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

The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.

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

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.

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.