He defined the soundrack of the Spaghetti Western, but Ennio Morricone was taken aback by the violence of Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming western, The Hateful Eight, for which he wrote the score.

Despite having written more than 500 film scores in a career spanning half a century, the 87-year-old composer said he was still “nervous” about collaborating with Tarantino.

Speaking through an interpreter, he told reporters at London’s Abbey Road Studios: "I was nervous, I worked very very hard because I thought he deserved something very special for what he had done."

Morricone said he wanted to give Tarantino something "unique" out of respect for the director’s work. Earlier this month, the Italian composer told The Telegraph that he was keen to create a “very different kind of theme”, rather than returning to the style of his classic scores for Sergio Leone’s Sixties westerns, such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 1966 Credit: Everett Collection/Rex Features

He said: "I have been impressed and even shocked by the violence of some of his sequences... but after giving a second thought to that I realised that yes, we are shocked by the horror of this violence but, if we think of the victims of this violence we realise that Tarantino's position is always on the side of the underclass."

The double Oscar-winning director, whose films are well known for their soundtracks, said Morricone was his "favourite composer", and described their collaboration as “a once in a lifetime thing”.

"I started really collecting soundtracks, next thing I knew I had a huge Ennio Morricone collection," he said. Tarantino said he first discovered Morricone's music as a 12-year-old taken to the cinema for the first time to see Eastwood — his mother's "crush" — in one of the Spaghetti Westerns, so-called because they were produced and directed by Italians.

Quentin Tarantino at the Los Angeles premiere of The Hateful Eight Credit: Chris Pizzello/Invision

However, Morricone had not always had such a high opinion of the director’s work. “He places music in his films without coherence,” Morricone said of Tarantino in 2013. He had also previously criticised Tarantino’s 2012 Oscar-winning film Django Unchained for having “too much blood”, saying “to tell the truth, I didn’t care for it.”

It is the first time the pair have worked together, although Tarantino has used Morricone's arrangements in a string of his blockbusters, including martial arts hit Kill Bill, bloodthirsty Second World War flick Inglorious Basterds and his last film, Django Unchained, which was also a take on the Western.

He only approached Morricone to write the score for The Hateful Eight after he had finished filming his latest release, leaving little time for the composer to create the score.

Samuel L Jackson in The Hateful Eight Credit: Moviestore/Rex

"He thought I hadn't started shooting yet and actually, so he was talking to me and I was like 'no I'm done shooting and I need the score in a month'," Tarantino said. He had visited Morricone at his apartment in Rome to convince the composer to work on the film, which stars Kurt Russell and Samuel L Jackson.

At the time the composer was working on film music for a friend and could only promise to create the theme tune, but a day later agreed to write music for the entire film after reading the story.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6_UI1GzaWv0https://www.youtube.com/embed/dGva1NVWRXkhttps://www.youtube.com/embed/dGva1NVWRXk

The Hateful Eight is in UK cinemas from January 8