Giuseppe Tornatore premieres in theaters the definitive documentary about the most popular and prolific composer, who comes clean in front of the director’s camera accompanied by stars such as Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen and Quentin Tarantino
It was not easy to interview Ennio Morricone. In 2005, when he was 76 years old, he came to Bilbao to offer a couple of concerts and agreed to be interviewed by this newspaper. “Don’t ask the teacher what his favorite movie is, he dislikes it a lot,” one of the members of his “bodyguard” warned the journalist, who, like his wife, was present during the meeting. Of course, not to touch the taboo subject: the five failed Oscar nominations. Two years later he would receive the honorary Oscar and, already in 2016, four years before he died, his first statuette for the score of ‘The Hateful Eight’, by Quentin Tarantino.
“If I compare myself to Mozart, I’m lazy,” the author of more than 500 scores, who in 1968 alone signed twenty soundtracks, confessed in Bilbao. The most popular and prolific film musician got up at five in the morning to work until his last days. The rigor and demand with which he conceived his profession is evident in ‘Ennio, el maestro’, an overwhelming documentary by Giuseppe Tornatore that arrives in theaters this May 13 after passing through the Venice and Barcelona festivals. For the first time, the serious and hermetic Morricone opens up to the director of ‘Cinema Paradiso’, who reviews the life and work of the genius over the course of 156 minutes. In addition to excerpts from his films, the documentary includes a dazzling list of interviewees: Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Springsteen, John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Oliver Stone, Metallica…
Who has not whistled the central melody of
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ or imagined the Iguazú waterfalls with the music of
‘The mission’? How not to get carried away by melancholy with the love theme of
‘Cinema Paradiso’? Who doesn’t get goosebumps at the march of
‘Nineteenth’? With permission from JohnWilliams, Morricone is the only composer whose celebrity has transcended the cinephile sectors. His most celebrated pieces are part of popular culture. “My favorite composer over Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert,” says Tarantino in the film.
‘Ennio, el maestro’ demonstrates how Morricone’s scores not only accompany the images, but also modify their sense and meaning. Captured in the intimacy of the studio of his Roman mansion, surrounded by mountains of records and sheet music, the composer waves his arms and conducts without an orchestra in an impressive picture that comes after the confessions: only at the end of his career did he make peace with music of cinema, which seemed to him little compared to ‘serious’ music. Morricone always sought recognition from other contemporary composers, who saw soundtracks as purely nutritional work. The poor did not know that the author of ‘The Untouchables of Eliot Ness’ was going to sell 70 million records.
Ennio Morricone in his Roman study in ‘Ennio, el maestro’.
A child prodigy, like the other great Italian film musician, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone was born in Rome’s Trastevere in 1928. The son of a jazz trumpeter and a housewife, he began to develop his musical skills at the age of six and completed his training ‘cum laude’ at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in half the time of his classmates. At the age of 16 he was already playing with orchestras in hotels. In the mid-1950s, he was working as a trumpeter in night clubs, writing music for RAI programs and arranging and orchestrating some of the most legendary songs by the Italian stars of the time:
‘Sapore di sale’, by Gino Paoli, and
‘Il Mondo’by Jimmy Fontana, are two stunning examples.
From working with Mina, Paul Anka and Rita Pavone, in 1961 he went on to sign his first soundtrack, ‘El federal’, a tragicomedy set in World War II. World recognition came from the hand of Sergio Leone, a former schoolmate and responsible for the trilogy made up of ‘Death had a price’, ‘For a Fistful of Dollars’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. Morricone included previously unreleased sounds in film music. The whistles, gunshots, bell tolling and screams that rhythmically punctuated the adventures of the ‘man with no name’ revolutionized a genre in which Hollywood had set the standard based on orchestral melodies. The harmonica and electric guitars also had a place in the staves of the Roman, who continued the experimentation at the hands of the most relevant Italian filmmakers: Bertolucci, Pasolini, Pontecorvo…
Ennio Morricone and Giuseppe Tornatore on the set of the documentary.
«The worst thing you could ask of Ennio was that he write a song in the same way as another of his songs. He hated him », reveals Giuseppe Tornatore, who was fortunate to have the master’s music in ten of his films. «In the documentary his aversion to the melody in quotation marks also emerges. Considering himself a creator of melodies instead of creating great works made him feel guilty, a kind of impostor. Another protagonist in the shadow of ‘Ennio, the teacher’ is María Travia, his wife for 64 years. She not only protected him and helped her overcome her shyness, but she was the first judge of his compositions. Before the directors heard his songs, she gave the thumbs up. «Maria gave him the point of view of the public, of simple people uncontaminated by the canons of the academic musical world», reveals Tornatore.
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