the gum would trickle out of one corner of their mouth. And that I think that's what he's doing. That's what he does with well, he does what he does with most of his films. It's certainly the f and that's the the attitude that John Williams responds to so much is that sense of childlike wonder of what you're seeing. You cannot believe that those are UFOs. You cannot believe that that is a massive shark. You cannot believe that these are Jurassic creatures from the distant past that have now come back again. So yeah, that was that was absolutely how it how it hit me. But I don't think any of the later films could do justice to just how unbelievably technically impressive Jurassic Park was. Nobody thought that they were going to be able to pull off that astonishing look for those for those dinosaurs. And the fact that, you know, when they when you were the first time you see them, those beautiful long-necked beasts, that when one of them's after something in a tree, he goes up on his back on his hind legs.

unknown 8:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Or a squirrel. And yeah, they were lovely. They were lovely to look at, and it turned out they were lovely creatures that had to stand on their iron legs to reach the high fruit like any other animal. That's I think that's that's very indicative.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

Yeah, I I just I mean, for me, so I was six when I first watched Jurassic Park, and I didn't see it at the cinema because my my dad had taken me to see the Muppet Christmas Carol, and I was too scared, so I had to wait to VHS. Um but the I think that bit what uh with the Brachiosaurus and its kind of rising up into the tree, that first thing, that music starts when we're in the helicopter and you get the big fanfare moment. What's the kind of background between you know John Williams before Jurassic Park? Obviously, people know Star Wars. How how do you think that influences his work when he's coming to approach um Jurassic Park?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Um, I think one thing there's two things about the way that Williams works. One is that he's he's very specific when he's coming up with a theme. The themes are usually earworms, they're very impressive. And any film composer will tell you that it's bloody hard to find a point within a film to get the theme in. You get it in at the top, you're lucky if you can find somewhere else that will just give you the sheer space in which to make your theme happen. So your theme tends to have to be reduced or go through some kind of variation or something of that sort to be able to be able to hear it again. The fact that I think probably Spielberg had already said to John Williams, you know, this is actually about holding the audience back, not allowing them to see the most impressive thing about this film. But building that expectation, and there's no better way of building an expectation than with a helicopter ride towards a distant island. And the fact that at the very top of the film we'd had a teaser of what was going on with the dinosaurs, beautifully scored and scored with absolutely no suggestion of a of a theme in there, none whatsoever. It was just pure uh-oh, what is that music, which John Williams can do, has done all his life. The other thing, though, about the way that he works is that he is very clever with his use of rhythm and pace. And the big thing about that helicopter ride is that it's got two jobs to do, and there's a very specific point at which one job becomes the other job. The first job is quite simply the helicopter ride. Wow. How exciting. We're in a hot we're in a hot uh helicopter with Sam Neil and Richard Attenborough, and we're disappearing across the sea, and we don't know what we're gonna see. And there's a kind of a kid's excitement in this that sense of flying. There's a tiny, tiny little sort of uh little hint of warning, but not very much. It's mostly about wow. Can you imagine how good that must feel for anybody who hasn't traveled in a helicopter, particularly who hasn't traveled in a helicopter with Sam Neal and Richard Atmer. So then then he and then Attenborough just leans into the camera and goes, There it is. And suddenly the music changes. And that's because we're not about the helicopter ride anymore, we're about the island. And the island is not just the island, this is where we're going. It's also got several jobs, I think, to do. The very fact that that we've been warned what we're gonna see, we've been told what Attenborough's been doing, we know that it involves ancient beasts. The very fact that the island is entirely jungle covered, there is no sign whatsoever of civilization, and it has an ancient feel, means that they are going somewhere timeless. And I love this idea that the timelessness of the island hits you as soon as you're flying over it. That's what the hell is gonna be down in those trees? What's gonna be down in that jungle? Whatever it is, it's astonishing. And that is what the music does at that point. It suddenly turns a corner, and it's not just wow, what a ride, but and he chooses two themes to do that with. Now, that's really, really unusual for John Williams. He's got multiple themes, he can do themes just like that, but to go from one theme to another just in the course of what amounts to one scene, even if that's a traveling scene, that's really unlike unusual. And I think it's because, as I say, the whole of that first what, half an hour more of the film is about expectation. And the music serves to make us expect something magical. Not just something impressive, but something which has force and timelessness and this strange kind of it is magic, but it's it's almost inexplicably extraordinary what we see, and that's in the music. And that's something John Williams can do. I'm not surprised that you know he was asked to do Harry Potter just as a sort of theme for a promo and came up with the sound of magic. You know, you could he know what magic sounds like. He can just produce it. Yeah. He'd probably say, Oh yes, but it's Shostokovic or it's some ancient Russian composer or whatever. But you know, it's whatever it is. He manages to get you feeling that. I honestly think in the Jurassic Park score, it's the choir. Yes. I think the choir is in the score to give it uh almost the sound of a hymn. It's it is the the main theme for Jurassic Park is like a chorale. It's a you know, you've you've you've I mean you've got multiple elements of this score. You've got that horn opening, which uh immediately suggests grandeur, but it also suggests hunting. It also suggests predators, and it doesn't follow any basic, any sort of harmonic uh pro uh texture that we would expect. So it's doing something odd with notes that don't seem to have a connection, exactly unlike close encounters, where the six notes in in close encounters do have a harmonic connection. Five notes. But it's it's got it's got elements of it that I think are really about almost sacredness. Put a choir in there, and you've got a human element, and there is absolutely not a human element really in the wonder of these document of these of these dinosaurs. But also there is something, it's almost sort of saying these it's it's life. Yeah, it's I suppose there's a there's a line, isn't it? Life will always find a way. So the music is the sound of life and the music of the store.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

