It is this unmitigated violence that marks and unites both Leone’s and Tarantino’s work. Though when asked by a Time critic why his films were so violent, Leone simply pointed to a double-page color spread of a young black man being gunned down by police and gave his famous reply: “Haven’t you read your own magazine?”
Interview with Sergio Leone
By Marlaine Glicksman
The release of Django: Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s
most-recent mash-up of spaghetti western and blaxploitation genres, about a
slave turned bounty hunter who seeks to avenge his wife’s enslavement, reminds
us of the reach the cinema of Sergio Leone has had.
I had met with Leone in September
1987 to discuss his then upcoming epic, a Soviet coproduction. He resided in a
Roman suburb that resembled a sort of Malibu minus the beach. His contemporary
home was filled with antiques. (“Every antique has a history,” he said, “a
mystery about it: who owned it, who touched it. Every object could be a film in
its story.”) His study was lined with books. It was there, behind a large desk,
that Leone, addressed as “Maestro,” held court before family and friends, most
clearly king. His friend actor Brian Freilino sat by his side, translating our
interview as we spoke.
With late-eighties Glasnost,
and with the assistance of the Soviet Union, Leone was in pre-production,
preparing to bring the 900-day siege of Leningrad during World War II to the
screen. For 40 years the story lay obscured by Soviet smokescreens, many of its
witnesses silenced by firing squads or sent into exile, never to return. Though
many films were previously proposed, his was the first project to be put into
active planning. Inspired by Harrison Salisbury’s nonfiction book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, the film would be
shot in Russian and English, and largely within the Soviet Union. The first
Soviet co-production, it was rumored at the time to be the most expensive film
ever. The movie also marked a turn for Leone, a step away from mythic America
toward a new frontier.
In the winter of 1941–42,
Leningrad, once compared to Venice, and the center of Soviet artists and
intellectuals, was surrounded by a Nazi blockade determined to starve and shell
it into annihilation. A bungle of Kremlin politics, power struggles, and poor
planning left the Leningraders to defend their city on their own. The incessant
squeal of children’s sleds against the snow was, at times, deafening, as they carried
bodies, thousands a day, most of them victims of starvation. Corpses obstructed
the streets, the hospital corridors, the riverbanks. The survivors pulled them
as far as they could; starving themselves, they were too weak to bury the dead.
The bodies would cover with snow and, with the below-zero temperatures, freeze
to form an icy path for the next caravan of sleds, only to be uncovered by
spring thaw. The living waited on breadlines, often targets of the daily
shelling. The survivors would pick themselves up to rejoin the queue for their
meager rations. Family pets were butchered. When none remained, there was
evidence of cannibalism: Corpses were carved up, and it was said human flesh
was being sold at the market. People were murdered for ration cards. Or, worse,
the cards were lost or stolen: Lost cards could not be replaced, and this meant
certain death by starvation. Many volunteered for the front, where food rations
were larger.
That winter was the worst, but
it was only the beginning of the 900-day siege. Many who survived would lose
their lives during the final battle, in 1944. Those who did survive did so on
luck, love for their city, and energizing acts of heroism—and there were many:
While war was waged, the library remained open; there were philharmonic
concerts. The Leningraders succeeded in defending their city against Napoleon
and during the Russian Revolution. They were determined to succeed again.
Sergio Leone was determined that their story be resurrected as cinema.
A cult figure in the United States but an auteur abroad, Leone broke ground—and box-office records—with Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first in a series of westerns that would establish stardom for actor Clint Eastwood and legitimacy for the “spaghetti western” (a term coined by American film critics), even though several had already preceded it. 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) would establish the Leone style: the rapid editing of extreme close-ups, seamless transitions, mythic landscapes (most often shot in Almeria, Spain), mannered acting, super-natural sound, elaborately powerful Ennio Morricone orchestrations (composed before the films were shot), broad strokes of humor, and anarchic violence.
“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.”
Sergio Leone was born in Rome
in 1929 to silent-film star Bice Valerian (Edvige Valcarenghi) and film
actor/director Roberto Roberti (Vincenzo Leone). He was no stranger to fascism:
His father stood firm in his opinions of Mussolini’s regime, and the family was
forced into exile and placed under constant surveillance in Naples when Sergio
was thirteen. He would attend law school and then begin work as an assistant
director for, among others, Vittorio De Sica (and even had a bit role in The Bicycle Thief). Later, he would assist the many
American directors who filmed in Rome, including Robert Wise, Fred Zinneman,
and William Wyler. He would take over shooting The Last
Days of Pompeii (1959) from director Mario Bonnard and then
make his first film, The Colossus of Rhodes (1960).
Unlike many of his Italian
contemporaries, whose work focused on Italy and the Italian family, Leone set
his films in America, creating epic fables documented with authentic detail.
Settings and stories serve as context, however, as Leone’s Italian sensibility
infused them with social and political implications. The director was a master
at mining the past for contemporary mirrors, and his movies seem as modern and
prescient today as they did at their height, in the 1960s and seventies.
