The trailer for Giuseppe Tornatore’s documentary on the famed Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has been released ahead of its opening in select US theaters on February 9th, 2024. Watch it below.
Titled Ennio, the film traces Morricone’s career from his early work with Sergio Leone to his first Academy Award for Quentin Tarantino’s 2016 movie The Hateful Eight, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Once Upon a Time in America; Days of Heaven; The Mission; and The Untouchables. It also offered the late composer, who died in 2020, an opportunity to tell his own story and break down his artistic process.
Adding to the portrait of Morricone are interviews with several of his collaborators and contemporaries, including Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Springsteen. Ennio also features appearances from Oliver Stone, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Giuliano Montaldo, Dario Argento, Joan Baez, and more.
Morricone and Tornatore shared a long collaborative history, beginning with 1988’s Cinema Paradiso. From there, Morricone went on to write the music for all of Tornatore’s subsequent films, including his Golden Globe-winning score for 1998’s Legend of 1900.
Ennio premiered at the Venice Film Festival in July 2021 before Music Box Films acquired the US distribution rights in November of this year.
See where Morricone’s work landed on our list of the best film scores of the 2010s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5WBbULw_0U

Titled Ennio, the movie explores Morricone’s illustrious career, from his early collaborations with Sergio Leone to his Academy Award-winning score for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016.
The documentary delves into some of Morricone’s most iconic compositions, including those for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Mission, and The Untouchables.
Released posthumously, the movie allows Morricone, who passed away in 2020 at 91, to finally reveal his own life story and expose the nuances of his artistic process.
In addition to Morricone’s personal insights, Ennio features interviews with famous collaborators, including Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Springsteen.
The documentary weaves a comprehensive tapestry of Morricone’s singular impact on the world of film scoring, with further contributions from the likes of Oliver Stone, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellocchio, Dario Argento, Joan Baez, and more.
Tornatore, famed for titles such as Malèna and Ennio, has a history with Morricone stretching back to 1988, when they collaborated on the former’s hit movie Cinema Paradiso. Morricone went on to write music for each of Tornatore’s subsequent movies, including his Golden Globe-winning score for Legend of 1900 in 1998.
Watch the trailer for Ennio below. See Far Out‘s recent review of the movie here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5WBbULw_0U

All of this considered you might be surprised that the Rawhide star is actually not so hard-hearted as his characters may have led you to believe. One Eastwood anecdote in The Toronto Star exemplifies this, and comes from his script editor Sonia Chernus, who called Eastwood “the gentlest person I know.” She explained, “He can’t bear to kill anything, including a moth which I asked him to get rid of in my apartment.”
In fact, while he’s usually one of the best shots in the West in many of his productions, Eastwood isn’t too keen on violence and killing. He said of hunting, “I never liked killing things. Some people are taken by it. Maybe it’s the form of masculine expression. I don’t know. I’d be interested in speaking to a psychologist about that.”
Even more confusingly, Eastwood, now known as the quintessential Western man, almost refused to act in his series Rawhide when the opportunity presented itself to him. His reasoning? Because it was a Western, of course.
Eastwood said, “I didn’t want to do a western – westerns were dead.” He said of Rawhide, “But then I recognized Yojimbo in it, and you could feel a lot of the black humor. And I thought, nobody’d ever have the nerve to do this in America.”
But while Eastwood doesn’t seem to agree with violence to extreme measures, he now understands the appeal of a good old-fashioned revenge plotline in a Western. He said, “Everybody has a dream about how they’d like to handle certain situations, every boy from nine to one hundred would like to take vengeance into his own hands…’The vengeance is mine.’ People need to see that.”