John Williams confirms he is not retired: “I like to keep an open mind”

Film composing legend John Williams has confirmed that he has not yet decided to retire, saying he “likes to keep an open mind”.

The composer, 91, has won five Academy Awards from a staggering 53 nominations, and is known for his work on Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, among others.

Williams had previously suggested that his score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, released in 2023, would be his final full length film composition.

Speaking in June 2022, he had said: “At the moment I’m working on Indiana Jones 5, which Harrison Ford – who’s quite a bit younger than I am – I think has announced will be his last film. So, I thought: If Harrison can do it, then perhaps I can, also,” he said.

However, by the time the film came out, he had already begun to row back on that assertion.

Speaking to Steven Spielberg in January 2023, he said: “Well, Steven is a lot of things. He’s a director, he’s a producer, he’s a studio head, he’s a writer, he’s a philanthropist, he’s an educator. One thing he isn’t, is a man you can say ‘no’ to,” implying that he’d be up for working on future projects with Spielberg.

Now, in a new interview with The Times, he has reasserted that he has not made any final decisions. “I don’t care much for grand pronunciamentos, statements that are firm and finished and surrounded by closed doors,” he said. “If I made one without putting it in context then I withdraw it.”

“If a film came along that I was greatly interested in, with a schedule that I could cope with, then I wouldn’t want to rule anything out,” Williams added. “Everything is possible. All is before us. Only our limitations are holding us back. Or, to put it more simply: I like to keep an open mind.”

Williams told Variety last year: “I had a 90th birthday and I met a woman at my age up in Boston. She was a very nice lady, exactly the same age as I, and I said to her, the greatest decade in a man’s life is 80 to 90, if you have your health, because if you get to 90, there’s an enormous compensation.”

“You see everything with such magnetic vision that you recognize the most beautiful thing in the world are Peruvian butterflies. There’s nothing more beautiful than that. And so it’s the greatest decade. And she said, ‘No, the greatest decade in a person’s life is 90 to 100’. So I’ll stick around for a while.”

“But also, you can’t retire from music. I said earlier, it’s like breathing. It’s your life. It’s my life. And so a day without music is a mistake,” he added.