America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.

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

It is hard to do a film that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been said.

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 think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.

The first must that any director has is to not force his public.

Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.