Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies
Sidney Lumet:
The only movie score I’ve heard that can stand on its own as a piece of music is Prokofiev’s “Battle on the Ice” from Alexander Nevsky. I’m told that Eisenstein and Prokofiev talked about it well before shooting began and that some of the composing was started before shooting. Supposedly, Eisenstein even edited some of the sequence to accommodate the score. I have no idea whether these stories are true. Even when I hear the music on a record today, I start remembering the sequence visually. The two, music and picture, are indelibly linked: a great sequence, a great score.
