“Forty years ago, if you said to me, ‘Here’s a project, John, and I want you to write 25 hours of music,’ I would have dropped my pencil case and said, ‘It’s impossible. No one can do that,’” the composer says with a laugh.
Yet he has, and for The Rise of Skywalker, he penned more than three hours of music, though the film itself only runs two and a half hours: New or revised music was needed throughout the recording process, which took 11 days between mid-July and late November.
“As with The Force Awakens, things were [changing] considerably during postproduction,” director J.J. Abrams explains, “and I would always apologize that we were making adjustments, and John would always laugh and apologize that he hadn’t written the right thing before. We were both just full of apologies to each other.”
With ‘Rise of Skywalker,’ Composer John Williams Puts His Coda on ‘Star Wars’, by Jon Burlingame (SPOILER ALERT)