John Williams has crafted enough compelling scores over the years to earn himself a retirement many times over, but his output doesn’t seem to be slowing down in the slightest, as he recently revealed that his work on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has resulted in more than 90 minutes of all-new material. The legacy of the franchise means that he did also incorporate familiar music and reimagined it in various ways, though the volume of fresh material for this film puts an emphasis on new perspectives, which includes Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s character Helena Shaw getting her own theme. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny lands in theaters on June 30th.
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“It’s certainly got to be an hour and a half of music, maybe more,” Williams detailed to Variety. “But I’m quite happy with it. There’s a lot of new material. The old material works very well as a touchstone of memory, but I had great fun, and I have a theme that I’ve written for Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the wonderful actress.”
Much like Harrison Ford, Williams has been a staple of the franchise since its inception with 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. The composer shared his enthusiasm not only for Ford in the film, but also the dynamic that Helena offers to the titular hero.
“Harrison is wonderful in it. He looks great, he moves beautifully,” the composer expressed. “The best part of it for me is the writing and the interplay of dialogue between Harrison and Phoebe, like the old-style Hepburn-and-Tracy kind of bickering. It’s witty and bright and snappy, like a duet that goes on for two hours.” ย
Williams also went on to detail what has made the music of the franchise so iconic and his inspirations for the material.
In his words, the scores for each film “are unified by Indy’s theme, and the general style of the film, which is in my mind a kind of action-comedy, because you never take the action seriously. It’s certainly a swashbuckling affair from beginning to end, fashioned more like movies of the ’30s and ’40s where the orchestra is racing along with the action, which you wouldn’t do in contemporary films very much.”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinyย lands in theaters on June 30th.
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