John Williams: War Horse

War Horse is a mix of pastoral folky numbers and full-on orchestral blow-outs as the films moves from the English countryside to wartime France.

Spielberg’s 2011 film adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo book about a boy and a horse who fight in the first world war gets a real injection of emotion from Williams’s score. Spielberg says that when Williams asked him to come and listen to his early ideas for a score to War Horse, “I came over to his piano and he played me four different sketches and I cried four different times”.

Spielberg has made it clear why he always uses Williams to score his films: he believes that Williams has made him "a better director than I could have ever been without him". Williams’s score for War Horse was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.