Best 77 quotes of Sergio Leone on MyQuotes

Sergio Leone

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    America interests me above all because it is so filled with contradictions, interesting contradictions, which change constantly. Even if you've decided that you don't want to deal with that subject again, before you know it, the desire comes back to do it yet again.

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    Sergio Leone

    America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.'

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    As far as commercials were concerned, I did very few, and I did them only when they gave me carte blanche to them the way that I wanted to. And I did them as an exercise, because I, who do very long films, never thought I would be able to tell a story in 30 or 40 seconds - you come across a whole new system and manner of approaching a subject.

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    Even when I read a book, if the book leaves me the possibility of finding certain solutions or working on my own toward a solution, I prefer that much more than if the book fills me with the answers, gives them to me directly.

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    Sergio Leone

    From Ennio [Morricone] I ask for themes that clothe my characters easily. He's never read a script of mine to compose the music, because many times he's composed the music before the script is ever written.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    I didn't want [actress] just to be a woman standing at the window, waving hello and goodbye to men as they came and went in the world that they were struggling through. I wanted her to have a true function.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    I even had success with commercials, which is strange, because out of the six ideas, two won the platinum Minerva in France - it's the Oscar for their commercials. One was about the Renault diesel and the other about the regular Renault.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    I have to be honest about one thing. When I want to America, no on asked me how I was. Everyone always asked me, "How much do you make?

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    Sergio Leone

    I'm not saying that the Americans had the same impact as the Jesuits, but I do see them as a very specialized populace, even in terms of being, to a degree, naïve. Because naiveté comes from lack of information.

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    Sergio Leone

    I'm terrified by young people who are doing what they think is film making. What they're really doing is taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It's not film making.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    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.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

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    Sergio Leone

    I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    It's a little hard to avoid putting both war and politics in, in that they both come into the activity, but on their own. My basic idea is to do a great love film set in the hell of 1942. At that moment, hell was Leningrad. Underneath all this, of course, is a film about dissension between the two most important countries in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. I think it is a must at this point to talk about cooperation instead of the rancor and hatred and competition between nations.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

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

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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.

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    Sergio Leone

    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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    Sergio Leone

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