I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.

I never worry about what they think about me. Because I feel so far away from what my Italian colleagues have done that I almost automatically become an isolated director.

It's natural to me that someone who loved that type of music or that type of spectacle would copy it, to do something, a video. It seems the most natural thing in the world to me.

Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone [owners, masters] of America.

I had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

America interests me above all because it is so filled with contradictions, interesting contradictions, which change constantly. Even if you've decided that you don't want to deal with that subject again, before you know it, the desire comes back to do it yet again.