David Yates wanted the final Harry-Voldemort confrontation to feel inevitable, mythic, decided by fate rather than skill. He watched Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and saw how Leone built the tension: extreme close-ups of eyes, the score building across unbearable silence, death arriving as punctuation. Yates borrowed Leone's grammar for the duel. In a 2011 Los Angeles Times interview, he was explicit about this influence. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly streams on Criterion Channel.
Films That Influenced Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
