Original subtitles

That is the theme of The Duelists, and it's a theme that I wrote.

My name is Howard Blake, composer and conductor.

I was very delighted back in 77 to be asked to write the

score for this film by Ridley Scott and David Partner.

They came down to my house in Sussex and said, We've got, we think, what is a very

beautiful film, and we'd love to have you write a score for it.

And I'm going to try and tell you how I did that.

Here comes the menace theme of The Duel, which recurs many times through the film.

It's derived from the main theme, but it's here,

it's on bass with side drum interpolations.

When it opened into this first scene, I thought, this is fabulous.

Fabulous scene, beautiful photography.

I thought it was actually maybe the most beautiful film I'd ever seen.

And I immediately wanted to do it.

The previous suspense music is actually derived from that

main theme, but it's used as what I call a bass motif.

And it gives the menace that is present in this dueling.

And it becomes a threat, a music that threatens the whole film.

And it gives a signal that they're going to meet again and duel again.

Originally I was going to write music here, but

we decided it was so tense that we didn't need it.

But we bring it in at the moment of crisis.

I met Ridley at the end of the 60s, early 70s, when I was very busy in London,

writing for all sorts of things.

I'd been writing scores for The Avengers, I'd been writing

feature films, I'd been writing a lot of commercials.

I was just basically enjoying writing for everything.

And I was very much part of the London scene at that time.

I'd come from being a sort of pianist at Abbey Road.

I worked my way up through all sorts of sessions

and working for other composers and music directors.

And I met Ridley writing soundtracks for commercials, as well known.

He was at that time, I would think, certainly considered

the most successful commercial studio in London.

He made an enormous number of very, very stylish commercials.

So I met him at that period and wrote several tracks for him.

And we talked at that time about what he so much

wanted to do, to get in and direct features.

But at that time, he still hadn't entered that field.

There's a bit of street music I recorded to sound of the period.

¶¶ In fact, this violin is, believe it or not, the leader

and owner of what was the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

Probably one of the most distinguished film

orchestras, recording orchestras in the world.

And actually, I got him playing.

I said, I want you to sound like an 18th century street beggar.

This was prerecorded on the film by a castrato.

I guess he wasn't really castrato, but a male alto singing Bach, Bis du bei mir.

And it should really have had harpsichord accompaniment on it.

And I said to Ridley, I should like to put some harpsichord accompaniment on it.

But he said, I sort of like it the way it is.

And I said, well, although historically it's

not quite right, I like it the way it is too.

So we kept it just the way it is.

And I think it gives the beginning of that

scene a very interesting sort of period feel.

In the distance, you can hear this salon piece.

This is me playing the main theme of Dualists in the style of Chopin.

Somebody on the track says it's the mazurka in G minor.

But in fact, this is in A minor.

And I never heard that line until now.

Otherwise, I would have played it in G minor.

I don't think a lot of people are going to notice that.

In fact, I improvised this on the theme.

It is the theme again of the Dualists, but in the Chopin style.

I did it twice.

There was a bit of an argument about whether it was long enough.

And I played it again.

But of course, the second time, it was completely different.

So there were two versions.

I can't remember which version this is.

The film was recorded at CTS Wembley.

And a wonderful recording engineer, John Richards,

who is still now one of my greatest friends.

He is now out in Hollywood here.

But he recorded this and produced the most marvelous recording.

I always saw these two Dualists as...

Dubert is very much the aristocrat.

And Farrow is the man of the people.

And this affected very much the way I tried to construct the score.

We hear the extreme dissonance of the next cue, which

characterizes the climax of each duel in a different way each time.

There are three types of music in this film, really.

There is what I would call the extreme tension, the Dualist type of music,

which is quite avant-garde, quite dissonant, discordant, quite frightening.

And it has a sort of feeling, I try to get into it, of steel meeting steel.

Ridley, I remember, said to me, these swords, he said, one thinks when you

watch swashbuckling movies, they are just like, they are not that sharp,

but he said, actually they are like razors, and the slightest touch and you

can be dead if it hits an artery or something.

