During the 78th edition of the Venice Film Festival in early September, New Europe spoke with movie director Giuseppe Tornatore, whose film credits include Everybody’s Fine, The Legend of 1900, Malèna, Baarìa, The Best Offer, and Cinema Paradiso, the latter of which won him an Academy Award in 1989. Tornatore’s new documentary Ennio, is a film about his long-standing association with the late film composer Ennio Morricone.
New Europe (NE): You worked with Ennio Morricone for a long time, when did you come up with the idea of making a biopic?
Giuseppe Tornatore (GT): To be honest, the idea wasn’t mine, but from two young producers. My only condition was that I had the ability to interview Morricone for as long as I wanted. Morricone accepted, but he wanted me to be the director, so in the end, we were connected.
NE: The first time you worked with Morricone was on Cinema Paradiso, which also included his son, Andrea. Why wasn’t his son featured in the new film?
GT: Actually, I intentionally decided not to talk about his son because I didn’t want to tell too much about his private and personal life. It would have taken too long to put all of his life into the film, I wanted to talk about Andrea and his contribution to The Love Theme in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso but, it might seem absurd, they did not grant us the rights to the sequence, so I decided not to include it.
NE: Can you tell us something more about the process, how did you managed to get all those people involved to talk about Morricone?
GT: To tell you the truth, the movie was not shot in one single sequence. I made it episodically. I did some interviews for a few days and then stopped for four or six months. This gave me the opportunity to think about the people I wanted to interview for the film. Somehow this allowed me to add, make changes and cut. Only the editing was done in one shot. This way of working made it possible for me to make choices on who I wanted to interview and what kind of questions I wanted to ask.
NE: One of the things that intrigued me about the film is that it shows how Morricone continues to improve himself, try new things, and overcome musical limits. but he’s never tried to write electronic music compositions. Why do you think he never tried this?
GT: First of all, this is a very interesting question. As a matter of fact, in his experiments, he never completed them. He always left them unfinished. He always kind of went into uncharted waters in terms of his music. It’s actually not true that he didn’t use electronic music. He’s always been looking for a particular kind of electronic sound. The one thing is that he always used electronic sounds to put them in his classic compositions. He did it many times. One of these examples is the Theme of Sacco and Vanzetti in which he used the sound of an electric shock when he imagined what sound an electric chair would make at the moment of execution. He would identify and manipulate sounds to use them in his musical schemes. That’s something he did a thousand times over the course of his career. In fact, the world of electronic music feels so connected to him and to his music. One reasons for this was that he always used a synthesizer, but he would never use it to imitate an orchestra. He only ever used it to create sound timbres that did not exist. He has been much closer to electronic music than everyone else.
NE: Can you tell us when you first fell in love with Morricone’s music?
GT: I remember it very well. At first, I wanted to find a way to portray fictional sequences in the film that were not possible to make. Anyway, I was eight or ten years old and I went to watch a (Sergio Leone) Spaghetti Western at the cinema and I remember watching A Fistful of Dollars. I loved the soundtrack. A few days later I was at the beach and there were jukeboxes to listen to music. One of them started playing the soundtrack from Fistful; I was so surprised that the music from a film could exist without the movie. That was the first time I discovered that it was made by Ennio Morricone. From that moment on, I followed everything he did. When we became friends, we joked that I remembered soundtracks that he didn’t even remember he had done.
NE: At one point in the film, someone says that Morricone’s music is recognizable from the very first few notes. Do you think that’s true?
GT: This is a very frequent question in the world of music. In the documentary, Hans Zimmer says exactly this, but he is not the only one who noticed that about Morricone’s music, The fact is, his compositions are always immediately recognizable. In all seriousness, the logical explanation for this cannot be technical because he has always made music in a different way. The answer lies in the fact that his music was totally personal. Nobody can give a technical or logical explanation for this phenomenon. Even Zimmer tried to find an explanation but was unsuccessful.
NE: How important was it for you to capture and then present Morricone’s body language and gestures?
GT: For me, it was very important because Morricone’s gestures, not only while conducting music, but also in communicating in a conversation, have always fascinated me. Morricone’s body language was not just theatrical and exaggerated like that of other great conductors, instead, his way of conducting was minimal as if he didn’t want to disturb the performance. He had a wonderful and natural way of gesturing that wasn’t at all contrived. It was very important for me that this part of his character be captured in the film.
NE: How did Morricone’s death affect your work on the film? How did you change the approach since he wouldn’t be able to see it?
GT: The work on the film was influenced, above all, from my emotional point of view. The project, however, has not changed at all, but my perspective has changed because when Morricone died, I was deep into the editing process for the film. Spending whole days with him, cutting his conversations, and editing the scenes made me feel like I was erasing the awareness that he was no longer there. This made me understand that I wanted the documentary to use only the present tense and that it should never refer to the fact that he was dead. I was sure that he has a form of eternity thanks to his music and that the documentary had to respect this. The title of the film, Ennio, also emphasizes because it wants to be a familiar sound that brings you back to the present. This consciously makes an attempt to avoid communicating a sense of absence.
NE: One of the things that surprised me in the film was to find out that Morricone had a huge inferiority complex. How do you think this affected his career?
GT: I wouldn’t call it an inferiority complex, but he always brought with him a certain amount of torment that he solved only towards the end of his life. For a long time during his professional career, this darker side really agitated him. Being born as a pure musician and finding himself as an entertainment musician created a wound in him that always left an uncomfortable mark. I personally believe that this wound is one of the elements that explain the richness of his music. He never felt at peace with himself and he always felt this constant battle inside him. Morricone wanted to make entertaining music that was more cultured than the norm and, at the same time, wanted to make absolute music that was more understandable and accessible to the general public. His inner conflict, however, was the element that enriched his music and by the end of his life, he resolved it. He recognized that music for movies is a form of contemporary music, and in this respect, it is a very interesting form of composing. I’ve done my best to try to emphasize this in the film as much as possible.
NE: How difficult was it to include interviews with people who have already passed away and how did you choose the people you interviewed?
GT: I always had it clear in my mind that I would have to look for stock material in which the directors who had worked with him could explain what it was like working with Morricone. As for the people I chose to interview, I wanted them to create a complete picture, so I didn’t want to interview only well known or highly regarded people. I also needed to interview humbler people like a sound engineer or a post-production manager, a technician, and so on. I wanted to give an overall picture that was complete as possible. I contacted (Quentin) Tarantino while he was shooting his latest film and he invited me to the set to do the interview. Everyone was very willing to talk to me. This made me realize how important Morricone has been for their lives. Together, Morricone and I worked on eleven films. But even for those who didn’t work with him as many times as I did, there was still a lot of love and respect.
