Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Sergio Leone - Page 2

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.

I had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.

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

I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.

I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.

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.

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.

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.

The first must that any director has is to not force his public.

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.

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.

I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The American public is a very specialized public.

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.

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

My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.

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.

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.

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.

[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.