Remembering Ennio Morricone

Remembering Ennio Morricone, we once again listened to his phenomenal soundtracks and watched an interview where he spoke about what he considered to be important in his work.

Famous interview Ennio Morricone on Kubrick & The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is among the best known film scores of all time – but Ennio Morricone gets “annoyed” when people just remember his Westerns!

Author of more than 500 musical works for movies, Ennio Morricone is one of the most prolific and famous living composers. Born in Rome in 1928, he studied trumpet and choir directing in Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Two years later, after composer’s debut in cinema, he met director Sergio Leone, who asked him to write the score for A Fistful of Dollars (1964). It was the start of a relationship that would generate legendary Once Upon a Time in America and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a film that defined the western genre, in large part because of Morricone’s haunted whistle-led theme. He then created music for the blockbuster Al Capone by Brian DePalma, The Untouchables, and the classical Cinema Paradiso by Giuseppe Tornatore.

…I started as a kid, when I was really very young. Too young, maybe. When I was 10, I threw all my compositions away, so there are no traces of my early work as sadly I didn’t record any of it. At that point, I didn’t even know that tape recorders existed…

…Not that I didn’t see the war but it didn’t affect my work. I never struggled to find work once the war was over. Somehow, I was lucky in life. People knew about me because I’d been a good student. I started as an arranger for radio, theatre and television, and after six or seven years I got into composing…

…I was trying to capture the mood of a film. On A Fistful of Dollars, I was thinking about a peasant who lives in the countryside and listens to a faraway sound; a nostalgic sound…

…He (a director – ed.) would have to trust me completely, and I’d have to know and respect his films. Occasionally, I score films I don’t like that much. When I first see a film, it is usually unfinished, which sometimes makes it hard to really gauge how good or bad it will be…

…One of the interesting things about my job is that collaborating with a director can yield unexpected results. Even if you don’t share the same opinions, sometimes the director’s ideas will trigger something you hadn’t thought of and it may turn the music around completely…

…A long time ago I really loved a film that I was working on and I became too involved. That was kind of unbalanced. It made me realise that you can’t love things too much if you want them to work…

…I don’t kneel when I go to church but generally speaking I am religious. I’m Roman Catholic, but that doesn’t play too much of a role in my music. As a matter of fact, people say that I’m a mystical composer. Maybe the music I wrote for The Mission explains that concept…

…When I’m not composing, I think of what to compose next. Sometimes I think about playing chess. In fact, had I not become a composer I would have liked to be a champion chess player. I’m actually quite good at it. I once played with Boris Spassky who is the former world champion and the game ended as a tie…

…In the morning I wake up at 4.30, I clean the house, I work out, I walk four or five kilometres, I go out to get a newspaper, I come back, I read the newspaper until about 8.30 or 9, and then I start composing. If necessary, I work through to the evening, otherwise I stop composing at lunchtime…

…I’m a complete hypochondriac. I worry about my health and that of my family. I take vitamins and mineral salts. I also measure my blood pressure every day, I have a professional machine to do it. And you’ll be pleased to hear, my blood pressure is perfect.

(from the interview with Ennio Morricone from Dazed’s archive, by Dino Gollnick, 6 July 2020 )

In this documentary on the soundtrack of The Hateful Eight with which Ennio Morricone received the Oscar nomination, we witness the recording with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and the interviews with Maestro Morricone and director Quentin Tarantino.