As John Williams celebrates his 54th Oscar nomination for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the legendary composer is opening up about his lengthy career creating iconic scores for Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling archaeologist, Superman, E.T., and countless others.
Most notably, Williams turned Star Wars into a space opera for the ages when he first collaborated with up-and-coming filmmaker George Lucas on the original 1977 film. While the franchise is filled with instantly recognizable themes like the Imperial March, Williams revealed that he regrets one inclusion in the classic installment that now seems awkward in retrospect.
Via Variety:
There was one blip in scoring the first movie. “I mistakenly wrote a love theme for Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. I learned later that they were brother and sister, so it was an incestuous idea to have a love theme for them. But George never told us there was going to be a second film!”
Williams is referring to the revelation in Return of the Jedi that Luke and Leia are long-lost twin siblings, which makes their romantic interludes in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back kinda weird, George!
That said, naturally, Williams is proud of his time on the now-massive franchise, which he never expected to blow up as big as it did.
“Doing it at the time, I didn’t think it was radical,” Williams told Variety about the original Star Wars. “What made it radical was the embrace that it had. People seemed to have been starving for this kind of expression, and here was a vehicle into which it could be put.”
(Via Variety)
