Ennio Morricone page

'If the director has no musical creativity, he always imagines something he has already heard, so I have to convince him to leave his ideas aside. I have to trust a director and he has to trust the composer. You have to like each other, otherwise it won't work.'

Biography

Ennio Morricone was born on 10 November, 1928 in Rome, Italy and has worked himself up to become one of the most influential composers working today. He studied at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory where he specialized in trumpet. In the early '60, his career in film music began, working on low budget European assignments. It was Fistful of Dollars that catapulted him to the top, as he is now known as the man of the spaghetti western sound. In the '60 and '70 there was no stopping Ennio Morricone, often writing a subliminal amount of 30 scores in one year (no themes here my friends). Among them the type of European projects or classics such as For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. Morricone also scored his fair share of horror scores as Exorcist II and The Thing can both testament. As the years started to grow, the increasing number of projects only led to a higher budgetary list of assignments. Once Upon a Time in America in '84, The Mission in '86 and The Untouchables in '87 are prime examples. Other scores for successful movies turn out to be Frantic, Casualties of War, Hamlet, Bugsy, In the Line of Fire, Wolf, Disclosure and Lolita. His latest scores that got widespread attention are The Legend of 1900, Malčna, Vatel and the critically despised Mission to Mars. Recently his scores tend to go back to the Italian movies and on occasion average hit, Ripley's Game, The Good Pope and Fateless, but don't think that these are average movie scores. Morricone is also a 5 time nominee, mostly for The Mission and The Untouchables he had a good chance of winning.

February 23, 2001

With The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I used animal sounds - as you say, the coyote sound - so the sound of the animal became the main theme of the movie. I don't know how I had this idea. It's just according to your experiences, and following the musical avant-garde.
(on the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone)

February 23, 2001

I definitely felt that I should have won for The Mission. Especially when you consider that the Oscar-winner that year was Round Midnight, which was not an original score. So there could be no comparison with The Mission. There was a theft! But, of course, if it was up to me, every two years I would win an Oscar.
(on Oscars)

February 23, 2001

If you scroll through all the movies I've worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies and so on. So in other words, I'm no specialist, because I've done everything. I'm a specialist in music.
(overall impression)

February 23, 2001

I want people to know about all the kinds of music that I write. Some believe I just write film scores, which is not true. With a film score, it is really for the film-makers and the audience. This other music is what the composer feels, and it's more personal.
(on chamber music)