And so, I think this film really, it gives you

this feeling of extraordinary danger in dueling.

In this scene, Tom Conti plays the flute.

I have a feeling he actually did play it.

He is there playing a little section from what the

castrato was singing, by Bach, just a little hint of it.

It struck me that it would be a nice idea if I used the theme again, that in fact he

is practicing and then he actually plays the theme from the Dualist as a flute piece.

And the fact that this rather beautiful, elegant, 18th century flute he is playing,

I thought it would be nice to use the flute playing the main theme, which of

course I do at the very beginning of the film and at the very end of the film.

The whole film ends with a solo flute.

Now, on the actual recording, the solo flute, who is a very strong element of the

orchestra, was played by a marvellous player called Christopher Taylor,

who made this very, very beautiful, big, full sound and played magnificently.

The orchestra was quite interesting.

It wasn't really a very big orchestra, because

the film was not a huge budget movie at all.

It was... everybody wanted to be in it, but we had to look at the costs.

And in fact, the orchestra is basically flute, one flute, one oboe, four French

horns, percussion, harp, piano and string orchestra.

String orchestra strength is about... I think it's about six first, six second

violins, four violas, four cellos, two double basses.

I think that's as I remember it.

So it's quite a string-based score with solos.

So, when I first discussed how we would do the score with Ridley, we started

discussing different sections, and we were talking about, well,

maybe this should have electronic music, or maybe we should have some voices

singing, maybe boy sopranos, all sorts of ideas came up.

And I said, well, I do think there are three different types of music,

but I would like to try and include them in the

overall plan, keep them within one orchestra.

In other words, the instruments that do one thing can also do everything else.

And this would give the film a sense of unity.

I'd like to try and do that.

So, first of all, there's the main theme, which is melancholy and tragic and

romantic, and that is characterized by my full orchestra sound, as I say,

with woodwind horns and strings.

And that carries the main theme all the way through the film.

The second sort of music is actually using that orchestra in a very discordant and

quite modernistic manner to characterize the fear and the threat of the duels.

And I use it in a... whereas one could say that the first romantic idea is sort of

early 19th century, when the film is set, and big orchestral sound.

The use of the same instruments is used for the threat and the fear of the duels,

used in the same way, in a more modernistic manner.

The third way and the third type of music used is what one could

call perhaps source music, but it's not quite source music.

I wrote music which could have been at the exact period, for

instance, a woodwind quartet in the chateau, street music.

Now here this goes... it appears that he goes into it and plays the complete theme,

which overlaps us into the next scene, which is out in the army camp.

And so I'm watching him and you will hear how it makes this transition.

Here's the threat motif again.

I thought it would be interesting to have the idea of musicians, military musicians,

practicing fife and drum.

In fact, this is a very distinguished piccolo player, flute player, called Susan

Milan, with a percussionist called Eric Allen.

So I wrote that little, it sounds like a fife and drum thing.

Here we see the romantic interest, Laura.

In the next scene, the next music cue, I take the

idea of the main theme and I give it a romantic slant.

I call this piece, in fact call it Laura, and I introduce a more romantic Harmony

under it to give the feeling of this romantic relationship between the two of them.

I use again the military idea of a drummer practicing,

and on this I got this wonderful drummer to...

I said, I want you to hear all the different types of taradiddles and

patterns that you would practice to give it a

sort of authentic feel of somebody in a camp.

The two overlap here, so this carries the music forward.

We've got the practicing drummer, but I introduced the threat theme over it.

That takes us through neatly into this dramatic

cutoff, and we see the next duel about to happen.

I think in this film, there's also some very, very delicate use of sound effects.

For instance, here you've just got to hear the

clinking of the swords and silence and big atmosphere.

And I'm always very nervous to interfere with an atmosphere if it works on its own.

I mean, the whole idea of having music in a film is the

minute you come in with music, it is immediately dramatic.

It immediately says something.

