Saving Private Ryan in the context of Scott Frank

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer and conductor. Over his seven-decade career, he has composed many of the best known scores in film history. His compositional style blends romanticism, impressionism, and atonal music with complex orchestration. Best known for his collaborations with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, he has received numerous accolades, including 26 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With a total of 54 Academy Award nominations, he is the second-most nominated person in the award's history, after Walt Disney. He is also the oldest Academy Award nominee in any category, receiving a nomination at 91 years old.

Williams's early work as a film composer includes None but the Brave (1965), Valley of the Dolls (1967), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), Images and The Cowboys (both 1972), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974). He has collaborated with Spielberg since The Sugarland Express (1974), composing music for all but five of his feature films. He received five Academy Awards for Best Score/Best Score Adaptation for Fiddler on the Roof (1971); score adaptation of the original music by Jerry Bock), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Schindler's List (1993). Other memorable collaborations with Spielberg include Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the Indiana Jones franchise (1981–2023), Hook (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If You Can (2002), War Horse (2011), Lincoln (2012), and The Fabelmans (2022). He also scored Superman (1978) and two of its sequels, the first two Home Alone films (1990–1992), and the first three Harry Potter films (2001–2004). Outside of his long-term collaborations with Spielberg and Lucas, Williams has composed the scores for films directed by William Wyler, Clint Eastwood, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, John Badham, George Miller, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, Ron Howard, Barry Levinson, John Singleton, Alan Parker, Alfonso Cuarón, and Rob Marshall.

Band of Brothers is a 2001 American war drama miniseries based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose's 1992 non-fiction book of the same name. It was created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also served as executive producers, and who had collaborated on the 1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan, from which the series got many of its visual cues and crew members. Episodes first aired on HBO from September 9 to November 4, 2001.

The series dramatizes the history of "Easy" Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. It begins during Easy Company's paratrooper training and follows its participation in the Western Front of World War II from D-Day to their occupation of Berchtesgaden. The events are based on Ambrose's research and recorded interviews with Easy Company veterans. Although all the characters are based directly on members of Easy Company, the series took some literary license, adapting history for dramatic effect and series structure. Each episode begins with excerpts from interviews with some of the survivors, who are identified by name only at the end of the finale. The title of the book and series comes from the St. Crispin's Day speech in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, delivered by King Henry before the Battle of Agincourt. Ambrose quotes a passage from the speech on his book's first page; this passage is recited by Carwood Lipton in the series finale.