john williams

Only John Williams could have put me in the orbit of one of history’s most famous basketball players. Kobe Bryant, like so many others, was a huge fan of Williams’ music; he befriended and sought out the composer for career advice and, when he made his post-athletic pivot to filmmaking, hired Williams to compose a short score.

And because I cover film music for a living, I was able to interview Bryant — along with Williams and Disney animation legend Glen Keane — for The Times in the spring of 2017. I even got to meet Bryant in person, backstage at the Hollywood Bowl, when he rehearsed his narration of “Dear Basketball” at an all-Williams concert. It was an obscenely hot day, and I waited outside Bryant’s dressing room while they finished drying his sweat-soaked shirt with a hair dryer before he came out and cheerfully shook my hand.

I gave Bryant and “Dear Basketball” a fair amount of real estate in my new book, “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” not because of his fame or athletic prowess, but because I feel that his short film inspired one of Williams’ most beautiful works of the last decade, and also because there was something poetic and moving about the whole affair, and about saying goodbye to the thing you love the most — especially as the film became a kind of eulogy for Bryant after his untimely death in 2020.

[The below excerpt is from Tim Greiving’s “John Williams: A Composer’s Life,” out Sept. 2. Greiving is a frequent contributor to The Times.]

Tim Greiving

(Laura Hinely)

Kobe Bryant, the 18-time NBA All-Star, was an unexpected admirer of John’s music: as a boy, Bryant would tie a towel around his neck and run around to the theme of Superman; as a player, he used the Imperial March to hype himself up before games; and as a father, he would rock his infant daughters to sleep on his chest listening to Hedwig’s Theme. The six-foot-six athlete from Philly could hardly have been less like John, but he recognized mastery when he heard it. “I asked myself a question,” Bryant said: “What makes a John Williams piece timeless? How is he using each instrument? How is he using the space between them? How is he building momentum, and then how is he taking it away to build it again?” As a basketball player, Bryant said he was “essentially conducting a game,” “so I just wanted to talk to him about how he composed music and try to find something similar that I can then use to help my game as a leader and winning championships.”

Bryant first contacted John for counsel just before the 2008 NBA season. “The first thing I told Kobe was, I’d never seen a basketball game,” John confessed. “High school, college, professional, or television. And of course he laughed.” “But once I had told him my reason for reaching out to him,” Bryant said, “he saw the connection immediately…If we look in our same industry and we just look at things from that funnel, then you wind up essentially recycling information. So sometimes you look outside of that discipline to have a new point of view, a new perspective on it. [John] was digging it.”

They continued to see each other over the years, with Bryant often visiting John backstage after shows at the Hollywood Bowl. When Bryant retired from basketball in 2016, he turned his attention to entertainment. He wrote a sentimental open letter, “Dear Basketball,” as a retirement announcement, and one of his first post-game projects was turning that text into a short film. He wanted it crafted by undisputed masters of their fields, so he commissioned Disney animation veteran Glen Keane— who designed and animated Ariel in The Little Mermaid, among other achievements— and he asked John to write the score. The first thing John said to Bryant was, “I do classical pieces, and it’s all by hand,” almost as a warning. Bryant answered: “The piece will be hand-animated by Glen Keane, who is you in the animation space. I want it to have the human touch. I don’t want it to be poppy, I don’t want it to be hip-hoppy. I want timeless, classical music.”

Somehow, these three disparate artists—with two decades between each of them—hit it off. Keane was an avid fan of Lost in Space growing up in the 1960s, and when he told John how much he loved the music, John was completely embarrassed. “But it’s wonderful, John!” Keane said. “It held the promise of wonder and excitement and fun and quirky and scary and dangerous, and it was all in this one score. And John— the roots of your entire career are in that score.” Keane asked if he could play some of the old music. John said, “No, please don’t!” “No, I really gotta play it for you,” Keane insisted. “So I did.” The unlikely trio sat around a table in Keane’s office “and we just talked,” said Bryant. “John talked about how [the letter] made him feel, Glen how it makes him feel, and we all centered on the same thing, which is why I wrote it in the first place: the beauty of finding what it is that you love to do, and then finding the beauty of knowing that you will not be able to do that forever. Once they saw the nature of the piece, there was really nothing else to discuss.”

(Oxford University Press )

Keane illustrated the five-minute film with graphite on paper, depicting the arc of Bryant’s letter— from young Kobe tossing rolled-up tube socks, to NBA glory, to retiring at 37. John was equally inspired by Bryant’s childlike enthusiasm and Keane’s artisanal process. “The drawings have great fluidity and, in the best sense of the word, great simplicity,” John said. “They really are gorgeous, not only to look at, but rhythmically they’re fabulous.” Keane always animated while listening to music, and for this story it was selections from Empire of the Sun. John used that score as a reference point, but initially he wrote something that was too big, “and he went back and he rewrote it for something that was more understated,” said Keane, “in a similar way that Kobe’s delivery, his narration, is very personal, uninflected, not trying to sell anything. More like revealing. Kobe’s got a very quiet voice, and that also had a big impact in how we animated.”

