My Favourite John Williams Score: ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’
My most beloved music score of all time by my favourite film composer.
Seeing Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial during the original run in 1982 was the Damascus Road experience that converted my seven-year-old self to cinema. The effect was immediate and permanent, and I have written about the experience here, if you’re interested.
That extraordinary encounter with an extraordinary film also began my lifelong love for the music of John Williams. Over the decades he has written iconic scores for many Spielberg classics, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List. He also wrote the landmark scores for Star Wars, Superman, Harry Potter… the list is almost endless. He has won five Oscars, and been nominated more than anyone else in Academy history, an astounding fifty-two times.
The music for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — for which he won his fourth Oscar — is, to my mind, Williams’s greatest work, and also the greatest film score of all time. It’s an opinion shared by Spielberg himself, and whilst an equal case could be made for any number of his other works, for me, there is an unashamed personal bias that comes into play here. After all, it isn’t an…
