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.
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.
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.
Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.
Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.
What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character. . . . And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.
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.
I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
The Jesuits use this kind of training, or, let's say it this way: The Jesuit General imposes this kind of structure; he encourages the young men to specialize. Because getting ten of them together, you have the best of everything. But this does not mean that this system is good for the Jesuits all over. They're all available to the cause.
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.
My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
I really do believe that the Jesuit system is better for a country.
I think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.
America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.
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.
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.
All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.
Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters. "
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.
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've seen films that have made as much as $100, $200 million, but they're not films. They're images. They're flashes. They're many beautiful images, lots of things to look at. They capture you. But it's not a film. It's not something that involves you in a story. They go to cinema now to be blown away by the effects.