I've always felt that music is more expressive than dialogue. I've always said that my best dialogue and screenwriter is Ennio Morricone. Because, many times, it is more important a note or an orchestration than a line said.

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

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

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.

I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.

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.

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.