Quote:
“He scores 30 movies a year. How can you do that? I write five, the maximum I work on is ten.” Who works on ten pictures a year in Hollywood? Nobody can physically. But apparently Morricone can.


The only way Morricone, or anyone else, could "write" even half that number would be to merely sketch the outlines of the score and then turn it over to orchestrators and copyists, though one suspects that he relies on uncredited co-composers to grease this conveyor belt. Thirty scores a year means turning out one every twelve days, with no time off for weekends or holidays.

Even the indefatiguable Max Steiner, in his most prolific years (1931, 1939), turned out no more than 17 credited and uncredited scores, but he had the full resources of the RKO, Warner Bros. and Selznick Studios music departments, with unlimited numbers of orchestrators, copyists and uncredited co-composers to back him up, lest he drop dead from exhaustion or, worse, not make the deadline for the scheduled recording sessions.

And then there's the little matter of conducting all those bloody sessions...