As one of cinema's greatest composers, he has written the music for hundreds of films, including classics such as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, recreating the wild west of Sergio Leone's imagination with a soundscape of haunting whistles and cracking whips.
But, after a lifetime's career in both Hollywood and European cinema, Ennio Morricone is now settling scores of a different kind. In a book based on extensive interviews with the famously private man, he attacks film-makers who, he says, fail to understand the power of music to heighten emotions – and some fellow composers for enabling them to regard a soundtrack as merely “something that plays in the background”.
“There are times … when you get to the recording stage without having the slightest clue as to the director's expectations,” he says in the book, Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words. Now 90, he recalls the US filmmaker and Halloween director John Carpenter commissioning him to write the score for The Thing: “He hardly said a word.” Don Siegel wanted Morricone's music for the 1970 western Two Mules for Sister Sara, starring Shirley MacLaine and Clint Eastwood, but “we didn't communicate much,” he says.
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