I consciously chose a person like the bounty killer [of the Fistful trilogy] because he was the street sweeper of the desert, a man who put his life at risk exclusively for the money. I'm not saying that he went against the law, but he put himself within the wings of the law only when it was something that he could profit by.

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

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

As far as commercials were concerned, I did very few, and I did them only when they gave me carte blanche to them the way that I wanted to. And I did them as an exercise, because I, who do very long films, never thought I would be able to tell a story in 30 or 40 seconds - you come across a whole new system and manner of approaching a subject.

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.

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.

I think that my films are westerns only in their exterior aspects. Within them are some of my truths, which happily, I see, belong to lots of parts of the world. Not just America.