Sergio Leone Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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 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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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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My discussion is one that has gone all the way from Fistful of Dollars through Once Upon a Time in America. But if you look closely at all these films, you find in them the same meanings, the same humor, the same point of view, and, also, the same pains.
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I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
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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 even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.
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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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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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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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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've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.
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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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America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.
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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.