Sergio Leone
In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.Collection: Dreams
I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.
When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Character
I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.Collection: Imagination
My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.Collection: Reading
I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Character
It's very difficult to be original.Collection: Difficult
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Home
There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.Collection: Thinking
Just go to Disneyland. You have the impact of how the Americans think, how they dream, what they desire, how they have a good time, what they prefer. I associate this with young people. But many times I think this infantile quality is much better than the false, incomplete concept of adulthood.Collection: Dream
I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.Collection: Wonderful
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.Collection: Frustrated
It's very easy with the camera to show the positive side of something.Collection: Cameras
The world is in America. In Italy is only Italy. France is full of France. Germany is full of Germany. In a continent that contains the entire world, contradictions are, of course, constantly arising.Collection: America
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.Collection: Beautiful
I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.Collection: Ideas
I was born with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.Collection: Ties
The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.Collection: Dream
If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.Collection: Oscars
The first must that any director has is to not force his public.Collection: Directors
As Claude LeLouche said, his favorite American director is Sergio Leone. Not because I would be American, but because I was dealing with subject matter that an American could have just as easily dealt with.Collection: Directors
We're talking a very cultivated people, but I found as cultivated as they were, they were uninformed about the personages who weren't American. They knew everything about America, but much less about other countries.Collection: Country
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.Collection: People
I think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Years
I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.Collection: School
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.Collection: Mean
It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.Collection: Ideas
I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.Collection: America
I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.Collection: War
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.Collection: Thinking
There's my pessimism. Because I didn't know yet that type of film is always going to become more extinct, that there won't be anymore. Because there will always be more films that win five Oscars like Terms of Endearment.Collection: Winning
I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.Collection: Producers
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.Collection: America
I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.Collection: Thinking
Whoever would like to look and see what someone is saying behind all the show, glitter, scenery, whatever it may be, and see what ideas are being expressed beyond and below and above that, can do that, as well.Collection: Ideas
Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.Collection: Ideas
Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone [owners, masters] of America.Collection: America
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.Collection: Italian
I must be honest and say that I was under the fascination of films. I was fascinated by all films, even the words of them. If I was to do a more-precise analysis of the situation, I have to admit that I was more entertained by the bad films than the good ones. Because when something is beautiful, it is there; it is finished; it is done. It doesn't have to be touched or be worked upon.Collection: Beautiful
I really do believe that the Jesuit system is better for a country.Collection: Country
Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.Collection: Film
Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."Collection: Virginia