And you never want to interfere with an atmosphere

if that atmosphere already works without you.

This is particularly true, I think, however, in the final scene of the film

when there are all sorts of birds and interesting noises going

on, and I sort of try and go around them and work with them.

So sometimes one can actually create a sort of a pad of

sound against which a sound effect will sound wonderful.

For instance, you can have tremolando strings, very quiet, and against it will

come a bird singing or making an alarm signal against that.

And that juxtaposition of a sound effect with music can be a very potent sound.

But what, of course, music can do, which in a way sound effects can't do,

is it can actually provide an emotional commentary, as we've seen with these

climactic pieces which are coming up to the end of Duels.

And as we'll see that through the film, sometimes I use very, very dramatic music

to actually show what is going on inside Dubé's mind, the fear.

You see this later particularly in the horse duel when he's actually shaking with

fear, and I actually convey that shaking by the use of six cellos playing random,

very discordant notes at a very low range, which gives almost a sort of subliminal

shaking of the nerves, and then over the top of that I put music which is like the

jangling of the nerves, very, very high violins.

And at one point Ridley uses, that cuts that off and goes to sound effects and

actually interposes music, extreme music against extreme sound effects,

which is actually a very unusual effect and very effective too.

Once again the bass motif, looking to the forward that he's not by any means through.

This is like a theme derived from the main theme, the more tragic element of it,

as one realises that this endless duel is a tragic thing.

Although they've had this duel, we know they're going to move to another

duel quite soon, and the bass motif comes back in the next music section.

But it then develops out into a very, hopefully, what I would say, eloquent solo

piano version of the main theme, which characterises Laura's despair at the

fact that she fears losing her lover, and she is so upset by the whole dueling

thing that they part, and she writes goodbye in lipstick on his sword.

This next cue is rather a favourite of mine, because in fact I decided to go from

the threat motif to a very romantic and farewell version of the theme,

and in fact I improvised this solo, I improvised it myself on the session,

a very slow version of the main theme.

When I was writing the score, I didn't write it all in one go.

I originally looked at the rough cut of the film with

Ridley and David Putnam and discussed it at length.

But the process of fine-cutting was going on, and in a way, what was happening was

they would ring me and they'd say, well, we've got another piece of film

which is now completed, and we'd like you to look at it.

And this actually worked quite well, because the whole film for me gradually evolved.

For instance, at one point I realised that at the end I was going to need a major

theme for the walk through the woods, and this theme gradually imposed itself on

me, and then I realised that I could take from that theme the various elements of it.

For instance, the falling motif, the beginning of it

actually becomes also the menacing theme in the bass.

Later it turns into the major and becomes the theme of the opposite when he gets out.

It all derives from this theme.

Now, the next piece, however, is slightly different, because

she then goes to a tarot reader and has her fortune told.

And for this, I remember going to see this section that had been recut, and going

back down to my house in Sussex down in the country, and I

thought this tarot card reading scene is very mysterious.

There's this old lady, a sort of a soothsayer, and she tells Laura her

future, and I thought the music should be very mysterious and not in some way

related to the duelling, this is related to her, and her sort of inner sadness and

trying to come to terms with what's going on in her life and her mind.

And I suddenly had the idea down there in the country of a mysterious canon,

which is a musical procedure where you start with a theme and then you overlap

it, the same thing overlaps with the first and the third with the first two and the

fourth with all three, and it creates a rather curious and rather mysterious texture.

And I wanted to write that for... I didn't need brass in that, it was just like four

woodwind solos, flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon.

Christopher Taylor on flute, my favorite oboist Richard Morgan on oboe,

Thea King, wonderful clarinetist, and Martin Ronchetti on bassoon.

Here he is.

And the end of this, a hint of the tragedy comes in, in a rather doom-laden chord,

which will feature in the film later on, and comes in and then develops right

through to the very end, a sequence and a big symphonic version.

It becomes the coda, if you like, of the main symphonic theme.

Here's this very horrific cello duel.

