Basil Poledouris - Conan the Barbarian

Conan the Barbarian is a 1982 action-adventure fantasy film by director John Milius and is recognized as the acting breakthrough of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had previously been a famous bodybuilder.

The film is loosely based on the Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and was written by Oliver Stone and John Milius, set in the mythical Hyborian Age. It was followed in 1984 by a lighter, but less successful sequel, Conan the Destroyer. Both Conan the Barbarian and its sequel are sword and sorcery epic tales that include magic, mythical creatures, and fantastical events.

The score for Conan the Barbarian was composed by Basil Poledouris. Vassilis Konstantinos "Basil" Poledouris (August 21, 1945 - November 8, 2006) was a Greek-American music composer who concentrated on the scores for films and television shows. He became renowned for his "powerfully epic style" of orchestral composition and "intricate thematic designs".

He scored the music soundtrack for The Blue Lagoon (1980; dir: Kleiser); Conan the Barbarian (1982; dir: Milius); Conan the Destroyer (1984); Red Dawn (1984; dir: Milius), RoboCop (1987; dir: Verhoeven); The Hunt for Red October (1990); Free Willy (1993) and its first sequel; Starship Troopers (1997; dir: Verhoeven); and For Love of the Game (1999).

Originally, producer Dino De Laurentiis had planned a soundtrack of pop music for the movie, but was eventually persuaded by Milius to use a full orchestral score. Ennio Morricone was considered by the producers for writing the score but Milius hired the composer Basil Poledouris, a former classmate of his from the film department at the University of Southern California, and assigned him to make "a continuous musical drama."The result was a choral and orchestral soundtrack that fills nearly every moment of the film, with pronounced use of leitmotifs to portray mood and character.

The violent early portions of the movie are filled with intense pieces including "Anvil of Crom", played by 24 french horns, strings and timpani, and "Riders of Doom", inspired by Prokofiev's "The Battle on Ice" from the score of the 1938 "Alexander Nevsky" movie by Sergei Eisenstein and the derived cantata as well as from Carl Orff's famous "O Fortuna" movement from his 1937 "Carmina Burana" cantata. Thulsa Doom's theme, heard throughout the film score, is a tribute to a leitmotiv from Miklós Rózsa's 1951 Quo Vadis score. Rózsa's influence is very present in Conan the Barbarian's soundtrack.

The soundtrack has become a classic amongst movie-music collectors. The score for Conan the Barbarian is considered by some people to be one of the finest examples of motion picture scoring ever written.

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