An Interview with Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone came to the fore in the United States with Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first in a series of westerns that established Clint Eastwood as a major film star and gave legitimacy to the “spaghetti western” (a phrase coined by American film critics), a hitherto derided genre. The films that followed, For a Few Dollars More (1965); The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966); Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); Duck You Sucker (a.k.a. Once Upon a Time the Revolution [1971]); and Once Upon a Time in America (1983) all established the distinctive Leone style: the use of quick editing, extreme close-ups, startling transitions, mythic landscapes (usually shot in Almeria, Spain), affected acting, unnatural sound, accompanied by a strong and evocative Ennio Morricone score (frequently composed in advance of the films being shot), heavy-handed humor, and unrestrained  violence.

Leone's distinct approach was initially hugely successful in his native Italy and and his first three Westerns were box office smashes across Europe. They were then released in the United States between February 1967 and January 1968, to mixed reviews but impressive box office success. A typical response of the time from critics however, was that European Westerns were "nothing more than cold-blooded attempts at sterile emulation," according to David McGillivray's evaluation in Films and Filming. In English-speaking countries, no major re-evaluation of Leone's work occurred until the 1970s. European films were still mostly neglected in American discussions of the Western genre, Christopher Frayling's 1981 book Spaghetti Westerns had a crucial role in a reassessment of the genre and of Leone in particular.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, filmmakers such as Chabrol, Bertolucci, and Pasolini produced "critical cinema," to which Frayling believes Leone's work belongs. Leone deliberately evokes the themes, characters, and settings of the American Western, distancing these elements from their ideological and historical bases in order to consider aspects of frontier history and mythology that Hollywood studio productions had evaded or ignored, particularly in Once Upon a Time in the West. 

Leone's explicit use of reflexive genre clichés in Once Upon a Time in the West, and again in his final film, Once Upon a Time in America, would appear to cast him as a trailblazing post-modernist, but there is a significant difference between Leone's referential system and the ‘blank irony’ identified by Frederic Jameson as central to a post-modern aesthetic.

Leone has a deep emotional and intellectual stake in the cinematic mythology he investigates, no matter how tainted and clichéd they may have become. As a result, as his films become more conscious of the ‘lost' classical American filmic legacy they are leaning on, they begin to take on a pensive, sombre aspect that is utterly absent from the first trilogy's frenetic exuberance. In his book Once Upon a Time in America, Adrian Martin aptly summarised this feature of Leone's latter work: 

“It was as if, for Leone, such disembodied ‘quotations’ – if they could be made to retain their mythic intensity and potency – might provide a kind of catharsis or ecstasy for modern-day cinephiles pining over their precious ‘lost object’. That is why, finally, form can never be ‘pure’ in Leone’s work: at stake in it is a psychic investment, a whole elaborate machine of selfhood, culture and longing…”

Leone's films are, in this sense, primarily about interrogating the image of 'America,' without ever really being American in themselves. From a certain perspective, his films make up a small but powerful body of work that may be understood as an extended commemoration, examination, and ultimate sense of loss of the beliefs that underpin twentieth-century American filmmaking. Leone's films have always centred around a concept of America as a ubiquitous cultural presence viewed from a distance. An exciting, violent, intense, and frequently absurd vision.

The following excerpt is from Interview with Sergio Leone, by Pete Hamill. Published in American Film, June 1984.

Question: You seem to be fascinated with American myths, first the myth of the West, now that of the gangster. Why is this?

Leone: I am not fascinated, as you say, by the myth of the West, or by the myth of the gangster. I am not hypnotized, like everyone east of New York and west of Los Angeles, by the mythical notions of America. I’m talking about the individual, and the endless hori­zon—El Dorado. I believe that cinema, except in some very rare and outstand­ing cases, has never done much to incor­porate these ideas. And if you think about it, America itself has never made much of an effort in that direction ei­ther. But there is no doubt that cinema, unlike political democracy, has done what it can. Just consider Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Scarface, or Rio Bravo. I love the vast spaces of John Ford and the metropolitan claustrophobia of Martin Scorsese, the alternating petals of the American daisy. America speaks like fairies in a fairy tale: “You desire the unconditional, then your wishes are granted. But in a form you will never recognize.” My moviemaking plays games with these parables. I appreciate sociology all right, but I am still en­chanted by fables, especially by their dark side. I think, in any case, that my next film won’t be another American fable. But I say that here and I deny it here, too.

Question: Why does the Western seem to be dead as a movie genre? Has the gangster film taken its place?

Leone: The Western isn’t dead, either yesterday or now. It’s really the cin­ema—alas!—that’s dying. Maybe the gangster movie, in contrast to the West­ern, enjoys the precarious privilege of not having been consumed to the bones by the professors of sociological truth, by the schoolteachers of demystification ad nauseam. To make good movies, you need a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of goodwill. And you need twice as much of it today as you needed yesterday. And the old golden vein, in California’s movieland, where these riches once glistened so close to the surface, unfortunately seems almost completely dried up now. A few coura­geous miners insist on digging still, whimpering and cursing television, fate, and the era of the spectaculars which impoverished the world’s studios. But they are dinosaurs, delivered to extinc­tion.

Question: What was it that you saw in Clint Eastwood that no one in America had seen at that time?

Leone: The story is told that when Michelangelo was asked what he had seen in the one particular block of mar­ble, which he chose among hundreds of others, he replied that he saw Moses. I would offer the same answer to your question—only backwards. When they ask me what I ever saw in Clint East­wood, who was playing I don’t know what kind of second-rate role in a West­ern TV series in 1964, I reply that what I saw, simply, was a block of marble.