It's reverence, isn't it, as well? Kind of reverence for these animals, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Yeah, it is. It's a re it's a reverie, yeah, absolutely. When the when the baby velociraptor is is is being is hatching out the egg, there's nothing to suggest that's gonna turn into a ravening killer. That is just pure life happening and the sacredness of that moment.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Um and again, that's that's all Williams. And I you know, I wish and maybe he did. I wish that Spielberg had maybe put a tape on when he was sitting down with John Williams for initial conversations about these films, because it would tell us so much. Probably so much that it you may ruin it all to know.

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

But you know, the thing to bear in mind is that no composer works in a vacuum. Every musical decision has been made as a collaboration, and the person who ultimately is driving those decisions is by no means the composer. Possibly in the odd way. I mean, I'm sure John Williams has got a tremendous amount now of influence over Spielberg and what Spielberg does and how he works. Uh, but in general, it's the director's vision. Yeah, the the the composers are gun for hire, even someone like like like John Williams.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

I think what's interesting about the scoring of Jurassic Park is um that the second it wrapped filming, Spielberg was off, he was out in Poland. He had just had such a really busy time. So he did Hook and he did Jurassic Park and then he went on to do Schindler's List. Wow. And had a year off, and then came back to do The Lost World. And it's the it's I think it's the only time in their career where he wasn't present for the actual scoring sessions.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Oh, really? For Jurassic Park.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Yeah. Wow. The the way that he heard the music for it was actually driving to the set in uh in in Poland. So he'd be driving in his car listening to these piano demos that John Williams did. And he said that it's almost kept it kept him sane while making that film, having to think of the post-production of Jurassic Park, which was mainly handled by um George Lucas. Oh, was it? I didn't know that. So yeah, so the editing, the editing, and from that, that's how George Lucas decided to go and do the Star Wars prequels because he could see that CGI was the way it was, so that kind of gave him the confidence to go, I I can do this, uh I can make these films like this now.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

I didn't I didn't know that, but I could I also think that that makes total sense. There's without a doubt, there is something about the Jurassic Park score, and again, this is not to take anything away from John Williams, but I can hear some of his previous scores in the Jurassic Park score. Uh there's little bits of um close encounters in there in which the same basic thing is happening, which is that we're watching something that is awesomely different.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

And and and Williams has got a kind of orchestral texture for Ooh, that's awesomely different, which he brings to both those films. And also I think something like The Raptor Attack in the Kitchen, that is so beautifully choreographed musically, and indeed directorially, you know. I mean, it's a cracking piece of filmmaking under any circumstances.

