Sergio Leone Quotes
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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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I had more trouble than I had a sense of utility or satisfaction. But it served to occupy me and to keep me occupied in a field that I love - which was cinema - while I was waiting to realize the film that I wanted to do, which was Once Upon a Time in America, which took ten years of thinking and working to realize.
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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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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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From Ennio Morricone I ask for themes that clothe my characters easily. He's never read a script of mine to compose the music, because many times he's composed the music before the script is ever written.
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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.' "
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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.
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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.
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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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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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I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
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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.
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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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The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.
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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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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.
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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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It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
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I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.
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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 was born in 1929, and in the 50 years from 1930 to 1980, I've been able to live an unbelievably varied century. Before, you could never have seen such intense change in a 50-year span.
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Just go to Disneyland. You have the impact of how the Americans think, how they dream, what they desire, how they have a good time, what they prefer. I associate this with young people. But many times I think this infantile quality is much better than the false, incomplete concept of adulthood.
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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'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.