It's very scary, and in fact we did talk about scoring this, and in fact I did

score it, but in a way it's so well shot, it's so scary

that one feels that it doesn't need any help from me.

I think it was right to leave it play without music.

Again, it's the use of just the sound effects, and these swords, and the crashes.

In fact, the music that I wrote here, which was a rising full string orchestra

pizzicati section going into a fairly violent chord, wasn't wasted because it

was later used as a climax during the last duel.

It comes in elsewhere, and it seems more right there, perhaps, than it did here.

I think this is, in a way, this often can happen in films, in other words,

you write music and you don't always think, well, this needs music.

But as the music is all of a piece, it all has a unity, of course it can

sometimes seem even more appropriate in another scene.

This happens several times in the dualists, the use of a piece used for one

thing that is maybe repeated or reused or used for the first time elsewhere.

The whole process of writing the music was a very,

very creative and very pleasant one with Ridley.

But as with this, in all the scenes, Ridley and I discussed what was needed.

And as I said earlier, I very much felt we

wanted to try and keep a unity to the whole film.

And that would be achieved by deciding on the sort of lineup of instruments that

could cope with all the various different elements that Ridley felt were necessary.

Extreme violence, romance, drama, that which is lyrical, that which is very forceful.

And that's how I ended up with the sort of lineup, but using

strings, which I played in all sorts of different ways.

String instruments are enormously adaptable,

and then certain solo instruments against them.

In the next scene, where we move to a very uproarious pub scene, leading up to the

next duel, a hurdy-gurdy music was recorded when

the film was being made out in the Dordogne.

And when I heard it, Ridley played it for me, and he said, what do you think?

And I said, I thought it was absolutely authentic for what

would have been played in a pub in France at that period.

And the hurdy-gurdy is a stringed instrument.

You turn a wheel around, it makes a pretty rowdy sound, and you play a little

keyboard on the side, you play fairly simple tunes on it.

But it is an instrument associated with that sort of period.

What still goes, they still use it in folk dances

in France today, but it seemed quite right.

So we left exactly the music recorded for the first assembly,

and I said, well, you know, I can't improve on that.

I think this is absolutely right for the scene.

This brings back the canonic theme that we've had with the tarot, which is

associated with Laura and with her inner feelings.

And it works perfectly here in a slightly different version, again with solo

woodwinds overlapping and a sort of insistent piano,

and again ending in a very doom-laden rising chord.

The cavalry duel, which is the next major piece of music, was a subject of intense

discussion, because there are several elements going on there.

You'll see that Dubert is this time visibly extremely frightened, and his

glove holding the reins of the horse is shaking.

You can see that his whole body is shaking, he's

intensely scared of what is going to happen.

They're going to fight with sabres on horses.

So they're sitting there, just shaking, so I put that shaking into six cellos.

And against it, also, this extremely doom-laden low bass crash, which consists

of a plucked double bass with the bottom octave of the piano played with the pedal

down, which is a very, very scary sound, actually.

Very low bass, and a harp, and also tam-tam.

That's a huge gong, and this produces a very, very

scary pulse against which we have the low cellos.

And then, as it speeds up, that creates a sort of mesmeric build-up.

Then, as they start to move towards each other through this extraordinary Avenue of

birch trees, I introduce horns, and very, very

discordant horns against those other two elements.

That's the low crash of the gong-like sounds, the cellos' scariness,

and this is the horn.

This is like his pulse rising, and they're both their pulses rising.

And then, as we see them, they are really going to suddenly cut each other.

I bring this very, very cutting-edge sound.

In very high violins, we're playing an adjacent semitone to

each other in a very, very raucous way, and that moves up.

So that all these combined elements all move together into a huge crescendo as,

in fact, they meet, and Dubert appears to cut the top off Ferro's head.

Dubert is absolutely thrilled that he's got out of it,

and I bring in this little section called Jubilation.