SPEAKER_01 18:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

And Williams knows exactly how to make it work, but you've got a very similar take there to the aliens surrounding the house in close encounters, and that sense of a geography, a very well brought out geography in which people are trying to hide from or run away from, or somehow or other repel predators, and you don't know where they're coming from, and you don't know what they're gonna do. And that too, there's a little bit of I think John Williams does cannibalize himself a little bit with those those two things. Yeah. But otherwise, I think I'd find it hard. I wouldn't know, I wouldn't have known from anything that Spielberg wasn't at the cell, wasn't overseeing the music section.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

They must have been at that point so confident in each other and just so in sync. Yeah. There's a c there's a couple of quotes that I found for the making of uh that Du Williams when he was talking about making the score, and he said it was a massive job of symphonic cartooning, which I thought was quite a was quite a good and he was kind of matching the dinosaur movements and making ballets, funny ballets with it.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yes. And that's I think that that cartoonery is spot on. And if you think that Williams would if Williams was gonna go, I mean, obviously Spielberg had to deal with a fairly schizophrenic situation with Jurassic Park in post-production and Schindler's List shooting, but then Williams had to do the same thing. And the difference I can just see between what he's bringing to Jurassic Park, which is basically uh a cinematic thrill ride. It's uh it matters no more than that ultimately. Whereas Schindler's List is you know, is intended to be for the ages. Yes, that is intended to be uh a mark in the sand in terms of our recognition of the Holocaust. So any music that Williams brings to I mean, the famous story is that when Spielberg showed in the film Williams said, You need someone better than me, and Spielberg said, Yeah, but they're all dead. I mean, I I think that's that's true because what Shin what uh Williams is basically saying is this is massive, this is the kind of theme that Mahler and Tchaikovsky and Beethoven were after in their music was this sense of the survival of humanity in the face of ultimate evil. How how the hell do we do this? And that I think is really interesting because I I um I I still cannot believe Williams' score for Schindler because I went to see that film when it came out, unlike Jurassic Park, and came away convinced I hadn't heard more than about 20 minutes of music throughout the whole thing. And was very surprised to buy the album and find there was an hour and a quarter of music in that film. And yet I think the theme and the shooting was so precise and so immersive that the music just felt like part of the experience. I wasn't listening. To it separately. And by that time, when I saw Schindler's list, I was listening to scores because I knew at some stage or other I wanted to talk about them or write about them.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Or you know, I wanted to separate out the music. Simply couldn't do it. And that that was the exact opposite of what I still slightly feel for John Williams. And I mean, he who am I to say how he saw these things? But in my mind, he would have seen Jurassic Park as higher journalism. Right. And he would have seen Schindler's list as ultimate classical scoring.

SPEAKER_02 22:37

Who who is the main influence, would you say, for like his themes? Who who which um composers of of um the golden age of Hollywood is he trying to evoke or do you think takes the most from?

SPEAKER_00 22:50

That's a very good question. I don't know. Um the problem is, I think uh I'm a very good friend of John Burlingame, who writes for Variety and is sort of the film score journalist and has interviewed John Williams on many occasions. And and he says, and I think this is absolutely true, he says that John Williams's ultimate legend is going to be based on the fact that he has broken down the gap, if you like, the wall, if you like, between classical music and film music. Now there's no such thing as concert hall music and film music, because film music is concert hall music, and that's what Williams did. And he did it, I think, having been through this mill of TV scoring in the 1960s, where the first job was to come up with a theme, and he made those themes mostly jazz. And you could tell that he's you know the one people he loved were people like Mancini. He was a big friend of Andre Previn, he liked Previn, he loved what Previn did. There's a sort of joy and a playfulness in the themes that he creates for TV. By the time he gets to film, I can't hear any major composers in John Williams's music. I can't hear certainly no 19th century composers. I mean, maybe certainly with the kind of more modernist stuff, yes, you can hear a bit of Shostakovich in there, but he really does create in the same way as Copeland did, a world of Americana, which seems to be almost homegrown, homegrown from Hollywood. There is a sort of a Hollywoodness to what he does. And although, you know, there's you can hear maybe a bit of Eric Wolfgang Corngold in Star Wars, it's got that same kind of swashbuckling feel to it. It could be Errol Flynn swinging his way through that through the uh through the Death Star. But I I think Williams has managed to actually create something that is most original, that is uh extraordinarily original because he's so he's got such a massive output of music, his knowledge and depth of understanding is incredibly wide, and yet he doesn't use and reuse particular ideas or particular composers or particular influences over and over and over again. He will come up with absolutely original music for all those films, and I think that's astonishing. I I I that is the most truthful answer I can give. I can't hear other c I can hear multitudes of musical ideas and thoughts, but what he writes feels original, it doesn't feel like anybody else's work. And I do think that's that that's a tribute to a lifetime of understanding music, listening to it, conducting it, guest conductor of the Boston Pops. You think what music has passed in front of him, been on his conductor's podium, and yet once he sits down with that piano and his brain and that film, what comes out of it is no more derivative of another composer than any 19th century concert composer would come up with.