Question: How would you compare an actor like Eastwood to someone like Robert De Niro?

Leone: It’s difficult to compare East­wood and De Niro. The first is a mask of wax. In reality, if you think about it, they don’t even belong to the same profession. Robert De Niro throws him­self into this or that role, putting on a personality the way someone else might put on his coat, naturally and with ele­gance, while Clint Eastwood throws himself into a suit of armor and lowers the visor with a rusty clang. It’s exactly that lowered visor which composes his character. And that creaky clang it makes as it snaps down, dry as a martini in Harry’s Bar in Venice, is also his character. Look at him carefully. East­wood moves like a sleepwalker between explosions and hails of bullets, and he is always the same—a block of marble. Bobby, first of all, is an actor. Clint, first of all, is a star. Bobby suffers, Clint yawns.

Question: Does it surprise you that an actor could become president of the United States? Should it have been a director?

Leone: I’ll tell you, very frankly, that nothing surprises me any more. It wouldn’t even surprise me to read in the newspapers that a president of the United States, for a change, had be­come an actor. I wouldn’t be able to hide my surprise if all he did was take on worse films than those done by cer­tain actors who became presidents of the United States. Anyway, I don’t know many presidents, but I do know too many actors. So I know with cer­tainty that actors are like children— trusting, narcissistic, capricious. There­fore, for the sake of symmetry, I imag­ine presidents, too, are like children. Only a child who became an actor and then a president, for example, could seriously believe that The Day After concealed who knows what new yellow peril.

A director, if possible, would be the least adapted of any to be president. I can picture him more as the head of the Secret Service. He would move the pawns and they would dance, accord­ingly, to the end, to produce, if nothing else, a good show. If the scene works, great. Otherwise, you redo it. Old Yuri Andropov, if he had been a director instead of a cop, would have enjoyed greater professional satisfaction and— who knows?—he might have lived longer.

Question: Most of your films are very masculine. Do you have anything against women?

Leone: I have nothing against women, and, as a matter of fact, my best friends are women. What could you be think­ing? I tolerate minorities. I respect and kiss the hand of the majorities, so you can just about imagine then how I genu­flect three or four times before the image of the other half of the heavens. I even, imagine this, married a woman, and, besides having a wretch of a son, I also have two women as daughters. So if women have been neglected in my films, at least up until now, it’s not because I’m misogynist, or chauvinist. That’s not it. The fact is, I’ve always made epic films and the epic, by defini­tion, is a masculine universe.

The character played by Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West seems a decent female character to me. If I can say so, she was a fairly unusual and violent character. At any rate, for a couple of years now. I’ve been harboring the notion of a movie about a woman. Every evening, before going to sleep. I rummage over in my mind a couple of not bad story ideas for it. But either out of prudence or superstition— as is only human, and even too human, I prefer not to talk about it now. I remem­ber that once in 1966 or ’67, I spoke with Warren Beatty about my project for a film on American gangsters and, a few weeks later, he announced that he would produce and star in Bonnie and Clyde. All these coincidences and vi­sions disturb me.

Question: How do you think you fit among the Italian and other European directors? Which directors do you ad­mire? Which are overrated?

Leone: Yes. without a doubt, I, too, occupy a place in cinema history. I come right after the letter L in the director’s repertory, in fact a few entries before my friend Mario Monicelli and right after Alexander Korda, Stanley Kubrick, and Akira Kurosawa, who signed his name to the superb Yojimbo, inspired by an American detective novel, while I was inspired by his film in the making of A Fistful of Dollars. My producer [on that film] wasn’t all that bright. He forgot to pay Kurosawa for the rights, and Kurosawa would cer­tainly have been satisfied with very lit­tle and so, afterwards, my producer had to make him rich, paying him millions in penalties. But that’s how the world goes. At any rate, that is my place in cinema history. Down there, between the K’s and the M’s generally to be found somewhere between pages 250 and 320 of any good filmmakers direc­tory. If I’d been named Antelope in­stead of Leone, I would have been num­ber one. But I prefer Leone; I’m a hunter by nature, not a prey.

To get to the second part of the question, I have a great love for the young American and British directors. I like Fellini and Truffaut. However, I’m not an expert on overrating. You should ask a critic—the only recognized ex­perts on over-, under-, or tepid ratings. The critic is a public servant, and he doesn’t know who he’s working for.

Question: Which comes first: the writer or director?

Leone: The director comes first. Writers should have no illusions about that. But the writer comes second. Directors, too, should have no illusions about that.

Question: What advice would you have for young people who want to be direc­tors?

Leone: I would say, read a lot of comic books, watch TV often, and, above all, make up your minds that cinema is not just something for snobs, other movie­makers, and the mothers of petulant critics. A successful movie communi­cates with the lowbrow and the high­brow public alike. Otherwise, it’s like a hole without the doughnut around it.

Question: F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “Action is character.” Do you agree?

Leone: The truth is that I am not a director of action, as, in my view, nei­ther was John Ford. I’m more a director of gestures and silences. And an orator of images. However, if you really want it. I’ll declare that I agree with old F. Scott Fitzgerald. I often say myself that action is character. But it’s true that, to be more precise, I say, “Ciack! Action and character, please.” Certainly we must mean the same thing. At other times—for example when I’m at the dinner table—I sometimes say, “Ciack! Let’s eat. Pass the salt.”