This.

music is really like a sort of symphonic poem entitled Napoleon's Retreat from

Moscow, and I've written it in quite a modernistic way, but tried to give it a

feeling of ice and great distance and great space, and that very long motif I

introduced where the violins play very low and then they fall down to this

portamento, this slide, gives a feeling, I hope, of despair.

We know that 600,000 men perished.

That idea, that motif, it's slow, it's like the feeling I gave as of

trudging through the snow, but I make it sound very big by extending that sound

over six octaves, which gives it a very wide

feeling, although the orchestra isn't so huge.

It gives it a feeling that it's in the wide open spaces.

This again is, of course it plays very well against the whistling of the wind,

the sort of sound.

Here I did score this, but again we found

this was more dramatic with just the gunshots.

Then the trudging motif actually is given an edge, which is an icy edge,

if you like, by my adding glockenspiel, like bells,

to that very, very high violins at the same octave.

And that actually gives this sort of ice and snow

feeling of icicles and frostbite and everything.

And I increased this in the very last scene.

You see this grenadier completely frozen to death.

And I use a device on high strings where you play with the bow very, very close to

the bridge, which gives a very grating, icy sound.

It's also played colleno with the wood, the

back of the bow, and very high on the bridge.

This use of the little flam on the side drum also became a sort of signature of

the film, that the military career of the two men is never far away.

Here in the next scene, he's convalescing from a wound.

He's convalescing from Moscow.

And this whole sequence from here, as if we've gone back into the 18th

century, we feel we're back in a pre-revolutionary period with the

beautiful chateau, the dresses which seem to

speak of peace, time and happiness and so on.

So, for this next whole scene, I felt that the music should actually harp

back a bit to the age of Haydn and Mozart, the idea of

the 18th century before the great revolutionary wars.

So, in fact, I use a sort of scherzo-like, very happy major variant.

It's still actually derived from a main theme,

although it's hard to explain quite how that is.

But you hear the falling theme of the duetist

comes in, in the major, up in the woodwind.

And I use a slightly smaller orchestra, more like a Haydn-type orchestra,

which is merely four woodwind and strings, the four woodwind merely being flute,

oboe, clarinet, bassoon again.

And later on, I use them on their own, as during the wedding, we'll hear that as

if they are an actual woodwind quartet playing in the chateau.

But this little scherzo, which we're going to hear, it couldn't, in fact,

have been written by Haydn, because the rhythm is curiously 20th century.

.

Obviously, on this, I've picked up the idea of the horse trotting along.

But it's in this slightly 18th century deference to Haydn.

In fact, the theme in the major, which is really the same musical idea,

is a sort of mirror image of the music we have

in the earlier part of the film for Laura.

But this time, one could say, it's so transformed.

Now, we see Dubé happy, moving towards a marriage shortly.

And the theme of the film is transformed into this peacetime, romantic theme,

which has emerged from the scherzander-like rhythm.

And we hear it both with that scherzo and on its own.

The whole of this area of the film has suddenly become very gracious.

And we've forgotten about the duels, we've forgotten about the war.

And my music forgets about it.

And.

my music forgets about it.

This extended piece we've just heard, I call it Chateau Montage.

And it's one of the things that music can do very well and very effortlessly,

which is tie together a whole lot of scenes

which are disconnected and give it a thread.

And that's what I do in that.

And the rhythm, of course, keeps the thing sailing along,

whilst the woodwind add a lyrical element above it.

I think what's interesting about that particular piece of music is it's actually

both in two-time and three-time simultaneously.

It's a bar of two and six-eight, followed by a bar of three-four,

which I don't think Haydn ever did, but it gives it a nicely bouncy feel to it.

And the other thing, which is not 18th century, is I use a harp within that

texture with the strings, which gives it a sort of light

delicacy, which perhaps is a little later than the 18th century.

Throughout the film, I was very aware of the differences between the graciousness

of the royals or the aristocracy, which Dube in this

scene quite clearly is a member of that aristocracy.

And the other side of Pharaoh, who is jealous of that aristocracy,

that seems to be really at root of what the duels are all about.

