Ennio Morricone is one of my favorite composers and at age 90, he has come out with a book - from The Guardian:
Ennio Morricone settles old scores with ‘simplistic’ directors
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.
The composer remembers that his fellow Italian Franco Zeffirelli asked for music “devoid of themes, a music of moods and atmospheres”, but “when the music was ready … said, ‘You didn’t write any themes.’”
Available for pre-order at Amazon.
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