And the meeting broke up, and Francis and I got in the car together to drive back to the studio, and Francis said, 'Well, good luck, Walter.' And I said, 'What do you mean, good luck?' He said, 'No, I have to go back up to San Francisco. I'm directing Private Lives for the ACT Theatre Company, Noël Coward's play.' I said, 'Francis, we're finishing The Godfather.' And he said, 'No, I know, but I agreed to do it, you know? You can do it, it'll be fine.'

So you know, I had this hot potato in my lap, which was, how do I... what do I do with the music to make Bob Evans happy with the film? Francis said, 'Call me if there's a problem', but you know, it was clear that he was not going to be at the coalface with me in this problem. And I sat there thinking, what would Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, do? And one of the things he advised was, get inside the mind of your enemy. If you're going to fight somebody, understand how they think. So I thought, okay, I'll pretend I'm the head of the studio. And I played the music for the film in my mind, thinking, is that a problem? No, that's okay, that's okay.

And then I came up against... I came up with the music for the horse's head scene. And I listened to the music for that scene, and I thought, okay, here, Evans has a point. The music... the music that was written was written in counterpoint to the horror of the scene, and because it's a horse, there's a kind of carousel theme. But it plays as a nice piece of music deep into the scene. And Henry Mancini would never have done that. It would be a hard-hitting thing. This is the music that's written, so we can't turn that into Henry Mancini music, but what can we do? And the structure of the music was what's called A B A. So there's an A structure to the music, and then a shift in key to another piece, and then it goes back to the first key. And I had another transfer of the music made, so I now had two copies of the music. And I shifted the second copy up into the area of the first, so that the A music plays, and then the B part of the music plays, but superimposed on that is the A music from the first part. And then the A music plays, but now it plays superimposed with the B music, so there's a dissonance between the two keys of the music, and things are playing against each other. And judiciously mixed at the right proportion, it adds a kind of horror distortion to the music. And I sunk it up so that the first elements of that distortion happened at the moment that you might see the first blood on the pillow next to his head. And then of course, as the sheets are moved and more blood is revealed, it gets progressively more horrible.