Quotes by Sergio Leone - Page 2

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 / Film Director
Italian
Thinking
Worry
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Italian
Kind
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Example
Once Upon A Time
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Film
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Thinking
World
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Natural
Video
World
Copy Quote
[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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Issues
Order
People
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Moving
Once Upon A Time
West
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Able
Intense
Years
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Directors
Steps
Thinking
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
America
Germany
World
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Character
Scripts
Theme
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Men
Goodbye
Struggle
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Directors
Matter
Would Be
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Glitter
Ideas
Looks
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Degrees
Impact
Information
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Two
Years
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
America
Country
Talking
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Cinema
Elements
Frustrated
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Film
Oscars
Winning
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Important
Lines
Notes
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Answers
Book
Giving
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Optimistic
Different
Live Life
Political
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Balls
Brain
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Ideas
Oscars
Two
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Home
Cinema
Read Between The Lines
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Pain
Views
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Desire
Interesting
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Moon
People
Son
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Death
Dream
Impact
People
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Men
Interesting
Sublime
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Thinking
Years
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Beautiful
Cinema
Looks
Copy Quote
The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Reality
Taken
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Men
Law
Wings
Copy Quote
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 / Film Director
Men
Mean
Training
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Exercise
Long
Would Be
Copy Quote
The best photographers are super nice people and that its not a coincidence. Great photographers genuinely like people, and people can feel that. That's what makes people feel comfortable. It is important to appear confident with clients, but it is more important to not be afraid to act like a fool, have fun, laugh and shake your hips to get people comfortable.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Fun
Nice
Photography
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Analysis
Beautiful
Fascination
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
America
Ideas
Reality
Copy Quote
What I do is give Ennio Morricone suggestions and describe to him my characters, and then, quite often, he'll possibly write five themes for one character. And five themes for another. And then I'll take one piece of one of them and put it with a piece of another one for that character or take another theme from another character and move it into this character.... And when I have my characters finally dressed, then he composes.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Character
Moving
Writing
Copy Quote
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.
Sergio Leone / Film Director
War
Country
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.' "
Sergio Leone / Film Director
Men
Italian
Taken
Copy Quote

Related Film Director Authors

Zoe Cassavetes
Film Director
Monday, Jun 29, 1970
Zhang Yimou
Film Director
Wednesday, Nov 14, 1951
Zal Batmanglij
Film Director
Zack Snyder
Film Director
Tuesday, Mar 01, 1966
Yasujiro Ozu
Film Director
Saturday, Dec 12, 1903
Thursday, Dec 12, 1963
Yasmin Ahmad
Film Director
Tuesday, Jan 07, 1958
Saturday, Jul 25, 2009
Yash Chopra
Film Director
Tuesday, Sep 27, 1932
Sunday, Oct 21, 2012
Xavier Gens
Film Director
Sunday, Apr 27, 1975
Wolfgang Petersen
Film Director
Friday, Mar 14, 1941
William Wyler
Film Director
Tuesday, Jul 01, 1902
Monday, Jul 27, 1981
William Friedkin
Film Director
Thursday, Aug 29, 1935
William Castle
Film Director
Friday, Apr 24, 1914
Tuesday, May 31, 1977
Will Gluck
Film Director
Wes Craven
Film Director
Wednesday, Aug 02, 1939
Sunday, Aug 30, 2015
Wes Anderson
Film Director
Thursday, May 01, 1969

View All Film Director Quotes

Top Authors

George Bernard Shaw
Playwright
Saturday, Jul 26, 1856
Thursday, Nov 02, 1950
Plato
Philosopher
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
Thursday, Jan 01, 1970
George Carlin
Comedian
Wednesday, May 12, 1937
Sunday, Jun 22, 2008
Walt Whitman
Poet
Monday, May 31, 1819
Saturday, Mar 26, 1892
Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor
Saturday, Apr 26, 0121
Friday, Mar 17, 0180
Dalai Lama
Saturday, Jul 06, 1935
George Orwell
Novelist
Thursday, Jun 25, 1903
Saturday, Jan 21, 1950
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Poet
Saturday, Aug 05, 1809
Thursday, Oct 06, 1892
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34Th U.s. President
Tuesday, Oct 14, 1890
Friday, Mar 28, 1969
Napoleon Hill
Author
Friday, Oct 26, 1883
Sunday, Nov 08, 1970
Soren Kierkegaard
Philosopher
Wednesday, May 05, 1813
Sunday, Nov 11, 1855
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Wayne Dyer
Author
Friday, May 10, 1940
Saturday, Aug 29, 2015
Billy Graham
Professional Wrestler
Monday, Jun 07, 1943

View All Authors

Sergio Leone Quotes - Page 2

App & Tools

Related Film Director Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

App & Tools

Related Film Director Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page