SPEAKER_02 26:42

Yeah. Did did have you seen the documentary, The Music by John Williams?

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Yes, which I enjoyed.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I just he's he comes across as an exceptionally humble man in kind of what what he does. But just the just from that period of doing Superman and Star Wars and Jaws, I just can't get it. I've been a man must have been awake 24 hours a day to be able to c create those to all those themes. It's just astonishing, I think.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

I I think it in I think it was in that documentary that he says, All I live for is work. Music is my life. You know, I'm not gonna go down the golf course. And I I get that. And I I I also think if you've got that amount of ability, of course you'll sit there and love the process of creation all that time. And also if you've got a creative partner like Spielberg, or indeed George Lucas, you're gonna do that because you know that what you're gonna be given to work with is gold dust. I think that's that's the thing that's always struck me about any film composer, and the more, you know, the more experienced film composer, the harder it must get, actually, is where does your next inspiration come from? What is that inspiration? And inspiration is actually quite hard to find. You have to really be turned on by something. Um I think it's also indicative of what an extraordinary relationship that uh Williams and Spielberg have, that Williams basically is pretty much, as far as I can see, anyway, has already been contracted to do every film Spielberg does. Now, if Spielberg should happen to do something that didn't float Williams's boat, so far anyway, it would seem that Williams hasn't gone, yeah and that's not really my thing. He's then found the perfect voice for it. You know, they are two sides of what seems to be an unbelievably creative single person. And that I that I I'm I'm still astonished by him. And I know he's gonna keep on writing. Yeah. You know, this is the other thing. He's still alive because he only lives for music and he only lives to write. But I also get it that there is a kind of there's a factory process to scoring film. There has to be. You know, it's set to a timing, it's set to a budget. This has to be produced by this time, these timings have to be right by that time. You actually can't wait for inspiration to strike because they need that particular scene done by next week, and it's got to be there ready to go. So to be able to bring that amount of creativity to what is basically a factory job is the other thing that still astonishes me about Williams. He's he has got so much more ability than the job could be said to require.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

I think it's you know, the the thing that you said about kind of breaking down the classical music and the film music, you know, I I went to see Jurassic Park at the Royal Albert Hall with a live orchestra. You know, that's and there's Star Wars ones, there's Indiana Jones ones, and to get people to go and be in that space and listen to the acoustics of that room, yeah, it's an incredible experience. And actually, watching that, the bit that I took away was not so I mean, where the island bit when they go to the island is still the bit where I tear up every time because I know what's going to happen, and the music feels like it um uh just gets more and more, and I just can't it just yeah, just overtakes me. But the he also knows when not to score a scene, and that kind of so the bit where the T-Rex attacks the car. And I was when I last watched it, I thought this is and actually watching it live. It's like everybody, including the conductor, including John Williams, are just putting down their baton and they're just stepping back.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Yeah, music very odd because it is it's both more immersive and because it's more unreal, it makes what you're watching less real. Music can weirdly inoculate you from the realities of what you're watching as much as it can draw you in. And I don't think there's any explanation for that. I remember I got to interview Jerry Goldsmith once on stage, and he was on with his director of the film that he'd just made, which is called The Edge. The director was Lee Tamahori. And The Edge is about the plane crash and the disparate people in the plane having to make their way back out the jungle. And the plane crash was very, very impressive. I mean, phenomenal piece of filmmaking. And uh I said to Jerry Goldsmith, I was really surprised that there was no music under the plane crash. And he looked across at Lee Tamahori and said, There was. And I thought, ooh, okay, that's interesting. Um so obviously Goldsmith had scored it, and Tamahori decided it's much more realistic with no music. Now that's that's the dichotomy, that's the weirdness about film music, and that makes the I mean, I was thinking not just of that, but actually I don't think there's very much music between the opening of the film and the helicopter ride.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

