Film composer Ennio Morricone conducts

Finally, after numerous flirtations and a tiff, Italian composer Ennio Morricone will officially team with director Quentin Tarantino, signing on for The Hateful Eight. The  marks Morricone’s return to the Western — the genre that made him famous — in 40 years.

The five-time Oscar winner’s haunting and hynotic scores vaulted him to international prominence  throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and at 86 he is revered by today’s young directors. Tarantino, an avowed fan of the Sergio Leone high plains dramas that made Morricone a star, has inserted some of his existing compositions into four previous films Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2, 2009’s Inglorious Basterds and 2012’s Django Unchained, for which Morricone contributed an original song, “Ancora Qui.” Shortly after that  film’s release Morricone told students at Rome’s LUISS University he felt his music was being used “without coherence.”

He later retracted the remarks, and the two seem to have settled their differences, as The Hateful Eight will be the first Tarantino film to rely on a traditional score for its emotional template, as opposed to the more curated existing catalogs the director has compiled to such great effect on his  previous works.

The Hateful Eight is scheduled for a Christmas release from the Weinstein Company. The plot centers around incidents that arise when bounty hunters find themselves stranded in Wyoming blizzard, post Civil War.

Morricone has composed music for more than 500 film and TV shows, including Leone’s iconic The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More.  He’s worked with a who’s who of top Hollywood directors, among them Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, Oliver Stone and Samuel Fuller. He received Oscars for his music for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso and Bugsy.