Pharrell Williams considers movie composing a “marathon” and thinks his specialty is the “three- to five-minute” song “race.”
He told The Guardian newspaper’s G2 supplement in a question-and-answer session with fans when asked if a Star Trek film would be his ideal movie to score: “I am a Star Trek fan, but scoring is a whole other thing. It’s not for me. There are all kinds of races: relay, marathons, cross-country, sprints. A film is a marathon. Every step has to be penciled in to take people on a journey. A 15-second jingle would be a sprint. My specialty is the three- to five-minute race. I don’t have the mental endurance to stay on something as long as a film score. There’s a reason Hans Zimmer has two Oscars.”
When asked to name the greatest music producer of all time, and to say whether he agreed with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who said that life without music would be a mistake, Williams replied: “Quincy Jones, obviously! Life without music would be like a human being without sense. I was always making music as a kid, but never thought I could do something with it. I always knew I was going to do music, I just never knew what — whether I would end up as a terrible music teacher or an art teacher who was always asking his friends to come over and play on the side. But thiswas how it was written and I give thanks every day.”
Williams also said female artists should have “more agency” in the music business, adding “the idea that women only make 70 cents on a man’s dollar is still unacceptable.”
He added about supporting non-gendered awards: “There’s something nice about celebrating woman as an individual species. If the Academy Awards combined the best male and female actors, that would be cool, because that’s something that needs to happen as a response to patriarchy and gender favoritism. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the gift that is the feminine aspect of women,” he said.
