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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade marks the tenth project
John Williams and I have on together and the third in this
series of adventure yarns, this one involving none other than
Sean Connery playing Henry Jones, Sr. to Harrison Ford's Indiana
Jones ... "Jr." And so the tone is set for an ebullient
father-son excursion across the surface of the world, more
in the vein of the funny, thrilling RAIDERS than the subterranean
journey into darkness that made TEMPLE OF DOOM so bone chilling.
I think John beard his new themes the first time he saw my
assembly of the movie. He knew exactly what he wanted and
eight weeks later before an 85-piece Hollywood orchestra,
I experienced one of John's livelliest film scores ever. From
the Grail Knight Theme written in the English pastoral idiom
in major modes with very positive intervals, to the sherzo,
underlining the father son exploits which is in a driving,
brilliant orchestral iddiom with 6/8 rhythm, the kind of music
you might imagine for a wild fox bunt. This scene is equestrian
in character, but it's transposed on something nearly contemporary.
Instead of riding horses, which is what this music reminds
us of, we instead hear this when they're fighting Nazis in
airplanes or being pursued on motorcycles or being chased
in boats. It brings, in musical terms, a classical element
to these scenes.
Henry's (Sean Connery) Theme has strong intervals that establish
an emotional relationship between these two men in a lyrical
way without sentimentality.
John's music has always related in a kinetic fashion to the
way I adventurous pace my sequences. It gives the impression
of one constant, adventurous trip. What is unique is that
John's music rythmically traces my action for almost 110 minutes
and becomes a character in the story with as much importance
as the heroes and the villains.
What I think is different in many ways about the score is
that only fragments of the familiar INDIANA JONES theme are
used. We felt the movies had grown up to the point that we
didn't have to lean on your thrill button every time something
heroic occurs as we had done in the previous two motion pictures.
Having said this, John has outdone himself...which has become
a habit with him. He gives new meaning to the phrases "audience
involvement".
- Steven Spielberg -
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