Nine-time Golden Globe nominee and three-time winner, the late legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone is the subject of a documentary directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso) simply entitled Ennio. The film tells of the life and art of one of the greatest film composers of all time, bringing his genius and endearing personality to the audience, spotlighting his humanity and his fascination with the mystery of music. It is a moving, powerful testament (running 2 hours and 37 minutes), ever-surprising and touching with the amazing notes composed by the Maestro, as everyone in the industry always called him.

“I believe the film works because Ennio tells us about himself,” said director Tornatore on Italian TV introducing the movie. “He is also surrounded by a chorus of people who have known and admired him. But over the course of a lengthy 11 days, 5 hours a day interview with me, the documentary is all Ennio and his stories.” 

Tornatore, who was a close friend of Morricone’s (he composed the score of every Tornatore film), worked on and off on the documentary for five years, gathering material and conducting interviews from Hollywood to India to China, and then exclusively for the last two and a half years, editing the project, a feat that was even more complex because of the Covid pandemic. Some of the greatest artists in the world, composers, directors, and singers, talk about Morricone to Peppuccio (that’s how Morricone loved to call Tornatore), and recount his years studying at the Conservatory, his desire to be accepted by the academic world, his attraction to all kinds of music, including pop music, which he tackled before cinema and which was not very well regarded by his teachers.

“Ennio thought that everything that he experimented with over decades helped his art,” continues Tornatore. “Whether it be to make arrangements for a popular song or composing a symphony or a score for a film, he always experimented and combined his intuitions with the technologies and the requirements of the musical narrative.” Morricone wrote all the time, with a massive body of work comprising over 400 film scores, and collaborations with directors like Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, Roland Jaffe, Oliver Stone to name a few.

Morricone had started his musical career playing trumpet like his father, and during and after World War II that allowed him to survive and eat. “We were playing for the American soldiers and we would put a dish out and the soldiers would give some coins which we needed to buy food,” Morricone says in the documentary. “Using the trumpet in order to gain money to eat was a terrible humiliation, something I never liked and I never forgot.”

Soon he was called to arrange – and sometimes compose – the music for songs of very popular singers of the time, from Gianni Morandi to Mina, undoubtedly contributing to the success of those songs which have accompanied generations of Italians since the late 60s. “He would add Wagnerian intuition or other contamination into those songs,” explains Tornatore. “He was the first great cross-pollinator of musical genres, giving songs  a more complex approach, making them memorable.”

Interestingly, most of the people Tornatore interviewed for Ennio inevitably ended up whistling or humming those memorable tunes, remembering the violins, the drums, the winds, laughing at the memories of how Morricone himself didn’t like a lot of those arrangements, considering them schifezze, lousy creations. “At the end of the day this film is also a sort of musical comedy where everybody sings!” says Tornatore, laughing.

The film tries to enter the mindset of the musical genius who always had a tune in his head, no matter what he was doing. “He always seemed as if he were distracted, his mind always somewhere else,” Tornatore says. In the film we see Morricone explaining, “I am always thinking about something that I have to write, I am always thinking about music. More than writing, I was transcribing because the music was already in my head.”

Among the many interviews, we see Clint Eastwood (also a musician) talking about Morricone’s legendary scores for Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name 1960’s trilogy, starting with A Fistful of Dollars, followed by For a Few Dollars More and The Good the Bad and the Ugly, which launched Eastwood’s career. Also interviewed are composers Hans Zimmer and John Williams, director Oliver Stone (who recalled the difficult relationship he had with Morricone on U-Turn), and Quentin Tarantino (Morricone won his third Golden Globe and an Oscar for The Hateful Eight). Bruce Springsteen offers perhaps the most interesting comment: “When I saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and I heard that sound, which I later found out was inspired by the howling of the coyote, it was the most creative music I had ever heard in a film,” he says in the documentary. “It was the only time I got out of the theater and ran to buy the film’s score!”

There is a moment in the documentary in which Tornatore asks Morricone to define the work of a film composer. “He didn’t have a quick answer,” Tornatore reflects. “Because his whole life was made of it, he didn’t have the definition for the composer but knew how to describe the torment of any composer. He said, ‘Every time you have to do a new score, and you have the blank page in front of you, and you have to develop a thought, and you think, what shall we put on this blank page? What are we looking for? We don’t know yet.’”

After saying these words, Morricone looks straight at the camera held by his loyal Peppuccio, and smiles a thoughtful, soulful smile.