Eminent Hollywood composer, 90, hits out at film-makers’
poor understanding of music.
The Guardian
Dalya Alberge
February 23, 2019
As one of cinema’s greatest composers, he has written the
music for hundreds of films, including classics such as A Fistful of Dollars
and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, recreating the wild west of Sergio Leone’s
imagination with a soundscape of haunting whistles and cracking whips.
But, after a lifetime’s career in both Hollywood and
European cinema, Ennio Morricone is now settling scores of a different kind. In
a book based on extensive interviews with the famously private man, he attacks
film-makers who, he says, fail to understand the power of music to heighten
emotions – and some fellow composers for enabling them to regard a soundtrack
as merely “something that plays in the background”.
“There are times … when you get to the recording stage
without having the slightest clue as to the director’s expectations,” he says
in the book, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words. Now 90, he recalls the US
filmmaker and Halloween director John Carpenter commissioning him to write the
score for The Thing: “He hardly said a word.” Don Siegel wanted Morricone’s
music for the 1970 western Two Mules for Sister Sara, starring Shirley MacLaine
and Clint Eastwood, but “we didn’t communicate much,” he says.
The composer remembers that his fellow Italian Franco
Zeffirelli asked for music “devoid of themes, a music of moods and atmospheres”,
but “when the music was ready … said, ‘You didn’t write any themes.’”
Roland Joffé, the British-French director behind The
Killing Fields, also comes in for sharp criticism from Morricone, who wrote the
score for The Mission, which starred Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. “What
makes it most difficult to compose a score are those directors who need to know
and control every detail of their work, and therefore don’t let composers do
their job,” he says. “In my career, I have met many of that kind … Joffé, one
of the most peculiar under this profile. Relationships must be based on trust.”
The composer, who has adapted his musical style to almost
every conceivable movie genre and since 1960 has scored more than 450 films, is
kinder to Leone, who, he says, “intentionally left space for the music to be
listened to” and adapted his camera movements to its sounds. But he is critical
of composers who, he argues, have been complicit in dumbing down their art.
“Film composers have themselves underestimated their own contribution and, in
so doing, they have made directors and producers accustomed to very fast
working times – not the least by resorting to myriads of clichés,” he says.
John Williams, the acclaimed writer of the Star Wars
scores, is “an exceptionally gifted composer whom I greatly respect”, but even
he is criticised for making “a commercial choice” about the space epic
franchise. It was, he says, “understandable, but still commercial. I could not
have scored Star Wars in that way”.
He adds: “What seems hazardous to me is to associate a
march, no matter how well written, to outer space. Oftentimes, solutions of
this sort stem not so much from the lack of creativity or skills, but from mere
commercial concerns – as consequences of the rules imposed by the film industry
… Speaking both as a composer and a filmgoer, I believe that a rather
simplistic standardisation of stylistic choices has made film music less
interesting over the years, in terms of both conceptual depth and compositional
methods.”
Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words, edited by the composer
Alessandro De Rosa, is published by Oxford University Press next month.
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