It’s a bit reductive to associate Ennio Morricone solely with his work in Westerns. The composer has scored over 500 movies and TV series, and his long, wide-ranging career won him an honorary Oscar in 2007. Still, it’s fair to say Morricone’s music never resonated more than in films like Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dollars, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, when his easily-whistled melodies captured the spirit of the frontier.
Thing is, Morricone hasn’t scored any Westerns since. That’ll change in January, when Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, The Hateful Eight, hits wide release. At his Comic-Con panel on Saturday, Tarantino revealed that the film would feature an original score by Morricone, marking the composer’s first Western work since the ’70s. The collaboration is long-overdue: Tarantino frequently peppers his films with Morricone’s music, and, apart from one brief, Django-induced spat, the two have always shared a fierce admiration of each other.