What is it like to work side by side with such a block of world film music as Enio Morricone; Especially when the great composer in question also happens to be your father? “It was very difficult, especially in the beginning. The roles of father-son and professional are not so easily separated. And the truth is, at least for me, the son has always covered everything else. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t work well together. After all, dad was always a perfectionist,” Marco Morricone tells me shortly before we sat down with the rest of the band at a dinner hosted by Ennio Morricone’s Greek Association of Musical Friends.

Marco, 65, is currently in Athens with his wife to take part in a memorial event called Mondo Morricone, which includes premiere nights. The highlight will be today’s screening in the Concert Hall of the documentary “Ennio”, shot by Giuseppe Tornatore, about the life and work of the great composer and his good friend.

Work and family

“They approached the Pope back in 2013 to make a film about his life. At first he did not believe, but then he called Tornatore and when he confirmed that he was “in business”, he immediately agreed. Filming began in 2014 and continued when there was time. There is a lot that is not yet known about Morricone in the documentary, but there is certainly a lot more that is not said,” Marco continues, consistently calling the maestro “dad”, with an endearment that shows the love relationship between them.

“It revolutionized film music. For the first time, he made her the main character.”

But how much did Morricone’s (exhausting) work interfere with his family life? “At first he left the job while it was being done outside the family, but then it just became impossible, so he shared it with us. I remember that in the 1960s he had to leave with a concert in Vienna. I was playing in the garden and like a child I asked him to come with me. And he took me, we even drove all the way in a caravan. On another occasion, we traveled as a family by car from Rome to Saint-Tropez for his work. We get to the house where we were going to live, and I remember the son of Joan Baez, he was three or four years old, he swam in the pool.

As we talk, the restaurant’s speakers play the great soundtracks that Morricone has signed over his long career. His son stops the conversation from time to time to draw my attention to a specific point in the music. “The truth is that Ennio Morricone revolutionized film music. For the first time, he made her the main character, and not just an accompaniment to the images projected onto the screen. He was a genius. When you compose, you usually first write with a pencil, then erase and correct. He wrote directly with a pen, and there were almost no corrections in his manuscripts. All this was in his head ready. But I don’t miss music. I miss his figure and his silence,” says Marco Morricone emotionally.

Morricone and Greece

When I ask him how he feels that his father’s memory and work is so admired in Greece, and especially in a city like Larisa, where the Morricone Association is based, he spontaneously laughs: “This madman is to blame,” referring to the President club Kostas Papakostas, who made a significant contribution to the organization of the screening of the documentary in Greece. “Crazy in a good way, of course,” he hastens to add, and concludes, “The bottom line is to love the music, sometimes that’s the best communication code, and it’s great that there are so many people in Greece who love Morricone’s music.” .

Today’s screening of the documentary in the Concert Hall will be preceded by a concert by the Stavros Lanzias Quartet to music by Ennio Morricone. An exhibition called “Ennio Formes” is also “running” at the Municipal Musical Theater “Maria Callas” in Olympia.