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.
When I go to the cinema, I'm often frustrated because I can guess exactly what is going to happen about ten minutes into the screening. So, when I'm working on a subject, I'm always looking for the element of surprise.
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.
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.
I've always had the sensation that people in America are always avant-garde. Very attentive to all the new innovations. But it's very specialized.
Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.
Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear. And I beg them not to imitate me, because I'm not a good actor.
I never worry about what they think about me. Because I feel so far away from what my Italian colleagues have done that I almost automatically become an isolated director.
It's very difficult to be original.
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. ' "
Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The very fact of seeking specialization is probably what makes America so great in these two hundred years. But also, the sensation that somebody who wants to understand America doesn't really need to visit it much.
I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.
I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.
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.
I admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.
I had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.