There are directors and there are composers, and then there are pairings so fused that it becomes hard to imagine one without the other. Hitchcock had Herrmann, at least for a while. Burton has Elfman, most of the time. But no director-composer relationship in film history has lasted longer, produced more, or shaped the sound of popular cinema as thoroughly as the one between Steven Spielberg and John Williams.

It started over lunch in the early 1970s and it is still going, more than fifty years and thirty films later. Spielberg himself summed up the stakes of that partnership in a line that gets quoted so often because it happens to be true: without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly, brooms don’t carry witches through Quidditch matches, men in red capes don’t soar, dinosaurs don’t walk the earth, and audiences don’t weep the way they do. Take the music away from a Spielberg film and you don’t just lose a soundtrack. You lose the emotional architecture holding the whole thing up.

So let’s walk through that architecture, film by film, from a quiet character drama about a Texas couple on the run to a black-and-white historical epic about the Holocaust, and everywhere in between.

An Unlikely First Date: The Sugarland Express (1974)

The collaboration didn’t begin with a shark or a spaceship. It began with Goldie Hawn, a stolen patrol car, and a young, mostly unknown director named Steven Spielberg making his theatrical debut.

Williams was already an established Hollywood composer by 1974, with scores for films like The Reivers and The Cowboys to his name. Spielberg, twenty-six years old and obsessive about film music, had specifically sought him out after falling in love with those scores. When the two finally sat down together, Williams later recalled meeting what looked like a sweet teenage kid who somehow knew more about film music history than he did, rattling off Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin scores like a scholar.

What’s notable about The Sugarland Express is how restrained the resulting score is. Spielberg wanted something big, a full symphony, maybe even Aaron Copland-style orchestral grandeur. Williams talked him out of it. He told Spielberg the story was too small and intimate for eighty musicians, and that what the film needed instead was something soft and almost cradle-like. The result leaned on jazz harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, acoustic guitars, and a small string ensemble, giving the film a bluesy, country-tinged texture instead of a sweeping main theme.

It would have been easy for two strong-willed creative people to clash right out of the gate. Instead, Williams’ instinct to underplay the material rather than overplay it impressed Spielberg even more than if he’d written something flashy. That trust, established on a film almost nobody remembers today, is the reason Spielberg called Williams back the very next year for something a little more ambitious. A film about a shark.

Two Notes That Changed Everything: Jaws (1975)

If The Sugarland Express was the courtship, Jaws was the marriage. And it almost didn’t happen the way we remember it.

The production of Jaws was a famous disaster. The mechanical shark, nicknamed Bruce after Spielberg’s lawyer, broke down constantly, and shooting on the open ocean ballooned from a planned fifty-five days to a brutal one hundred fifty-nine. Spielberg ended up with far less usable footage of the shark than he’d hoped for, which meant the film had to imply the creature’s presence again and again rather than show it. As a result, the shark itself doesn’t appear on screen until well past the hour mark.

That should have crippled the film. Instead, it became the reason the film works.

Williams’ solution was a two-note ostinato, alternating between E and F, low and relentless. When he first played it for Spielberg on the piano, using just two fingers, Spielberg assumed he was joking. He’d been expecting something more melodic, more romantic, the kind of score a young director imagines accompanying his big studio debut. Williams insisted the simplicity was the point, explaining that the sophisticated, melodic approach Spielberg wanted wasn’t the approach the footage itself was asking for. He described the theme as grinding and instinctual, something almost brainless, the same way a shark is brainless.

Spielberg came around fast. The mechanical failures of Bruce meant the film had to lean harder on suggestion than spectacle, and Williams’ theme became the actual monster of the movie. You don’t need to see a fin breaking the surface when those two notes start creeping in underneath a calm ocean shot. Spielberg has said outright that he believes the score is responsible for half the success of the film, which is a remarkable thing for a director to admit about somebody else’s contribution. The Jaws theme won Williams his second Academy Award and remains, fifty years later, one of the most universally recognized pieces of music ever written for a film.