No, not much, no.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

So all that opening stuff feels like real life. Yeah, there is no music there because, you know, being reductive again, we are not being manipulated into feeling something more than we can see. That's that's what film music does. It takes our emotions and goes, oh, by the way, watch this, but what you should be feeling is this. And that's why there are many people, including film composers, who don't like film music, they don't like being told what to think. But the music doesn't, if the music's not there, we've just got to make our own minds up about those visions. That's why I think if you were to take away the score from Jurassic Park and just have the helicopter ride and the island, then our expectations would not only not have been raised to the degree they are, more of a problem, I think, when we finally saw those dinosaurs, that magic would not be there to that same degree. We wouldn't be sharing a kind of weird sort of feeling of humanity amongst something bigger than being human thing. And that's what that's what Williams brings, without a doubt.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

And I think that's interesting because obviously Jurassic Park is the first film really to use CGI in the way that it did. Um and while I was thinking about the music for Jurassic Park, I was also thinking about King Kong from 1933 that was kind of having to do a similar job of winning the audience over to make you believe and empathize with something that wasn't real.

SPEAKER_00 33:40

Yeah. I mean, the case of King Kong, a puppet, in effect, you know, it's it's it you we need to believe that it's got feelings and that we can understand what's going on in its head. I think that's that that is that is something that is very there with Jurassic Park. But there's something beyond that as well. Where where the score for King Kong, the initi the the original 1933 King Kong, had to make us feel that Kong was real and had to make us feel that he was a living, breathing, hot-blooded personality who could fall in love with Faye Right. Yes. I think what the what again, I think this comes back to my first point. What the music was trying to do was not only make us feel that these creatures were real and hot-blooded, but that they could be split into somehow or other good and bad. You know, that there were there were good dinosaurs, which tended mostly, surprise surprise, to be the herbivores. And then there were bad dinosaurs, who, of course, were mostly the Velociraptors. Yes. And then there was a super bad dinosaur who actually turned out to be a good dinosaur because he ate the Velociraptors.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

And that I think, you know, this again, we're now back to Spielberg's worldview, whereby even with apex predators like dinosaurs, you can have the ones that you could quite happily take home and keep in a cage in the garden, and the ones you absolutely can't do that with. No, and that that's you know, that that it's again, I'm being reductive, and it sounds like I'm dismissing the whole thing. I'm really not, but I am saying that Williams is part of that.

SPEAKER_01 35:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Williams has to be part of that worldview for it to work. And musically, that's why I think he and Spielberg are are are joined at the hip through all this. Williams is an enabler for Spielberg.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

After they did um Schindler's List, they had a bit of a rest. But supposedly the only thing he could think about and be excited about was returning to Jurassic Park, which was the world of the dinosaurs. I think he wanted to just explore and play a little again. What what's your take on the difference between the between the two?

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Well, the the the thing I noticed, and I have to say I haven't gone deep into this because I didn't go and see Jurassic Park 2. The ones I've caught up with have have been more recent than that. But um looking at it and listening to the score this time around, what you can hear more than anything else, there's an awful lot of drums in there. This is Williams is back with a huge percussion section, and I kind of get that because the the big difference between Jurassic Park 1 and Jurassic Park 2, Jurassic Park 1, as I say, is about wonder, it's about awe and a kind of almost holy oneness. Whereas Jurassic Park, I mean the thing about The Lost World is that it follows the structure of of Conan Doyle's book, The Lost World. Totally. So it's it's as if it yeah, it's almost as if Jurassic Park hadn't happened.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

