Sergio Leone Quotes

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.

In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.

My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.

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.

Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.

Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.

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.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.

It's very difficult to be original.

The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.

I was born with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.

It's very easy with the camera to show the positive side of something.

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.

It is hard to do a film that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been said.

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.

All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.

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 don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.

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.

Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

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.

If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.

[The director] has to, I feel, be one step back, not only from cinema, but also from politics and all these issues in order to tell and depict the situation that spreads to people.

The American public is a very specialized public.

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.

I really do believe that the Jesuit system is better for a country.

I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.

It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.

My films are often characterized by the lack of women present in them, except for this last one [Once Upon a Time in America].

Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."

I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.

I think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.

I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.

My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.

The first must that any director has is to not force his public.

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.

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.

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.

I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.

It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.

I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.

Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.

I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.

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 work with intuition. With interpreters. I have my own method. I know exactly what I want from actors. Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear.

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 had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.

I admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.