Sergio Leone Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It's very difficult to be original.
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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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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 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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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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My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.
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It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
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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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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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Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone owners, masters of 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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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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The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.
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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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I don't enter into particulars with Ennio Morricone. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.