Sergio Leone Quotes

I must be honest and say that I was under the fascination of films. I was fascinated by all films, even the words of them. If I was to do a more-precise analysis of the situation, I have to admit that I was more entertained by the bad films than the good ones. Because when something is beautiful, it is there; it is finished; it is done. It doesn't have to be touched or be worked upon.

The world is in America. In Italy is only Italy. France is full of France. Germany is full of Germany. In a continent that contains the entire world, contradictions are, of course, constantly arising.

My films are often characterized by the lack of women present in them, except for this last one [Once Upon a Time in America].

As Claude LeLouche said, his favorite American director is Sergio Leone. Not because I would be American, but because I was dealing with subject matter that an American could have just as easily dealt with.

Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."

[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.

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

I think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.

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

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.

It's very difficult to be original.

I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

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

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

Young people of this century, like my son, didn't live through all those things that went on during that period of time, from 1930 to 1950. They're missing that experience. To go from a bicycle to a vehicle that takes somebody to the moon - only we saw this kind of thing.

I'm not saying that the Americans had the same impact as the Jesuits, but I do see them as a very specialized populace, even in terms of being, to a degree, naïve. Because naiveté comes from lack of information.

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.

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.

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

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.

It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

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.

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

Even when I read a book, if the book leaves me the possibility of finding certain solutions or working on my own toward a solution, I prefer that much more than if the book fills me with the answers, gives them to me directly.

The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.

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've seen films that have made as much as $100, $200 million, but they're not films. They're images. They're flashes. They're many beautiful images, lots of things to look at. They capture you. But it's not a film. It's not something that involves you in a story. They go to cinema now to be blown away by the effects.

I'm terrified by young people who are doing what they think is film making. What they're really doing is taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It's not film making.

I have to be honest about one thing. When I want to America, no on asked me how I was. Everyone always asked me, "How much do you make?"

It is hard to do a film that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been said.

I consciously chose a person like the bounty killer [of the Fistful trilogy] because he was the street sweeper of the desert, a man who put his life at risk exclusively for the money. I'm not saying that he went against the law, but he put himself within the wings of the law only when it was something that he could profit by.

An important Italian critic once gave Fistful of Dollars a very bad review when it came out. Then he went to the university here [Rome] with Once Upon a Time in America. We showed it to 10,000 students. And while the man was speaking that day to the students, with me present, he said, "I have to state one thing. When I gave that review about Sergio's films, I should have taken into account that on Sergio Leone's passport, there should not be written whether the nationality is Italian or anything else. What should be written is: 'Nationality: Cinema.' "

As far as commercials were concerned, I did very few, and I did them only when they gave me carte blanche to them the way that I wanted to. And I did them as an exercise, because I, who do very long films, never thought I would be able to tell a story in 30 or 40 seconds - you come across a whole new system and manner of approaching a subject.

When I used Claudia [Cardinale] for example, in Once Upon a Time in the West, she represented the birth of American matriarchy. Because women had enormous weight in America.

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.

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

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.

The first must that any director has is to not force his public.

I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

If a director takes the time to document - to step back to observe - I think it I more honest. Because it has to be the public that makes the conclusions and who, possibly, resolves the situation.

When I used a woman in my films or wrote a woman into my film, I wanted her to be a central point and a motivating point or a catalyst to function in the film.

Because the life that I live - the life that we all live - is filtered through [one's own] experience. It isn't necessarily optimistic when you look at the political phenomena, the different things that are going on in the world.

Whoever would like to look and see what someone is saying behind all the show, glitter, scenery, whatever it may be, and see what ideas are being expressed beyond and below and above that, can do that, as well.