John took a short break from The Last Jedi and spent two weeks in March 2017 to write and record this short piece—a gift for Bryant. When the towering baller arrived at the Sony scoring stage, John said: “I hope that you like what I’ve written.” Bryant just looked at John and said, “I feel pretty confident that it’s going to be just fine.” When Bryant heard John’s piece for the very first time, emanating from a symphony orchestra, “Oh my God,” he said. “I almost lost my mind. As soon as his hands went up and then the music started, I almost yelled out loud— but I had to remember that the red light was on and we’re recording… It was the most unreal experience I could ever have.” Bryant looked over “and just put his head on my shoulder,” said Keane, “like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ It was so beautiful. Then when it was done, John turned to us and said, ‘I promise it’s going to get better.’”

It was one of the simplest, yet most inspired pieces John wrote during this decade: a brief journey taken by a humble, hummable tune that bottled a young boy’s guileless dreams and aspiration for greatness and glory. His hymnal theme begins as a gentle woodwind duet, which is passed to strings and then accelerates into soaring triumph to accompany Bryant’s heyday. Then it grows small again, a lonely keyboard wandering a broken chord as Bryant’s voiceover admits that his body can only play for so long. John’s knack for noble flying music closes the loop, with heraldic horns and rolling timpani connecting Bryant’s story to his music for American heroism— concluding with a bittersweet reprise of the theme on piano and an uplifting coda as the credits roll. Like the letter itself, the score is part valentine, part elegy—and John put his heart into it. He premiered it at the Hollywood Bowl in September, and Bryant surprised the audience by joining John onstage to narrate. The short film won an Oscar in March 2018—and then very shortly afterward, it became a poignant eulogy for Bryant when he died, age 41, in a helicopter crash on a foggy Sunday morning in Calabasas that also killed his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna. John’s wistful, symphonic poem suddenly took on a new shade. “It is elegiac, but it isn’t weepy,” John said of the film when he first scored it, never imagining the sudden tragic fate of his young friend.

It strikes its own manner of saluting the man and the game and the accomplishments with a lot of modesty, I think. It’s very touching, and in the end that may be its highest achievement, that it’s able to praise this man the way it does, without a lot of false vanity or hubris that could easily have spilled into it. That’s my take on it in any case.

An enormous shadow hovers over the characters in “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” and it’s the same one that has been dogging composer Alexandre Desplat ever since he was a teenager in Paris.

That shadow? The music of John Williams.

“He’s such a legend for all of us,” says Desplat, 63, on a Zoom call from London, where he’s been burning the midnight oil on the score for Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming “Frankenstein.” “He’s just the only one to follow.”

Like Williams, Desplat is now a grizzled (though painterly handsome) veteran himself, with hundreds of films to his name. He’s already completed three scores this year alone — for the French-Swedish Palme d’Or nominee “Eagles of the Republic,” Wes Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme” and this week’s “Jurassic” heavyweight.

He’s also making his North American conducting debut on July 15 in a grand survey of his film career at the Hollywood Bowl, a fitting, if overdue, coronation of his two-decade reign as an A-list composer in America.

When Desplat began scoring Hollywood films in the early 2000s, his music swept in like a breath of fresh French air — elegant, restrained, melodic, idiosyncratic — and the list of filmmakers who sought him out reads like a sizable section of the Criterion Closet: Terrence Malick, Ang Lee, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Greta Gerwig.

“He’s the last tycoon of American movie music,” Desplat said in 2010 of his idol John Williams. “He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

His ride-or-die partner is Anderson, who first employed him on “Fantastic Mr. Fox” in 2007 and who teed up Desplat’s first Oscar win with “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (He’s been nominated eleven times.) May’s “The Phoenician Scheme” marked their seventh collaboration.

“As I started being a film composer, I had my idols in sight — of course Hitchcock and Herrmann, David Lean and [Maurice] Jarre, [François] Truffaut and Georges Delerue,” Desplat told me in 2014. “All these duets were strong and they showed how important the intimacy between a director and a composer would be for both of them. It’s not only good for the film, it’s good for the composers, because these composers actually developed their own style by doing several movies with the same director.”

In a town too often filled with generic, factory-farmed scores, his were like a gourmet French meal, even though he grew up on the same diet of American movies and their iconic scores. The young Desplat was obsessed with U.S. culture — listening to jazz, watching baseball and the Oscars — and he decided he wanted to score movies after he heard “Star Wars” in 1977. Emblazoned on the cover of that iconic black album were the words “Composed and Conducted by John Williams.”

“That,” Desplat told his friend at the time, “is what I want to do.”

It’s fitting and kind of funny that two decades after charming audiences with a delicate, waltzing score for the 2003 Scarlett Johansson prestige picture “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the composer is now promoting a stomping monster score for a blockbuster behemoth starring Johanssson and a bunch of CGI dinosaurs — and tampering with John Williams’ sacred musical DNA.

“Jurassic World: Rebirth” isn’t the first time he’s had to brave the T-rex-sized footprints of his hero: Desplat scored the final two films in the “Harry Potter” series, and he was also the first composer on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” He left the latter when Tony Gilroy took over the project from original director Gareth Edwards, and before composing any notes.

