Ennio Morricone’s Musical Life

For decades, celebrated Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has been lending his musical talents to directors from Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Leone to Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino. In the latest installment of the Guardian’s weekly This Much I Know column, the great cinema artist shares some of the wisdom he’s gained in his eighty-seven years. His anecdotes range from a recounting of his difficult childhood in Rome during World War II to the experience of winning his first Oscar (for The Hateful Eight) earlier this spring. And he reveals that age hasn’t brought him tranquility. “I’m growing more and more anxious,” he says. “Even though I am more self-assured now, my need to always do better and improve myself is stronger. I must seem very worried and concerned most of the time—and it’s because I am. My work carries great responsibility.”

Morricone notes that meeting and marrying his wife were the “most romantic moments” in his life and that on a typical day the two will have lunch together during a break in his regimented daily writing routine. And when it comes to death, he’s “not particularly scared about it . . . What really frightens me is that if I go before my wife, I will leave her alone, and vice versa. The ideal would be to die together.”

More revelations—about Morricone’s favorite pizza and how he feels about “cats . . . horses, some monkeys, and sweet dogs that aren’t too aggressive”—can be found over at the Guardian.

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