Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

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 admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.

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.

I think, to go to the bottom of it all, that the films I have made and my kind of film-making is a hybrid type of film-making - in that it isn't American, it isn't Italian.

I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.

I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.