Oscar-winning composer Ennio Morricone will get the big-screen treatment in a new documentary titled “I Never Wrote Music for Films — We All Love Ennio Morricone.”
The project is based on the perspective of his manager Luigi Caiola, who produced over 250 Morricone concerts all over the world.
“I Never Wrote Music for Films” follows director Giuseppe Tornatore’s widely sold Morricone doc “Ennio” that launched from Venice in 2021.
The new Morricone doc is being produced by Milan-based Marie Mariad Cinema and Chinese multihyphenate Yi Zhou along with Caiola, who managed the maestro from 1997 to 2015, producing his global concert tours as well as the Grammy-winning tribute album “We All Love Ennio Morricone.”
Zhou, who produced and co-directed the doc “Chronicles of Disney,” on Monday announced the new Morricone doc, which she is boarding through her companies Into the Sun Films and Colors of the Sun Ventures.
Morricone, who died in 2020 at age 91, was one of the most prolific and admired composers in film history. Starting in 1946, he composed over 500 scores for film and television, as well as over 100 pieces of music for orchestral performance. At least a dozen of his scores became classics, from the so-called spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s including Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West,” to the Cannes Palm d’Or-winning Roland Joffe film “The Mission” and “Cinema Paradiso” of the 1980s.
“I Never Wrote Music for Films — We All Love Ennio Morricone” will be directed by Italian musicologist Massimo Privitera, who will work in tandem with ace cinematographer and director Daniele Ciprì (“Vincere”). Shooting is planned to start in summer 2026 across multiple locations in Italy and Europe, according to a statement from Into the Sun Films.
The new Morricone doc project is divided into nine chapters, blending fictional sketches, commentary from music experts and previously unseen archival footage. “It includes testimonials from the musicians who toured with the maestro for nearly twenty years, offering a ‘first-hand’ account of his daily work and humanity,” the statement said.
Colors of the Sun Ventures will handle the doc’s post-production and take distribution rights for selected international territories in tandem with its Moon Prism Entertainment subsidiary.
