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.

All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.

You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves around her [Claudia Cardinale]. If you take her out, there's no more film. She's the central motor of the entire happening.

It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.

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.

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

I had always thought that the 'good,' and the 'bad' and the 'violent' did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference.