Mangold on Williams

Continuing the talk about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (here and here), see a great new interview with director James Mangold in The Hollywood Reporter.

There’s a lot about working with John Williams. Here’s Mangold:

But the other aspect that gets to your Richard Kimble part is that while John and I talked early on about letting the full Indy theme run in the beginning, I thought that when we got to 1969 and found Indy having lost his mojo, there’s no better definition of a character losing their mojo than they can’t quite hear their theme anymore. And so John immediately started scoring. I said, “I think you will be scoring a kind of ‘70s picture, a Three Days of the Condor,” and he goes, “I can do that. I am a ‘70s composer.” And so the movie then shifts and becomes more of a score of that time and less of the themes of Indy, until he gets to Morocco and puts on the hat and starts to find his mojo again. The theme returns with that. So it’s a very interesting flow that John and I trace musically. The movie almost ends up being a gigantic overture at the front and then a loss of that theme, and then a slow rebuilding toward the final reels when John once again lets the horses out of the barn, if you will.

That “’70s composer” material was some of my favorite that I heard in the theater and I was bummed it was not on the album. But maybe that’s why they skipped it, to focus on the more traditional “Indiana Jones” music?

That section of the film also includes this odd adaptation (or possibly a needle-drop) of the “Spyders” theme from Minority Report:

What a joy it is to have a new score to care about!