Steven Spielberg Intros ‘Music by John Williams’ AFI Fest Doc Premiere

Even without the John Williams factor, the premiere event for the 38th annual AFI Fest would have been notable in one particular regard, Steven Spielberg said. “First of all, I thank the AFI board and everyone for doing something they’ve never done before, which is to open the AFI Festival with a documentary,” Spielberg said in introducing the 2025 events’s opening-night attraction at the TCL Chinese Theatre. “That is a wonderful thing, to really be able to place the documentary form exactly where it belongs, right up alongside the narrative form.”

But “even without the John Williams factor” is not something that Spielberg has wanted to experience very often in his filmmaking career. From his debut feature, “The Sugarland Express,” through his most recent film, 2022’s “The Fabelmans,” Spielberg has brought Williams in to score 29 of his features. And now they more or less share a 30th together: “Music by John Williams,” a Disney+ documentary for which Spielberg served as one of the producers as well as (apart from Williams) the primary interviewee.

“I love John,” Spielberg told the crowd, saying he is “much more” than a family friend — really, “a family member. He’s the greatest creative partner I have ever had. In the 52 years John and I have been working together with him scoring my films… this is the greatest partner I have ever had in the creative arts.”

Ron Howard is also a producer on the film and helped Spielberg introduce the Chinese screening. Although he admitted that Spielberg is “somebody who knows him far better than I do,” Howard may have briefly stolen the show when he noted that he and Williams both worked on the 1962 film “The Music Man” and spontaneously sang a stanza of “The Wells Fargo Wagon,” reprising his child-actor days.

The combined efforts of Lucasfilm Ltd, Amblin Documentaries and Imagine Documentaries led to the Laurent Bouzereau-directed documentary’s premiere at the Chinese, before it goes on to a limited theatrical run in L.A., New York and London on Nov. 1, concurrent with its Disney+ home release. Those walking the red carpet for the AFI Fest premiere included producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, and guests like filmmaker J.J. Abrams, LA Phil conductor Gustavo Dudamel, composer Alan Silvestri, songwriter Diane Warren, actor Bryce Dallas Howard and Williams’ daughter, Jenny Williams.

Howard spoke to how long Williams, 92, has been in the business when he noted that “I’ve been kind of in his universe for decades, even when I didn’t know it. For example, John let me know that he scored an episode of ‘Kraft Theater’ that my father, Rance, was in in the mid-’50s.” In singing his brief snippet from “The Music Man,” which Williams worked on in the days when he was better known as a pianist and arranger than composer, Howard said that “that was for John, and hopefully you somehow hear it.” (Williams was not in attendance at the premiere.)

More seriously, Howard noted the nature of the collaboration, saying that “one of the benefits of the way Brian Grazer and I have now framed Imagine Entertainment as a business model is this opportunity that we have to not just broaden our own horizons creatively, but also who we get to work with. And on this film, it’s been such a thrill to collaborate with Steven, with Kathy and Frank, with Amblin and Lucasfilm combined with the Imagine Documentaries side… to recognize John Williams as a complex, dimensionalized human being.

“What Laurent captured is this understanding of the way John is capable of communicating and reaching audiences and collaborating with filmmakers. And he’s a very complex figure… he’s a number of things. He’s very humble, and yet he’s brilliant. He’s a genius. He’s very, very kind, and yet he’s driven as an artist; he’s a task master. And, Laurent, thank you for your film. You really captured all that. … And to the maestro himself, I just have to thank him for trusting us to have this honor of telling this story.”

Spielberg lauded Bouzereau for graduating from his origins in doing “B-roll, when you’re making a movie and some guy runs around with a 16-millimeter camera and a microphone and tries to get you to pretend you’re directing the movie… This is how Laurent started with me. And since then you’ve become a very, very serious filmmaker. And this year alone, to have brought out the documentary ‘Faye,’ about Faye Dunaway, and now to have done this… I express my admiration for where he has been and how far he’s come.”

Bouzereau confirmed on the red carpet that he has known Williams for about 30 years and that he had tried for much of that time to get the composer to sign on to get the documentary treatment, only recently having succeeded, in rather spectacular if belated fashion.

Spielberg gave what amounts to a stump speech about the power of music, and Williams’ power in particular. “John and I, up to the time we got very busy about two years ago, twice a year for seven years running, would hold concerts for orchestras as a fundraiser… We would go all around the country and we would do an evening of film music… In each one of these concerts, I would take a scene that they know, perhaps the opening sequence from ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,’ and I would play it for the audience of a thousand people with no music, only sound effects and foley and some dialogue and that’s it. The opening of that movie is about four minutes long. And when you see the opening of ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ without music, that four minutes feels like 14 minutes. It takes forever. It is full of action, and you should be entertained, but it just drags. Then John’s at the podium with the Philadelphia orchestra, the LA Phil, the New York Phil… and we run that four minutes again, and John (picks up) the baton, and that four minutes suddenly feels like a minute and a half.

“And that is the miracle of film scoring. And that is the consistent miracle of John Williams and what he has brought to all of our movies and how he’s elevated them and brought them out to all of you — where often you might even leave the film that John Williams scored and a week later forget the film, but you’ll never forget the music.”