“There probably are about 55 minutes of music in the film, I think. And we recorded 92 minutes of music in Chicago.”
UPDATE from Randall D. Larson’s facebook: Transcript from comments made by John Williams at Lincoln‘s world premiere (Nov 8), included in Dreamwork’s EPK released today:
“It’s different only in the sense that every film that one does, and with Steven in this case, is a separate individual and discrete process. The subjects vary wildly, the texture and timbre of what needs to be done is individual in every case, so it is certainly a very different approach than INDIANA JONES or ET or SCHINDLER’S LIST. It is its own work. We hope that, in this case, that it’s remotely worthy of the subject… Certainly the atmospherics of the 19th Century and of the American musical grammar needed to be articulated in a musicologically accurate way, which I hope we did, and in addition to that, all the emotional connections that need to be threaded… People who will be watching this conversation may not have seen it, but it’s a film some very beautiful words, beginning with Doris Kearns Goodwin’s wonderful book and Tony Kushner’s script, and President Lincoln’s own writings… so a musical accompaniment of that would need to be something that, as I said earlier, I hope would be remotely worthy of what it purports to do. I hope that it is. I think that it’s very important for people to see this movie, it has an educational component which shouldn’t scare us away, actually, it’s not a tough film to take, but it’s a very rewarding film.”