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Giuseppe Tornatore’s portrait of Oscar-winning composer Ennio Morricone gets a special out-of-competition screening in Venice.
The 2021 Venice International Film Festival will pay tribute to the late, great Ennio Morricone with a screening of Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore’s new documentary on the life and music of Italy’s greatest film composer.
Ennio will get a special, out-of-competition gala screening at the 78th Venice International Film Festival.
The documentary takes the form of a long interview between Morricone and Tornatore, with comments from artists and admirers, including director collaborators Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Barry Levinson, Roland Joffé, and Oliver Stone, as well as musicians Bruce Springsteen and fellow film composer and Oscar winner Hans Zimmer.
The documentary tells the Maestro’s story in a long interview of him with Tornatore, and with comments by artists and directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuliano Montaldo, Marco Bellocchio, Dario Argento, the Taviani brothers, Carlo Verdone, Barry Levinson, Roland Joffé, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino, Bruce Springsteen, Nicola Piovani, Hans Zimmer and Pat Metheny, and through music and archive footage.
The film also seeks to reveal Morricone’s lesser-known aspects, such as his passion for chess, and the origin of some of his musical intuitions, like the howl of a coyote that inspired the theme of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.”
“I worked with Ennio Morricone for thirty years, I made almost all my films with him, not to mention the documentaries, commercials, and projects that we tried unsuccessfully to put together,” said Tornatore, whose features have included the Oscar winner “Cinema, Paradiso”(1988), “The Legend of 1900”(1998), and “The Best Offer” (2013), all of which featured the music of Morricone.
“During this time, our friendship was increasingly consolidated. Thus, film after film, as my understanding of his character as a man and an artist grew ever deeper, I always wondered what type of documentary I could make about him.”
With Ennio, Tornatore says, his dream has come true. “I wanted to tell Ennio Morricone’s story to audiences around the world who love his music. I structured Ennio as an audio-visual novel that relied on clips from films for which he composed the music, repertory images, and concerts, to introduce the spectator to the formidable existential and artistic career of one of the most beloved musicians of the 20th century”.
In his long career, Morricone received six Oscar nominations, finally winning the Academy Award for best original score for his music to Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in 2016, nine years after he received an honorary Oscar for his life’s work. Morricone died last year, aged 91.
Other high-profile movies in the festival include Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune”, starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and other big names, which was partly filmed in Hungary, Kristen Stewart’s Diana drama, “Spencer”, directed by Pablo Larrain, Ridley Scott’s medieval epic “The Last Duel” and Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog”.
Source: HollywoodReporter, Variety
