Art & Creativity Quote by Maurice Jarre

The brag is modest, but the power move is real: Maurice Jarre is describing a moment when a director stopped treating music as decoration and started treating it as architecture. In Lawrence of Arabia, that desert rescue is already myth-making in motion - a speck of a man swallowed by an indifferent landscape - but Jarre’s point is that the scene’s tempo wasn’t ultimately dictated by plot. It was dictated by sound.

The intent is clear enough: Jarre wants credit not just for a great theme, but for shaping the film’s rhythm. The subtext is thornier, and more interesting: film composers are often hired hands, their work squeezed into pre-cut sequences. Jarre is quietly flipping that hierarchy. David Lean “listened,” then “wanted to extend the scene” - a rare admission that the image served the score, not the other way around. It’s also a reminder that cinema’s most famous expanses aren’t purely visual. The desert becomes emotionally legible because the music gives it contour: awe, menace, yearning, grandeur.

Context matters. Lean’s epics are frequently praised for their scale and patience, but patience is not just running time; it’s confidence. Extending a scene to “let my work stay completely” suggests Lean believed the audience could sit inside a feeling without constant narrative reward. Jarre isn’t merely recounting collaboration. He’s describing authorship by osmosis: the score doesn’t accompany the myth of Lawrence; it helps manufacture it, minute by minute.