Ennio Morricone: who was the man behind the film music?

When Ennio Morricone died at 91 in 2020, cinema lost one of its greatest craftsmen. For more than half a century, his name had been legendary for film lovers the world over. From the twanging guitars and hyena shrieks of his Spaghetti Western scores to the lush sweep of his orchestral work in movies such as The Mission, many of our favourite film stars have lived, loved and died to the sound of Morricone’s music.

But, as with many legends, there was also an enigmatic quality. Photographs show a man whose most distinctive feature was usually a large pair of glasses. And, as an Italian with only a little English, most don’t know what he sounded like.

Giuseppe Tornatore’s new documentary Ennio reveals the man behind the music (and the sunglasses). The Italian director’s affection for Il Maestro is as evident as his admiration, yet the first thing we see in the film is Morricone’s exercise regimen. “He dedicated the first two hours of his day, every day for his whole life,” Tornatore says. “I saw it as not only his wish to keep fit but as emblematic of his disciplined view of life. He was always training in order to pursue his music.”

Born into a working-class family in Rome in 1928, Morricone was taught to read music by his father, Mario, and was already composing at the age of six. While Mario played the trumpet at outdoor cafés, the young Ennio collected the coins that were thrown. It was an early and tough lesson in the relationship between commerce and art.

His relationship with his father was crucial to understanding the man, Tornatore says. “There’s a moment in the film that I really love. Ennio talks about how he would every now and again give his father work. But at a certain point he was getting to a certain age and wasn’t as good as he had been. So Ennio, in order to avoid embarrassing or offending his father by calling other players, stopped writing pieces for the trumpet until his father died. This tells you everything you need to know about the personality of the man.”

Having studied composition, Morricone was soon making a name for himself as a one-man hit machine, arranging and writing songs for the Italian pop idols. His work for radio and television spilled over into the cinema in the early 1960s, but it was the reunion with his old primary school friend Sergio Leone which helped elevate Morricone to another level. The soundtracks for A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels defined a whole genre and sold millions of records. The music mixed electric guitar and whistling (provided by another childhood friend, Alessandro Alessandroni) with powerful and original melodies.

In chronicling Morricone’s career, Tornatore’s documentary traces the history of cinema from Leone to Quentin Tarantino, from The Battle of Algiers to Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. “Morricone’s work is immense,” Tornatore says. “I wanted to recount it in chronological order in order to show the transformation and development of cinema. Ennio begins playing the trumpet in the orchestra for the films of Alessandro Blasetti in the 1940s and then as we go on we can see how cinema evolves throughout his career. It changes as the language of film is enriched — and it’s still changing today.”

An incredible amount of his work doesn’t exist any more because he used to give the studios his original score rather than keeping it

Unlike many of the giants of soundtrack writing such as John Williams and Bernard Herrmann, Morricone managed to have a career both in Hollywood and internationally, across numerous genres. He was as comfortable with scoring the body horror of John Carpenter’s The Thing as he was bringing an elegiac melancholy to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven or pathos to the gang warfare of The Untouchables. The documentary shows that this egalitarian approach was partly rooted in how Morricone was at once an avant-garde experimentalist and the conduit of a rich melodic tradition.

Tornatore himself worked with Morricone on his films Cinema Paradiso (1988) and The Legend of 1900 (1998) and the two became friends. One of the biggest challenges facing him was simply the size of Morricone’s output. “We will never have a complete works of Ennio Morricone,” Tornatore says. “An incredible amount of his work doesn’t exist any more because he used to give the studios his original score rather than keeping it. Perhaps we’ll discover more in archives over the coming years but it’s impossible that we’ll ever have everything.”

Does he think we will ever see a career like his again? “There are many great musicians around,” Tornatore says. “What has changed is the approach to film-making. When Morricone had to write a piece for a scene which lasted four minutes, he would write it, record it with an orchestra and then you wouldn’t be able to change it. So his brilliance was in the way he could enter and exit a scene at the right moments, respecting the dialogue and the structure of the scene. Today most musicians will record a piece and then fit it to the scene using digital technology. So that talent has been a little bit lost.”

For Tornatore, there is also something in Morricone’s sheer staying power, the scope of his career, that seems unobtainable today. “I don’t think there are musicians who like Ennio began working when they were 15 and will continue until they are 90, because today we burn through things. It’s all too fast. Someone has a huge success and three years later we don’t talk about them any more.

“While Morricone never looked for success, he always did the work without looking up. And it’s because of this approach he was on the frontline for 70 years.”

‘Ennio’ is in UK cinemas from April 22, ennio.film