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

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

There was also the myth of the western films. But my films are borrowed not from the story of the West in America but from the story of cinema.

I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.

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.

Especially in gangster films, with the gangster's moll - she would always be more or less of an object. And I'm not convinced of this theory. Because I think even gangsters' women have brains. They think and even, as we say, have balls.

When one goes to see Modern Times, for instance, one understands much more about socialism than listening to the man who was then head of the Socialist movement in Italy.