John Williams: “I’ve not looked at the Star Wars films”

Star Wars mania has firmly gripped the globe again this festive season with Disney and Lucasfilm’s latest installment, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, topping the box office across the world and grossing over $388million. With the release of Star Wars: Episode VIII now less than a year away, work will soon start on post-production and preparing its score, with John Williams returning once again. But in a new interview, the legendary composer has revealed he has never seen any of the films.

Speaking to The Mirror, the 84-year-old has revealed that even though he sees the film’s as part of the scoring process, he has never seen any of them in their entirety, saying:

“I let it go. I have not looked at the ‘Star Wars’ films and that’s absolutely true. When I’m finished with a film, I’ve been living with it, we’ve been dubbing it, recording to it, and so on. You walk out of the studio and, ‘Ah, it’s finished,’… Now I don’t have an impulse to go to the theater and look at it. Maybe some people find that weird, or listen to recordings of my music very, very rarely.”

Such news will be a surprise to Star Wars fans everywhere but Williams’ logic is quite sound given the way he would “see” the film in a recording studio with the same scenes playing out over and over again. In another surprising admission, Williams doesn’t think his work through the series is particularly memorable, saying:

“I don’t know. A lot of them are not very memorable and so on. It’s probably the most popular music that I’ve done.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in cinemas now; Star Wars: Episode VIII opens on December 15th, 2017.