The Lost World deals with an explorer going to an island, finding dinosaurs, bringing one of them back to London, yeah, and it it it escapes and you know demolishes buildings and kills people. And I think as soon as Spielberg says, Right, well, that's what I'm gonna do, albeit with added science and added Jeff Goldblum and added CGI and all the rest of it, then Williams also goes, okay, so it's a Chase movie. I get it. Right. Well, if it's a Chase movie, here's what's going on. And there's very little of the Jurassic Park thinking in the music. It's much more about tension, about explosive action. And I can see that, you know, Spielberg loved the idea of taking his beautiful big T-Rex that had only really had a chance to chomp down on things in the jungle and the odd sort of visitor center and let him loose on you know freeways and petrol stations and Spielberg's very much loved suburban houses. You know, the fact that he finds a swimming pool to drink out of as soon as he's arrived. She, he, can't remember it's the man, or if it's the father or the mother. And you know, the same thing as well, if they're gonna get him back, they've got to take the kid, gotta be able to hear the kid, then he's gonna be chasing after them in the car. You know, it's I can see immediately what it was that Spielberg wanted to get out of that. And and Williams provides it in space. But what there isn't there, and I think this is not a surprise, really, because Spielberg's after something different. I don't think there's much to take away from that score. If you know the the cartooning that John Williams talked about that you mentioned from the first film, is really all the second film's about. It's it is flat-out action, it's making the music match what's going on, and this idea of people already know what they're up against. Yeah, it's just that they've not been up against it in this particular environment, i.e., our everyday lives. And the music is doing its job there. But um, it's interesting that later on people like Michael Giacchino get involved with scoring later Jurassic Park. And actually, with some of the later ones, I think Giachino brings a little bit more inspiration to the film than John Williams managed with with the second film, which I can entirely understand. I don't I I think you know that the it was a different job that Williams had to do. And I assume fairly soon after Jurassic Park 2, Williams was probably on to something else unbelievably impressive and unbelievably inspirational.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Spielberg says that you know it's a franchise he loves because it's his. Yeah. Whereas the in Indiana Jones stuff, it's it's George Lucas coming to Spielberg, whereas Jurassic Park, he always wants to shepherd it in its new directions or whatever. What's interesting about Gecino is the fact that he scored the game soundtrack for The Lost Worlds. So that's where he appeared. So he had to ape John Williams for the PlayStation game, and then all those years later, got to do it for real, I suppose. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

I was just looking to see what the next film was that John Williams was to go on and do. Uh it's Shinder's List, then Sabrina, then Nixon, then Sleepers, then Rosewood, then The Lost World, then Seven Years into Bet Amis Dad, which is going to be the next Spielberg, and then Saving Private Ryan. So Shinder's List is 93, Jurassic Part 2 is 97, Private Ryan is 98. That's still a bloody good run. Yeah. Phenomenally good score. Wow. And then the Phantom Menace is 99. Huh? Jeez. And the Harry Potter's 2001. I mean, that's extra. I mean what a hit rate.

SPEAKER_02 40:55

That's quite extraordinary. It's just talking about the Harry Potter, like the fact that that is still just in, and in Jurassic Park, you know, all they have to do is to just put in just a few notes, five or six notes, and you've got the audience. And in those five or six notes, you can relive being and seeing that film. That's what the producers obviously want. That's what the studios want you to do as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

