Sergio Leone (Italian: [ˈsɛrdʒo leˈoːne]; 3 January 1929 – 30 April 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, credited as the inventor of the "Spaghetti Western" genre.
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. ' "
Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.
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.
I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.
We're talking a very cultivated people, but I found as cultivated as they were, they were uninformed about the personages who weren't American. They knew everything about America, but much less about other countries.
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.
The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.
The best photographers are super nice people and that its not a coincidence. Great photographers genuinely like people, and people can feel that. That's what makes people feel comfortable. It is important to appear confident with clients, but it is more important to not be afraid to act like a fool, have fun, laugh and shake your hips to get people comfortable.
[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 think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
I even had success with commercials, which is strange, because out of the six ideas, two won the platinum Minerva in France - it's the Oscar for their commercials. One was about the Renault diesel and the other about the regular Renault.
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'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.
I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.
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.
The function of the flashback is Freudian. . . You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.
It's very easy with the camera to show the positive side of something.
Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.
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 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.