Even if you don’t know Ennio Morricone’s name, you’ll know his music, which has scored nearly 500 films. From the heavenly choral uplift of Roland Joffé’s The Mission to the operatic majesty of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Morricone was the rare film composer who truly earned the nickname Maestro. He once thought film music was humiliating. “By writing, I wanted my revenge,” he said.
One of Morricone’s most consistent collaborators before his death aged 91 in 2020 was the Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, who worked with the composer on over a dozen films, and who has now directed a documentary about Morricone, simply titled Ennio.
Over the course of its (never dull) two-and-a-half hours, Tornatore interviews famous admirers of Morricone about his influence on their life and work, from Hans Zimmer and John Williams to Bruce Springsteen and Metallica’s James Hetfield, And, of course, there’s Tarantino, for whom Morricone scored The Hateful Eight – the first Tarantino to feature an original score – and for which Morricone won an Oscar.
The most fascinating aspect of Ennio comes from an in-depth interview that Tornatore conducted with Morricone himself, when the composer was in his mid 80s – not that you would know it from the musician’s energy. From the opening moments, which Tornatore daringly stages without any music but merely the sound of a metronome, we see Morricone at home and at work. The effect is a candid insight into the musical genius that the Maestro possessed.
Tornatore today reflects on their decades-long collaboration, which began in 1988 with Cinema Paradiso, when Tornatore’s producer suggested approaching the composer. “I assumed it was unlikely that he’d accept the job, especially with an unknown director like me, but he read the screenplay and liked it, and agreed to do it, so that’s how we started,” says Tornatore. It led to both a professional and personal relationship between the two. “Every film that I made, he did the score for. But we also socialised with our families when we weren’t working together.”
