Composer Ennio Morricone on Returning to His Western
Roots With 'The Hateful Eight' and Why He Has No Plans to Retire at 87
Billboard
By Robert Levine
January 8, 2016
Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight (released Dec. 25
by The Weinstein Company) is the first western that legendary Italian film
composer Ennio Morricone has scored in decades. But anyone expecting the
spooky, avant-garde soundtracks he did for Sergio Leone's epic spaghetti
westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1966 and Once Upon a Time in the
West in 1969 will be surprised.
"It would have been absurd to write something of
that sort!" asserts Morricone, who is talking from Rome, through a
translator, and seems almost offended by the idea of repeating himself. The
soundtrack for The Hateful Eight (starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell)
has all the surging drama of Morricone's best work, but it also features the
creeping dread of horror-movie music, with none of the whistles, whip-cracks or
other odd instrumentation the composer's revered western scores are famous
for. "The music I wrote for Leone is almost 50 years old -- this is
totally different," he adds. "I always try to give each director his
own specific musical location, if you will."
At 87, with more than 500 film and TV soundtracks -- plus
enough commercial appeal to conduct orchestras on arena tours in Europe --
Morricone (whose score for The Hateful Eight has been nominated for a BAFTA
Award in the best soundtrack category) is the eminence grise of scoring. He and
Tarantino are a match made in film-geek heaven: the director inspired by the
grindhouse aesthetic and the composer behind the music to many of the classics
that defined it. Tarantino has long touted his Morricone obsession, citing him
as an inspiration for the music in Pulp Fiction and using parts of his old
scores in Kill Bill and Death Proof. "Morricone is the maestro -- he's the
top, as far as I'm concerned," he tells Billboard. He asked Morricone to
score Inglourious Basterds, but the composer turned him down. They finaly
collaborated when Morricone wrote a song for Django Unchained. Despite being
quoted in 2013 as saying he didn't like the way Tarantino utilized his music --
complaining he "places music in his films without coherence" --
Morricone today insists he was taken out of context. "I love the way he
used my music. I only criticized one scene [in Django] where there was
incredible violence."
Tarantino didn't formally discuss The Hateful Eight with
Morricone until June, on the day before the composer presented the director
with two prizes at the David di Donatello Awards in Rome. "I read the
script and it was a masterpiece," says Morricone. "He has this ability
to have violence that comes so suddenly and is so weirdly absurd that it
becomes something else."
By then, Tarantino had finished shooting the film, and
Morricone agreed to write a main theme and give Tarantino material he had
written for John Carpenter's The Thing that was never used. Morricone ended up
writing 25 minutes of original music in a month, recording it in July in
Prague with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, as Tarantino looked on,
beaming with pride. "When your ideas are clear," says Morricone,
"you can write music quite rapidly." (In December, the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences determined that the soundtrack will be
eligible for the best original score Oscar. Morricone received an honorary
award in 2007, but has never won for original score.)
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