Sergio Leone Quotes
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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.
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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.
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When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.
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It's very difficult to be original.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.
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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.
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If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.
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I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.
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I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
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I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.
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My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.
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Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone owners, masters of America.
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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.
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It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
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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.
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I don't enter into particulars with Ennio Morricone. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.
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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.
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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.
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America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.
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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.