When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.

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.

The American public is a very specialized public.

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

I've always had the sensation that people in America are always avant-garde. Very attentive to all the new innovations. But it's very specialized.

The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.

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