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I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.
Sergio Leone
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Sergio Leone
Age: 60 †
Born: 1929
Born: January 3
Died: 1989
Died: April 30
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Manufacturer
Screenwriter
The Eternal City
Bob Robertson
Eye
America
Way
Time
Terrifies
Fascinates
European
Scary
Eyes
More quotes by Sergio Leone
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.
Sergio Leone
Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.
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.
Sergio Leone
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.
Sergio Leone
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.
Sergio Leone
It's very difficult to be original.
Sergio Leone
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.
Sergio Leone
My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sergio Leone
Especially in gangster films, with the gangster's moll - she would always be more or less of an object. And I'm not convinced of this theory. Because I think even gangsters' women have brains. They think and even, as we say, have balls.
Sergio Leone
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.
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.
Sergio Leone
It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.
Sergio Leone
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.
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].
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.
Sergio Leone