“I went as far as the change of directors and change of plans,” Desplat explains, “and the weeks passing by, and then I had to move on because I wanted to work with Luc Besson” (on 2017’s “Star Wars”-esque “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”).

“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Much like his work on “Harry Potter,” Desplat’s odes to Williams in “Rebirth” are more whispers than shouts — though there are a handful of overt declarations of both the iconic anthem and hymn for Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dino-masterpiece. More subtle homages arrive in his use of solo piano and ghostly choir, and in the opening three notes of his motif for the team led by Johansson’s character — a tune that almost begins like Williams’ “Jurassic” hymn.

“So there’s a connection,” Desplat says. “I take the baton and I move away from it.”

He composed new leitmotifs for wonder, for adventure, for danger. His score, much like the original, is an amusement park ride full of sudden drops, humor and family-friendly terror, with a few moments of cathartic, introspective relief.

Mostly, Edwards kept pushing him for more hummable motifs.

“When I was tempted to go back to something more abstract — you know, French movie,” Desplat says, winking — “he would just ask me to go back towards John Williams’ inspiration of writing great motifs that you can remember and are catchy.”

Desplat worries this is becoming an extinct art in Hollywood. “I don’t hear much of that in many movies that I watch,” he says. “It’s kind of an ambient texture — which is the easiest thing to create.”

In college, he would listen to the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” score on a loop, and as his own scoring career developed, he was paying keen attention to John Williams’ more intimate chamber scores like “The Accidental Tourist” and “Presumed Innocent” — as well as juggernauts like “Jurassic Park.” Besides the music itself seeping in, he learned that it was important to score every kind of film, no matter how big or small. Williams’ work also taught him “that I could have something elegant, classical, but with some seeds of jazz in the chords or in the way the melody evolves.”

Whenever he hears someone talking dismissively about Williams, Desplat gets defensive. “I want to punch them,” he says, only half kidding.

“He’s the master, what can I say?” Desplat told me in 2010. “He’s the man. He’s the last tycoon of American movie music. So that’s everything said there. He drew a line and we just have to be brave and strong enough to try and challenge this line. With humility, but with desire. It’s a kind of battle.”

Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in the movie “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

(Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures )

When Desplat received his first Academy Award nomination, for “The Queen” in 2007, the one person who called from Los Angeles to congratulate him was Maurice Jarre, composer of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago.”

Desplat had met the French legend a few times over the years, including an early invitation to a mixing session for the 1990 film, “After Dark, My Sweet.” Desplat was aghast when he saw director James Foley taking away Jarre’s melody and all the various musical elements on the mixing board, save for a simple electronic thump.

The young composer expressed his dismay and Jarre calmly said: “It’s his film. I have to accept that.”

“That’s a lesson that I learned very early on,” Desplat says. “I’ve never forgotten that, because it’s still the same,” he laughs.

He was also warmly received as a young man by Georges Delerue, the great serenader of the French New Wave in films like “Jules and Jim” and “Contempt.” “They were so kind,” Desplat says, “such sweet men, both of them.” (Michel Legrand? Not so much, Desplat says: “He said awful things about me in books.”)

What they all have in common — besides a penchant for composing beautiful music — is the defiant, transatlantic leap from the French film industry where they started to the highest perch in Hollywood. Jarre left Paris in the early 1960s after the enormous success of “Lawrence” and never looked back, forging meaningful partnerships with directors like Peter Weir and Adrian Lyne. Delerue uprooted from Paris to the Hollywood Hills after winning his first Oscar in 1980 and scored a few hits including “Steel Magnolias” and “Beaches.”

“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy,” says Desplat, who has already completed three scores this year. “That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

Desplat started professionally in France in 1985 and wrote roughly 50 scores before “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the English-language film that put him on Hollywood’s radar. He continues to do French films amid the summer blockbusters and American art house pictures.

“I dreamed of writing for symphonic scores,” Desplat says, “but for many years there was no way I could do it in French cinema, because the movies didn’t offer that, or the producer didn’t offer that. I had to learn how to sound big with very little amount of musicians.”

He enjoys the freedom of a big-budget project. “To be able to have a studio say, ‘Go, write what you need to write.’ The director, he wants an orchestra, he wants 95 musicians. Great! They don’t even say anything. You just go and you record. They book the studio. They book the musicians.”

Still, the limitations he trained under gave Desplat some of his greatest strengths: creativity, resourcefulness, speed. He had to orchestrate everything himself, which means his music bears a distinctive fingerprint. And composing for small, sometimes unorthodox ensembles gave his music a clean, transparent signature as opposed to the all-too-typical wall of mud.

He can’t say much about his 100-minute score for “Frankenstein,” which he just finished recording with a giant orchestra and choir at both Abbey Road and AIR Studios, and which comes out on Netflix in November. The reason he does so many films, Desplat proposes, is because he’s lazy.

“I really think that people who work a lot are lazy. That’s why they work a lot — otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.”