A New Documentary Will Explore the Good, the Better, and the Best of Ennio Morricone

“At first, I thought making music for the cinema was humiliating,” the late film composer Ennio Morricone once said. “By writing, I got my revenge.” That comeuppance came in the form of an Oscar for his score to Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, several previous Oscar nominations, and a great public appreciation for his scores to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Thing, and The Mission, among others.

Morricone’s full career, including his early Italian pop songs and his beloved scores, is the focus of Ennio, a new documentary by Giuseppe Tornatore, who directed Cinema Paradiso (which featured a Morricone score.) Clint Eastwood, Terrence Malick, Hans Zimmer, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Metallica’s James Hetfield, and others all took part in interviews for the film, which will open theatrically at New York City’s Film Forum on Feb. 9.

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“He opens up the visuals,” Tarantino says in a trailer for the film.

“You hear his music, and you know it is Ennio,” composer John Williams says.

The trailer, in which Bruce Springsteen praises Morricone’s “deep, deep, deep emotion,” shows clips from movies that featured his music along with archival interviews with Morricone, who died in 2020 at age 91, and his many admirers. It also showcases the swelling strings, unusual earworms, and heavenly choral arrangements that were Morricone’s calling cards.

“I wanted to make Ennio to make Morricone’s story known to audiences all over the world who love his music,” Tornatore said in a statement. “It was not just a matter of having him tell me about his life and his magical relationship with music, but also of searching in archives around the world for interviews and other images relating to the innumerable collaborations carried out in the past by Morricone with filmmakers.”

In the trailer, Morricone explains how he scored his first film in 1961, thinking he’d quit in 1970, and then after some success, he moved that to 1980 … “Now I don’t say anything,” he says. Ultimately, he won two Oscars and provided music to around 500 films.

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