I think that's that's the the greatest ability of a film composer is to be able to boil down a film to a matter of notes, if it's a tool problem. Um it's like writing a haiku, you know, it's actually it's it might be the shortest, smallest form of poetry, but it's the hardest. Because you've got so little to cram all that into. I always use the same uh sort of metaphor for this, that when Arthur Miller was writing, and he yeah, his plays are sort of some amongst the greatest of the 1950s American dramas. Um and Miller would evidently, when he was working on a play, he would work out in his own mind what one sentence which summed up the play, and then he would write that down and he would sell a tape it to his typewriter. And as he put it, from then on through, any line he wrote that didn't link back to what was taped on his typewriter, he'd cut. Now, I think I think John Williams can do the opposite. I think he can take all those disparate elements of a film and he can create a theme which absolutely sums up what it's about. And often, as you say, in a matter of a few notes, arguably endure two notes. Yeah, you know, it's sort of yeah, that's that's amazing. And he does it at the beginning of Jurassic Park with the horn call, he does it with the five notes. Uh, you know, it's it's big stuff. He does it with Schindler's List, he does it with the the the Shinder the theme to Schindler's List. It's uncannily good film scoring, but it requires a degree of musicality that most composers, even most film composers, don't have. And I think that's what I meant about the John Berling quote. That Spielberg is up there in the Pantheon with all the other great composers. It's just that he has chosen to ply his trade within film. But what he's created is no better, no worse, and no different to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony or the Marler Number One or The Rack Maninoff Second Piano Concerto or any of the great pieces of classical music.

SPEAKER_02 43:38

Um I was wondering well what you think the lasting legacy of maybe the 90s work of um John Williams is so Jurassic and Schindler's, and it's a it's a because he kind of had to reinvent the blockbuster, you know, Spiels Steven Spielberg did in the 90s with Jurassic Park almost.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

I don't think anybody has reinvented the blockbuster as it was originally thought of. By Spielberg and Lucas and Kay. There was a point at which Hollywood became about entertainment over and above content. Now that's that's being harsh again, but there is no two ways about it. What what we now have in terms of entertainment movies, we don't expect to have our brains enlarged at all by what we see on screens in absolutely mainstream Hollywood product. It feels like it's there to hook us up, dump us off at the end with a big smile on our faces, but not matter very much more than what we're going to eat after the film. And I think that is the downside of what happened in the 1970s and 80s when the Wunder Kids took over cinema. Having said that, Williams has always brought a depth and a profundity to the music he's added to those films. So that even if we were watching a piece of schlock, what we were hearing sounded like it was timeless and profound and deep and had substance to it. And I think he's been doing that again and again and again and again and again. And as I say, when a film comes along like Schindler's List, in which we're no longer just talking about keeping us entertained, we're talking about actually putting the audience through quite a tough experience. And actually, Spielberg's done it several times now. He did it also, I think, with um the Munich Olympics film as well. And certainly with Private Ryan, you know, there are there's there is genuine upsetting horror in those films, in which you can't help but feel terrible for the people going through what they're going through. And Williams can turn his hand to that as well. But in a way, I'm not sure that there was an attempt to kind of re-invigorate the blockbuster. I think there were innumerable copycats who did their own versions of Star Wars, their own versions of Indiana Jones, their own versions up to a point of Jurassic Park, all the way through the 80s and 90s and the 2000s. What Spielberg and Williams' job became was to actually make us feel like whenever they produced a film, we were back at original source again. We weren't making a copy of something, we were watching something that had an ethos to it, that had an intention to it, to be cinematic and to entertain, yes, but to entertain with with intelligence. And I think that's that that's what they then go on to do, what they then go on doing. And really Jurassic Park's prime mover, as Spielberg is, is seeing Jurassic Park for what it is, which is fun with dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_02 47:07

My huge thanks to Neil for that conversation, and I really hope you enjoyed it as much as I did recording it. You can follow Neil on threads and Instagram at Neil.brand.com. Neil does perform live several times a year, and I urge you all to go and see him if you can. I had the joy of seeing a screening of Beggars of Life, a 1928 silent film with Louise Brooks, complete with a live score by Neil and the Dodge Brothers. Cinema for me is experiential. It goes far beyond just the passive act of sitting and watching a film in the dark. And there is no better way, in my mind, to see a air quotes silent film than to see it with a live accompaniment. It's almost like having the ability to time travel. Next week I'm bringing you my conversation with Tom Jurassic himself, Tom Fishingden, talking all about the expanded universe of the Jurassic franchise. We discuss the comics, novels, um well, evolution of Claire, TV shows and much more. Plus, we talk about Tom's self-produced audio drama, Tales from a Jurassic World, which returns for its final season on the 23rd of May. So very timely. As always, if you like what I do here, then please leave a rating and review. And until next time, I'll say thank you very, very much for listening and goodbye.