"Indiana Jones [IV] will be a challenge because we'll now have to recast the film with Harrison Ford as a mature Indiana Jones, if you like, and a more mature composer will be doing the score!" he says, chuckling. "Until I see a script or see the film it will be hard for me to tell how much of the early material will apply -- if any."

Not that he's going to give up the familiar fanfare. "I would have thought Indiana Jones is now a pretty well-known theme and at least will be referred to as some type of memory trace if nothing else."

And of course, Williams will be picking up his conductor's baton for the final "Star Wars" film, the yet-untitled Episode III, which arrives in 2005. For the last installment, he hopes to use hints of some of the themes in the very first "Star Wars" film (now known as "Episode IV: A New Hope") to link the two trilogies musically.

So if you hear a familiar melody -- say, the Imperial theme that ran under Princess Leia's first meeting with Darth Vader -- don't be surprised.

"I think working backwards some musical hints like that will be appropriate," he says. "I am looking forward to bringing all those thematic fragments together in the final episode of 'Star Wars' and to pick up what opportunities it'll have for new material, also to sort of round out a whole corpus of musical themes that are all interrelated and connected."

Visit the official John Williams site at www.johnwilliamscomposer.com

*Interview courtesy of CNN.com