Earlier this summer, directorQuentin Tarantinowent to San Diego Comic Con to promote his revenge WesternThe Hateful Eight, where he revealed that legendary composerEnnio Morriconehas written the original score for this highly-anticipated movie. The score will beEnnio Morricone’s first Western score in over 40 years. It’s one of the few times that the director has actually used a composer for his films, since he usually takes pieces of scores from other movies and recycles them. Earlier this month,Quentin TarantinoscreenedThe Hateful Eightat the Director’s Guild of America, where he revealed thatEnnio Morricone’s score actually brings in his unused work fromJohn Carpenter’s 1982 classicThe Thing.
The director explained at Comic Con thatThe Hateful Eightwas the first project he thought deserved an original score, which lead him to meetingEnnio Morricone. Ironically, the video presentation shown at SDCC featured some ofEnnio Morricone’s work onThe Thing. The filmmaker said during the Q&A portion ofThe Hateful Eightscreening at the DGA thatEnnio Morriconedidn’t think he’d have the time to compose a score forThe Hateful Eight, but he came up with a plan that involved using his largely unused score fromThe Thing. Here’s what the director had to say, paraphrasing whatEnnio Morriconesaid to him during their meeting.
“(Ennio Morriconesaid) ‘I wrote a whole orchestra score [for ‘The Thing’], and I wrote a whole synthesizer score, because I knew that was what [John Carpenter] was used to, and I gave him everything, and the only thing he used in the entire movie was the synthesizer main title [track].’ So basically, if you stay away from the synthesizer main title, all that music that’s on the soundtrack album has never been used in a movie ever. So, he goes, ‘What I can do, is I’ll write the theme…and with the other Thing pieces of music, now you have your original score that’s never been used in a movie before.'”
Of course, there is another major parallel withThe ThingandThe Hateful Eightat play, since both movies starKurt Russell. However,Quentin Tarantinorevealed that, onceEnnio Morriconestarted working on the theme, thecomposertold the director the next day that he will provide more music forThe Hateful Eight. Here’s what the director had to say about the music thatEnnio Morriconekept contributing.
“(Ennio Morriconesaid) ‘I’m going to write you more music.’ And I think he literally sat down that night and started composing the theme that he was talking about and got more inspired, and came up with more music. And then all of a sudden ten minutes of music became seventeen minutes of music, became thirty-five minutes of music. And so with that, and the unused Thing portions that I used, [I’ve got] my original score.”
What remains to be seen is if this mixture of previously-composed music and the new work byEnnio Morriconewill disqualify his score from contention in the Best Original Score category at theThe Academy Awards.The Academyhas a number of strict rules in place for both the Original Score and Best Original Song, so it seems possible that the composer’s work may not be recognized by the Academy. What do you think about these new details regardingThe Hateful Eight?
