One number keeps appearing in the coverage of Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film released in June, and nobody stops on it.
Seven recording sessions, spread over six months. The first on 11 September 2025 at Sony, the last in February. A 96 piece orchestra. Two hours twenty of recorded music, for a film that keeps eighty two minutes.
It is the thirtieth collaboration between Spielberg and John Williams, who is 94. And that calendar is not a scheduling footnote. It is the story.
What six months actually means
In the ordinary working life of this job, a feature score gets tracked in a few weeks. You receive the cut, you write, you record, often in two or three studio days because an orchestra is expensive by the hour. The schedule is handed to you, and whether it suits you is not a question anyone asks.
Here the sessions were laid out differently. Seven appointments spaced from autumn to winter, giving Williams time to conceive and then record in blocks. It is the only documented accommodation, and it is enough to put the film outside the norm.
I do not know anyone this happens to. And it is not primarily a money question: on a blockbuster post schedule, with a release date locked far in advance, spreading work across months is often harder to obtain than an extra budget line.
What he did with that time
The result is not what such a setup would lead you to expect.
Spielberg describes what is probably the most restrained score Williams has written for one of their films, someone holding back in a subtle and beautiful way. The Soundtrack World review points the same direction: delicate themes, often carried by the orchestra without trumpets or trombones, with the piano well forward.
Six months, 96 musicians, two hours twenty committed to tape for eighty two minutes kept, and a score that chooses restraint. From the composer of Jaws and Star Wars, that is information in itself. The ratio between what gets recorded and what survives the edit says something every composer knows anyway: a good part of what you write does not make the film.
On conducting, the album credits list Williams alongside William Ross and Randy Kerber, for orchestration as well as conducting. Variety reports that people close to the composer say he orchestrated the entire score and conducted much of the sessions. Both versions coexist, and I have no reason to pick one. What is certain is that at 94 he stood in front of 96 musicians, and that is not a figure of speech.
The part we do not know
One detail is circulating, and I give it for what it is: reported, unconfirmed. Williams reportedly suggested four other composers to Spielberg for the film. Classic FM writes it in the conditional. No names are known, and nobody knows what passed between them.
What several sources do report is that Spielberg went after him and that Williams eventually agreed. The Variety piece notes that neither man was interviewed. Williams had suggested back in June 2022, while working on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, released the following year, that he might stop scoring films. He walked that back a few months later, saying something about Spielberg I find accurate: he is not a man you can say no to.
I am not going to embroider past that. You can read this as the story of a composer being held on to, or as the story of a composer who wanted to be held on to. Both are plausible and I have no way of settling it.
What you can take from it
Nothing reproducible, let us be clear straight away. Nobody is going to spread six months of sessions for you. This case exists because fifty years of shared history and a director in a position to ask for that accommodation happened to add up.
But one thing does transfer, and it comes down to this: what a production agrees to rearrange for you is a good indicator of your actual standing. Not the only one, the health of the schedule and the director’s leverage matter a great deal. An indicator all the same.
On a first short film, you are given ten days and you take them. After three films with the same team, you can start saying you need fifteen. That is not a whim, and it often tells you more than the number on the quote.
Yesterday I wrote about Nanni Moretti, who after fifty years hands his music to a composer he had never worked with. Today, a director who spreads out his sessions rather than looking for someone else. I know the reasons behind neither, and putting them side by side would be manufacturing a symmetry that may not exist.
What I take from both, more modestly: a composer’s place on a film is read as much in the calendar as in the score.