Sergio Leone Quotes

The American public is a very specialized public.

We're talking a very cultivated people, but I found as cultivated as they were, they were uninformed about the personages who weren't American. They knew everything about America, but much less about other countries.

Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.

I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.

I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.

I admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.

There's my pessimism. Because I didn't know yet that type of film is always going to become more extinct, that there won't be anymore. Because there will always be more films that win five Oscars like Terms of Endearment.

What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character.... And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.

From Ennio [Morricone] I ask for themes that clothe my characters easily. He's never read a script of mine to compose the music, because many times he's composed the music before the script is ever written.

It's natural to me that someone who loved that type of music or that type of spectacle would copy it, to do something, a video. It seems the most natural thing in the world to me.

I work with intuition. With interpreters. I have my own method. I know exactly what I want from actors. Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear.

I didn't want [actress] just to be a woman standing at the window, waving hello and goodbye to men as they came and went in the world that they were struggling through. I wanted her to have a true function.

It's a little hard to avoid putting both war and politics in, in that they both come into the activity, but on their own. My basic idea is to do a great love film set in the hell of 1942. At that moment, hell was Leningrad. Underneath all this, of course, is a film about dissension between the two most important countries in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. I think it is a must at this point to talk about cooperation instead of the rancor and hatred and competition between nations.

There was also the myth of the western films. But my films are borrowed not from the story of the West in America but from the story of cinema.

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.

I even had success with commercials, which is strange, because out of the six ideas, two won the platinum Minerva in France - it's the Oscar for their commercials. One was about the Renault diesel and the other about the regular Renault.

I had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.

I think, to go to the bottom of it all, that the films I have made and my kind of film-making is a hybrid type of film-making - in that it isn't American, it isn't Italian.

My discussion is one that has gone all the way from Fistful of Dollars through Once Upon a Time in America. But if you look closely at all these films, you find in them the same meanings, the same humor, the same point of view, and, also, the same pains.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves around her [Claudia Cardinale]. If you take her out, there's no more film. She's the central motor of the entire happening.

America interests me above all because it is so filled with contradictions, interesting contradictions, which change constantly. Even if you've decided that you don't want to deal with that subject again, before you know it, the desire comes back to do it yet again.

Just go to Disneyland. You have the impact of how the Americans think, how they dream, what they desire, how they have a good time, what they prefer. I associate this with young people. But many times I think this infantile quality is much better than the false, incomplete concept of adulthood.

It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.

It's very easy with the camera to show the positive side of something.

I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.

Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone [owners, masters] of America.

I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.

I never worry about what they think about me. Because I feel so far away from what my Italian colleagues have done that I almost automatically become an isolated director.

If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.

I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.

Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.

I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.

When I go to the cinema, I'm often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I'm working on a subject, I'm always looking for the element of surprise.

Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear. And I beg them not to imitate me, because I'm not a good actor.

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.

It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.

I was born in 1929, and in the 50 years from 1930 to 1980, I've been able to live an unbelievably varied century. Before, you could never have seen such intense change in a 50-year span.

I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.

I was born with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.

I really do believe that the Jesuit system is better for a country.

I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.

The best photographers are super nice people and that its not a coincidence. Great photographers genuinely like people, and people can feel that. That's what makes people feel comfortable. It is important to appear confident with clients, but it is more important to not be afraid to act like a fool, have fun, laugh and shake your hips to get people comfortable.

The Jesuits use this kind of training, or, let's say it this way: The Jesuit General imposes this kind of structure; he encourages the young men to specialize. Because getting ten of them together, you have the best of everything. But this does not mean that this system is good for the Jesuits all over. They're all available to the cause.