First Contact, in Five Notes: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Two years after Jaws, Spielberg and Williams returned to the well, this time for a film about humanity’s first peaceful contact with an alien species. And once again, the solution to a massive storytelling problem turned out to be almost absurdly simple: five notes.

The famous five-note motif in Close Encounters functions as both score and dialogue. It’s literally the communications signal the humans in the film use to greet the alien spacecraft, and the alien ship answers back in deep tuba tones. Critic Pauline Kael described the resulting exchange as a kind of musical dialogue, with the humans offering an oboe variation on the theme and the visitors responding in their own register, building into what she called a conversational duet between two civilizations. It’s one of the rare moments in film history where the score isn’t just supporting the scene. It is the scene.

Williams later noted that the surprise hidden in those final two notes only works because the first three notes of the phrase already feel resolved on their own, a piece of music theory sleight of hand that took him decades to fully articulate even to himself. It’s the kind of detail that explains why his melodies tend to lodge themselves in your brain rather than just decorating a scene and disappearing.

A Detour Through War and Adventure: 1941 and Raiders of the Lost Ark

Not every Spielberg-Williams collaboration from this stretch involved sharks or spaceships. The 1979 war comedy 1941 gave Williams the chance to write a rollicking march that Spielberg would later single out as his personal favorite among all of Williams’ marches, which is saying something from a director who’s worked with the man on thirty films.

Then came Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and with it the Indiana Jones theme, a swaggering, instantly hummable piece of pure adventure music that Williams would go on to develop and reuse across four more films spanning more than four decades. Spielberg once described the relationship between Indy and the score in almost literal terms, joking that the music’s sharp rhythms told the character when to run and its strings told him when to duck, as if Williams were quite literally directing the character’s survival instincts from the orchestra pit.

Letting the Music Lead: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

By 1982, the trust between these two men had grown to the point where Spielberg did something almost unheard of in mainstream filmmaking. For the climactic flying bicycle chase in E.T., Williams was struggling to hit every musical cue against the picture as already edited. So Spielberg made an unusual offer. He told Williams to take the film off the screen entirely and just conduct the orchestra the way the music naturally wanted to flow, with its own phrasing and momentum. Spielberg would then go back and re-edit the scene to match the music, rather than the other way around.

This is, by any normal standard, backwards. Composers fit music to picture, not the reverse. But the result speaks for itself. The final fifteen minutes of E.T., scored to Williams’ soaring “Escape / Chase / Saying Goodbye” cue, achieve a kind of emotional momentum that feels inevitable, as though the bikes lifting off the ground and the music swelling underneath them were always one single idea rather than two separate crafts stitched together after the fact. Williams himself has said the sequence has a sense of operatic completion that came specifically from this unusual wedding of musical accents to film editing. It earned him his fourth Academy Award, and it remains, for plenty of people who grew up with this movie, the single moment where John Williams made them cry without their permission.

Empire of the Sun, Always, and Hook: The Less-Discussed Decade

After Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, the collaboration took a brief pause before resuming in 1987 with Empire of the Sun, a sober wartime drama about a young British boy navigating Japanese-occupied Shanghai. It’s a markedly different register for Williams, trading adventure swagger for something more wistful and unsettled, fitting for a film that’s one of Spielberg’s more underrated efforts.

Always followed in 1989, a supernatural romance about aerial firefighters that doesn’t get talked about nearly as often as its blockbuster siblings, but which gave Williams another chance to write tender, romantic material rather than action cues.

