The musical relationship between Morricone and Tarantino began long before they worked on a full score for the same film.
First came the music written for other films
Ennio Morricone’s presence in Quentin Tarantino’s cinema does not always amount to direct collaboration during filming. In Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, much of that relationship consists of selecting recordings from earlier films. The composer had written for other characters and other cuts; Tarantino reuses that material within a new arrangement.
This distinction makes it possible to recognise two different creative tasks. Morricone builds the original piece, with its form and its instrumental associations. The later director decides where it starts, how long it lasts and which images it accompanies. The new function does not erase authorship, but nor does it necessarily reproduce the role the music had in its original film.
In Kill Bill, Morricone’s pieces provide different forms of suspense, violence and emotional uplift. There is no single texture that can be summed up as Western sound. The selection shows the breadth of the catalogue: one theme can produce intimacy, while another turns an escape from confinement into an action of almost mythical scope. That variety explains why Tarantino returns to the composer without always needing a new work.
In Inglourious Basterds, reuse also changes the relationship with the war genre. The film’s music selection brings together scores from different sources. Morricone contributes pieces that allow a scene to be treated as a duel, a memory or a farewell, even though the setting is occupied France. The effect comes from the tension between the world depicted and the cinematic memory of the music.
Ancora qui and the move towards The Hateful Eight
Django Unchained adds a detail that prevents The Hateful Eight from being described as the very first occasion on which Morricone created something for Tarantino. Ancora qui, performed by Elisa, was an original contribution to Django. It is a song, not a complete instrumental score for the whole feature film. The terminological precision makes it possible to recognise the precedent without confusing the scale of the two works.
The function of Ancora qui belongs to the sphere of affective memory and separation. Within a soundtrack that includes numerous borrowings, the song opens a different kind of collaboration: the material is already born tied to the new project. The director still selects and edits, but the composition does not come solely from an earlier film.
With The Hateful Eight, released in 2015, Morricone composed an original score of a different breadth. Threat is organised through recurring motifs, low registers and a sense of pressure that accompanies the confinement. This is not a simple revival of the most popular style of his westerns with Sergio Leone. The new story demands that suspicion and hostility within a trapped group be worked through.
The score for The Hateful Eight also sits alongside other musical materials. Talking about original music does not mean that every musical sound in the film was composed for it for the first time. A film soundtrack can combine a commissioned score, songs and pre-existing fragments. The album and the film do not have to arrange those contributions in the same way either.
Recognition, disagreements and careful attribution
Morricone received the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Hateful Eight at the 2016 ceremony. The award belongs to the 2015 film; confusing the release year with the year of the ceremony creates an unnecessarily muddled chronology. The distinction recognised a collaboration that had moved from admiration for a catalogue to the creation of specific material for a shared project.
That award was competitive and specific to a score. It should not be confused with the honorary Oscar Morricone had already received in 2007 for his body of work, a recognition of a different nature.
The relationship has also been described through disagreements about how music is used. It is reasonable to recognise that selecting excerpts and composing an architecture for a film respond to different perspectives. However, not every controversial statement attributed to the composer can be repeated as true. The supposed 2018 Playboy Germany interview was challenged by Morricone and later the subject of an editorial correction.
That episode should not be used as simple proof of enmity. A reliable chronology needs to distinguish between documented criticism, an aesthetic disagreement and a disproved attribution. It should also avoid the opposite story of perfect harmony inferred solely from an award. Shared work can exist between professionals who understand the relationship between composition, editing and musical autonomy in different ways.
The journey makes a concrete transformation visible. Tarantino began by using Morricone as a privileged source of existing music; then he incorporated a new song and finally a large-scale original score. That evolution does not cancel out the record-based selection that characterises the director. It expands it: alongside the editing of cinematic memories appears the possibility of asking a composer to build a new form of threat for a film that has not yet acquired its own musical history.
Back to the guide to Tarantino's musical collaborators.