John Williams said he was scoring Steven Spielberg’s “deep wound” as a child of divorce in “The Fabelmans.” In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt airing Wednesday, the legendary composer said that many children “suffer greatly” from the familial displacement.
“I imagine that a great number of children suffer greatly from divorce, from parents,” Williams told Holt in an exclusive clip shared with TheWrap. “There may be some that are relieved of a great … tense situation. But … for Steven, that was a deep wound, I think it’s fair to say.”
While Williams admitted that every film presents a challenge as “one has to search for what should the film sound like as well as look like,” scoring the Oscar-nominated “Fabelmans” represented a particularly interesting scenario as the director was “so frank [and] so unguarded about his family and his life as a youngster and the difficulties and the successes he had.”
The 91-year-old composer, who also wrote the “NBC Nightly News” theme song, coincidentally, felt justified in his observations of Spielberg’s parents as he got to know them “quite well” through the years, drawing from his mother Leah’s love for the piano.
“His mother was quite a good pianist,” he continued. “Coming to ‘[The] Fabelmans,’ she played a lot of piano in the film, and she played Beethoven, and some Bach, and some Satie, and Clementi, and so on, other things, plus what I’ve written for her in the background, which suggested a piano.”
While piano became a beloved hobby for Leah, Williams asserted “she wanted to have a career as a concert pianist,” but instead she had four children — which the composer notes is a “very familiar story to probably millions of women.”
“I felt that I was telling their story along with Steven in a very kind of close-to-the-vest way,” Williams concluded.
Lester Holt’s interview with John Williams will air Wednesday on “NBC Nightly News” at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, with the full sit-down available to watch after on NBCNews.com/NightlyFilms.
