Ennio Morricone - H 2014
AP Photo/Michael SohnComposer Ennio Morricone on Saturday received his Golden Globe for best score for The Hateful Eight in person at a special ceremony in Rome at the Bulgari flagship store on Via Condotti. The 87-year-old maestro limits his travel and was unable to attend the festivities in Beverly Hills earlier this year where director Quentin Tarantino accepted the award on his behalf.
Lorenzo Soria. president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, presented Morricone with the statuette, remarking that it was Morricone’s third Golden Globe. He has previously won for The Mission (1986) and The Legend of 1900 (1998).
“Actually, I forgot the other two,” said Morricone. “When you work, you tend to forget. Thank you for reminding me that I won the other two Golden Globes. I do my profession at the service of cinema. And I think that my job is to write for cinema, not for these objects, which are pleasant things, but are objects.”
Upon accepting the award, the composer told the assembled press about the fears and anxieties he has when embarking upon a new job. “When I accept to write music for a movie, because of my being shy, my first thing is I’m worried to talk to the director about music,” he said. “I’m worried to talk to the producers because the producers want to listen to something. The first thing for me is to make music that the people can understand.”
The Hateful Eight was no exception, and brought new worries for Morricone, who has over 500 film and TV credits to his name, as well as over 100 classical works. “I’m very concerned anytime I accept to write music,” he said. “With Tarantino, I said no. But then he was here to receive the David Di Donatello [award] and he came to my house and he wanted me to write the music for the movie. I wanted to break with what was my past with Western movies. I didn’t see this movie as a Western. It is an adventure movie, The Hateful Eight.”
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Continued Morricone: “I wanted to break with what I had written up to that moment, but I didn’t know whether he would understand what I was aiming for. He’s a fan of Sergio Leone and all of the Western music. I didn’t want to give him the same kind of music I had written 50 years before for Sergio Leone or for the other Western directors.”
Fortunately for the composer, Tarantino, a longtime superfan of Morricone, was completely on board. “I didn’t know what type of culture he had, but he accepted it. He gave me a free hand and I was extremely happy,” said Morricone. “I wrote this music like a symphony. He liked it very much, so I’m very, very happy. As I said, I’m always afraid when I accept this type of work. There’s always this fear.”
The collaboration has netted the composer his sixth Academy Award nomination. He also is an honorary Oscar recipient for his multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.
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At the event, Academy Award-winning director Giuseppe Tornatore, a 25-year collaborator with Morricone, also discussed a new documentary he is making about the composer, The Glance of Music, which is being supported by Bulgari. While a trailer with the words “coming soon” has been circulated on the Internet, Tornatore said the project is actually in its infancy.
Tornatore has begun with a long “psychological” interview with Morricone, and will next commence with interviews with other collaborators of the composer, archival research and eventually fictional recreations of Morricone’s life. While both are currently busy with other projects, Tornatore joked that the trailer should actually end with the words “coming later.”