But in these scenes, of course, Dube is introduced to his future fiancée

and all his sweetness and light and all his happiness,

and that's what I've tried to mirror in the music.

Soon, of course, we are aware that Pharaoh, far from disappearing,

is actually in the area and that, in fact, Dube has by no means escaped.

Now, the next piece of music, however, we hear is the wedding.

And what this is, in fact, is having written the Scherzando Haydn-like piece

for the montage, which takes in all aspects of that happy return to the

chateau, I thought it would be a nice idea to have the music as if it was being

played in the chateau itself by a group of musicians for the wedding when it happens.

So, in fact, I wrote what turned out to be my first ever

woodwind quartet for the youth in that marriage scene.

And, in fact, I used the same material as the montage, but written in a chamber

music sort of way, so we feel as if it could be coming from the next room.

We don't see any musicians, but we feel that they are there.

In this scene, we see the threat reappearing, being

presented by Edward Fox, and our duelling theme returns.

I only used a short section of it, I think about a minute of it.

But, in fact, a little bit of that scary, fouché music is used in what we call a

sting, which points up the fact that Duber is still very much under threat.

Now we see Farrow accusing him of being disloyal.

Here we see very much how the Royalists have returned, and this is where I got the

idea of presenting the woodwind quartet, the montage music, the chateau music,

in that earlier 18th century Royalist manner.

Which, of course, is also a good contrast, because when we come back to the military

music, it makes it all the more poignant that this apparently very happy,

very comfortable world that Duber is in, is in

fact still threatened by the opposing general.

On the same side, but actually mortally opposed to each other to the death.

.

Now we're further on and we see Edward Fox as

the colonel, much depressed and out of work.

And we're into a completely different world again, where Duber has recovered,

is married, and so on.

And the last thing he wants is a duel, but it's not to be.

We're moving towards a scene with the chief of police,

the Fouché, much feared man in Europe at that time.

And the music I wrote here is like another derivative of the duelist theme,

but as sinister as I could make it, because he was by all accounts a very

sinister man, you could never entirely trust him, to say the least.

I did start the music right from the beginning here.

I remember having that in the cue sheet, the water pouring down, but we decided not

to bring the music in until he gets into the room.

.

So we had taken the music out of all this section because, as one can see,

Albert Finney is magnificent here and needs absolutely no help from me.

But that said, certain elements of that last cue actually now have gone into the

mix that eventually comes to fruition in the last reel of the film.

Use of harp in a rather icy manner, the use of pizzicato, close, very close

chords, pizzicato on the lower strings against high violins.

That is actually, in a way, it's anticipating, it's prophetic of the final

duel in the woods, which comes up in the tenth reel of this film.

I think that I'm looking back at my score, which was written 25 years ago,

and it's very interesting to see and hear it in a new print.

It looks really as I remember it.

It doesn't seem a day since I did it and I can see those musicians playing and I can

see Ridley in the box and David Putnam rushing in and egging us on.

I think what was interesting about the film from my point of view musically was

that I had rather got away from films five or six years before I did this film.

I'd got into writing serious music.

I'd written a cello concerto, a piano quartet.

I'd been writing music for choral music, music for symphony orchestras.

I'd done a big work for the Royal Philharmonic.

They commissioned me to write a piece for their 30th birthday called Toccata.

All of this was fresh in my mind.

And in fact, I had been commissioned to write a

ballet for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.

And I was actually very busy in all of those areas.

I also had been working for the London Contemporary

Dance Theatre who had been using my music for dance.

So I'd also written a small opera.

So I was far more into ballet and opera and symphonic music, chamber music,

a whole lot of areas rather than into film.

And when David Putnam and Ridley came to see me, I said, you know, I'm not sure I

have time to write this film because of this Royal

Commission from the Covent Garden Royal Opera House.

And I said, well, you know, we'd love you to do it.

And madly I said, well, I'm okay.

I was sort of quite reluctant saying I'm not sure if I can do it.