Then in 1991 came Hook, Spielberg’s big-budget reimagining of Peter Pan, and one of the more curious entries in the catalog. Hook was originally conceived as something closer to a full musical, with Williams co-writing eight songs alongside lyricist Leslie Bricusse, though only five ultimately made it into the finished film. What survived is still some of Williams’ most purely whimsical work, full of swashbuckling brass and the kind of childlike wonder that the film itself was chasing, even if critics at the time felt the movie didn’t quite live up to its own ambitions. The score has aged better than its reputation, and deep-cut fans of the partnership tend to rank it surprisingly high.

Dinosaurs and Genocide, in the Same Year: Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List (1993)

If you want a single year that demonstrates the sheer range of what this collaboration was capable of, look no further than 1993, when Spielberg released two films that could not be more different from each other, and Williams scored both.

For Jurassic Park, the challenge was capturing a sense of genuine awe, and doing it before the CGI dinosaurs were even fully finished. Williams wrote the now-iconic theme that plays over the first full reveal of the brachiosaurs, a swelling, triumphant piece of music that does as much work selling the wonder of the moment as the visual effects themselves, maybe more. It’s become one of the most recognizable pieces of pure “sense of wonder” music ever composed for film, instantly evoking that feeling of seeing something impossible for the first time.

Then there’s Schindler’s List, a project that nearly broke Williams emotionally before he’d written a single note. After watching a rough cut with Spielberg, Williams was reportedly so overcome that he told the director he needed a better composer than himself for this material. Spielberg’s reply has become one of the more famous exchanges in film scoring history: he told Williams that he knew, but they were all dead, meaning there was no one left to ask. Williams ultimately composed a haunting, violin-led score and brought in virtuoso Itzhak Perlman to perform the main theme. The result is some of the most restrained, devastating music either man has ever put into a film, built almost entirely around a single mournful violin line rather than the lush orchestral textures audiences associated with their work together. It won Williams his fourth Academy Award for an original score, his fifth overall.

The Later Years: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, and Beyond

The collaboration kept rolling through the rest of the 1990s and into the new millennium, including Amistad in 1997, Saving Private Ryan in 1998, Catch Me If You Can in 2002, War Horse in 2011, Lincoln in 2012, and The Fabelmans in 2022, Spielberg’s deeply personal, semi-autobiographical film that marked the duo’s twenty-ninth project together. Most recently, Williams scored Spielberg’s latest alien movie, Disclosure Day.

Not every Spielberg film since 1974 has featured a Williams score. Twilight Zone: The Movie went to Jerry Goldsmith, The Color Purple to Quincy Jones, Bridge of Spies to Thomas Newman, Ready Player One to Alan Silvestri, and West Side Story used Leonard Bernstein’s original Broadway music, with Williams stepping back into a consulting role to help preserve it rather than replace it. Those five exceptions, out of thirty films, only underline how remarkably consistent the partnership has otherwise been.

In 2022, at ninety years old, Williams briefly announced that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would be his final film score before reversing course the following year. His explanation for changing his mind doubles as a pretty good summary of why this collaboration has lasted half a century in the first place: he said he didn’t think you ever really leave music, that it functions as a kind of nexus, a conduit, a connection.

Why It Worked

It’s worth asking, after all this, what actually made the Spielberg-Williams partnership different from every other director-composer relationship in Hollywood history. Plenty of directors have long-running collaborators. Few have one that’s lasted fifty years and thirty films without a serious public falling out.

Part of the answer seems to be mutual restraint. Williams talked Spielberg out of a big orchestral score on their very first film together, and Spielberg trusted him enough to listen. Part of it is mutual ambition. Spielberg has never been a director who wants wallpaper music sitting quietly under his scenes, and Williams has never been a composer content to write functional, forgettable cues. And part of it, frankly, is just chemistry, the kind that either exists between two collaborators or doesn’t, no matter how talented either one is on their own.

Spielberg has described the relationship as something like an ideal marriage with no disagreement, calling Williams his muse and a steadfast brother. After fifty years and thirty films, from a quiet harmonica solo in a Texas crime drama to a single mournful violin scoring the Holocaust, it’s hard to argue with him.