Anyway, I did it.

And I think what's really very interesting about the film was that I was at an exact

point in my life where the sort of way I was writing

coincided with the sort of film I think this is.

This film, in fact, has elements of opera and ballet and is a classic film.

One thing that happened during the discussions with Ridley and David Putnam

was that when we got to the end, he said, at the end

of the film, he said, I want a huge symphonic piece.

The whole score should move to that point.

And I said, well, that's a marvellous thing.

And he said, you know, he said, like at the end of Wagner's Tristan and

Isolde, there's a wonderful Liebestod music.

He said, really, I think it would be great if

you could possibly do something of that sort.

And I said, well, that's a big undertakement.

I said, it'll be quite difficult to say quite

how long, how long do I have to do that?

And he said, I think you should just write, write

the score like that, that it gets to that point.

And suddenly at the end, the whole thing unfolds.

This is now moving towards my favourite, my favourite cue, my favourite reel,

which is the duel in the woods, the final duel.

This is early on in it, but gradually all the different elements come together into

a reel, which is 10th reel, which is virtually the end of the film, is all music.

So we've now come to a point where Dubert is very much threatened and he doesn't

want his life disturbed in this way at all.

And we now come back to the duelling theme in a new guise, even more dangerous,

in a cue which I call pistols.

And we realise that the climax of the film is approaching.

This is the last time we hear the bass duelist's motif, the threat of the duel.

It's run all the way through the film and this time, this is

going to lead to the final duel and the resolution of the film.

We now reintroduce the tarot theme, which just seems to work very well here.

One can see how that doom-laden duelling motif, which came from the end of the

tarot section, which was really in the beginning associated with Laura,

it worked out perfectly to actually zoom in on that close-up of Dubert with the

whole poignancy of it, and how war and duelling actually is in opposition to the

romantic and the personal side of one's life.

And that comes out in that doom-laden chord,

which we're going to hear once again in the duel.

Now, the next big section is they move off into the woods.

And this was a very interesting scene to score.

It's a long scene.

And the location within this very extraordinary woodland, with its giant

ruins everywhere, it looks like a ruined city, magnificently lit and shot by Ridley.

What I tried to do in that, I tried to give each location

and each part of that scene a different sort of climate.

As if he's saying, he walks through an archway, which is backlit.

And I use tremolando strings over, it sounds like over many octaves.

And then he turns to go downhill, and the whole thing slides down,

as if he too may be hit and slide down the hill.

We're moving towards the ending of the film, and we're not sure whether Dubé is dead.

In fact, what happens is that Dubé is not dead.

And in fact, it's Pharaoh who is condemned to more or

less exile in his own country for the rest of his life.

And to deal with this, what we call the lonely Walker scene, I bring together the

entire dualist theme, matching his slow walk through the woods.

This has drawn quite a lot of attention.

One critic actually said that this lonely Walker scene can be seen as the supreme

example of the marriage of film and music in the cinema.

Certainly for me, it felt very right, and it was a culmination of the whole film.

Now, the huge climax that I've written earlier, at the end of a duel,

is brought back here for the once and final time, like the sudden rush of adrenaline.

All the thoughts of the whole film rush through his mind.

In fact, I wrote two versions of the lonely Walker scene.

The first was entirely for flute, and then there is another version,

which is the version used on the film, which is flute and oboe.

But it seemed quite appropriate to have this solo oboe musing

almost on the fate of Pharaoh, the fate of the dualists.

And then it very, very gradually edges back into a

restatement of the theme on oboe with string orchestra.

That actually happens during the most magnificent shot of Pharaoh looking rather

like Napoleon, standing way above a huge river valley.

After the oboe version, as we hit the credits, go into

a huge symphonic treatment of it for full orchestra.

And that takes us in a very big style to the ending of the whole film.

I think that's all I can really tell you about how I wrote the score to this film.

I hope you've enjoyed listening to this as much as

I've enjoyed watching the film and talking to you.

Thank you.