In Fistful of Dollars (and in an easy parallel with
the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan), Eastwood arrives in a stagnant
border town to be told, “You will get rich here, or you will get killed,” then
threatened, “Get out, Yankee.” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is
set against the Civil War, while Once Upon a Time in the West parallels
the Vietnam War. All are filtered through familiar cinematic myth, however, as
Leone plays with archetypes and, often, turns them on end: Women rise above
saloon-girl status to become the films’ central motivating force; the
protagonist shoots first; and good-guy types like Henry Fonda are cast as the
bad guy (a choice blamed for poor U.S. box-office draw for Once Upon a Time in the West). Nowhere is this more
evident than Once Upon a Time in America, a
reflection on Leone’s own life, and the life and (in Leone’s eyes) death of
cinema. Ironically, as might befall a parable about cinema, American
distributors cut the film from 420 to 135 minutes—a shorter film means more
daily screenings, equals more box-office revenue.
Leone’s highly stylized mise-en-scène,
plots, and characters, and his quick-fire cutting influenced the work of
directors Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, and Alex Cox (whose Straight to Hell was also shot in Almeria).
Similarities are found in George Lucas’s Star Wars and gangsta rap. Leone’s
Ennio Morricone soundtracks still echo in music videos and in the work of
contemporary composers like John Zorn.
Today Quentin Tarantino’s
explosively idiosyncratic revenge-genre films owe a most-obvious nod to the
Maestro, from their graphic title sequences to their unabashedly blood-spewing
plots to their groovy soundtracks. (Tarantino claims The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as his number-one
favorite spaghetti western.) Django’s own ruffles, cinched peacock-blue suit,
and Thom Browne–style cropped blazer clearly riff on Leone’s cinematic flair
for fashion, with its leanings toward long black dusters, draping ponchos,
cigarillos, and chiseled cheekbones. In Tarantino’s cinema, as in Leone’s, man
and gun are almost indistinguishable, and whether it’s the man or the gun that
inevitably fires first is never easily or entirely clear.
It is this unmitigated
violence that marks and unites both Leone’s and Tarantino’s work. Though when
asked by a Time critic why his films were so violent, Leone simply pointed to a
double-page color spread of a young black man being gunned down by police and
gave his famous reply: “Haven’t you read your own magazine?” With the
horrifying massacres in Newtown, Connecticut, and Aurora, Colorado, this
response could as readily be Tarantino’s own.
Sergio Leone died of a massive
heart attack in 1989, at the age of 60. Unsurprisingly, the Maestro’s untimely
end paralleled that of his main character in what was to be his upcoming epic:
the death of a man who gets so involved in the story, he loses his life in the
process.
Marlaine Glicksman: Can you
tell me about the film you’ve initiated with the USSR and how the project came
about?
Sergio Leone: The idea came to
me ten years ago. I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas. The original
idea was this amazing story on the city of Leningrad holding out against the
Germans, almost destroying themselves, consuming themselves to hold out again
the Germans. But I don’t want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a
political film. 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.
I will approach these themes
through the story of a Russian journalist who calls in a cameraman during this
particular period in Leningrad. The news cameraman expects to go and to do
fifteen, twenty days, whatever it is, to cover something that is going on over
there. Instead, he not only gets involved in the situation but overwhelmed by
the amazing collective bravery of these people holding out against the Germans,
He gets so involved, that he loses his life in the process. Because in the last
days of the siege—we don’t have to tell the ending, but nonetheless—this man
gets so involved with the entire thing that he stays longer than he thought,
and his own personal sacrifice is much greater than he ever dreamed it would
be.
MG: Is this project part of
Gorbachov’s Glasnost?
SL: No. It’s a film that I’ve
been thinking about and discussing for ten years, and there is no way I could
have foreseen Gorbachov’s arrival or this opening.
MG: Will you weave present
U.S.–Soviet politics into the film?
SL: As I said, politics, if it
enters this film, will come from under the door, after the door has been
closed, as politics quite often seep its way into all types of places. It is
difficult to exclude politics, but this is not essentially a political film;
politics is a marginal factor. It’s a film about this heroic, collective
behavior, which is probably the greatest human act in the history of the world.
Out of three million people, one third were lost. One million died in three
years. I don’t know any other story that has so many deaths in order to protect
and save something.
We are also going to respect
historical facts. But it is not essentially a historical film, either, because
I have no intention of doing a historical film, or a war film. The film is
humanistic in the respect that I want to take these two people, one Russian,
one American, deal with them and their encounter, the contrast between them,
and how they resolve it.
MG: It is not a metaphor for
politics today?
SL: If anything, it might be
some kind of example, but not a metaphor. What I hope, as a result, is that
Reagan and Gorbachov, after seeing the film, would be a little friendlier
between themselves.
MG: I understand that this
will be your most pessimistic film. Is this true?
SL: If death is a sign of pessimism, I guess so.
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. The American public is a very specialized public.
But when I begin a film, I
never start off thinking whether it is going to be optimistic or pessimistic.
As the fable develops, it takes on one aspect or another. A story on one face
or the other, optimist or pessimist, depending on which way it turns.
Obviously, today’s reality isn’t very optimistic.
I admit that some of my ideas
may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature. 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. If you filter those ideas
through, they aren’t going to come out optimistically. And that went into some
of my characters and some of my films.
MG: It’s said the film will
cost $100,000,000—the most-expensive film ever made.
SL: You can’t qualify it in
that sense. Because the Russians will be doing their costs in rubles, and we’ll
be doing our costs in lira. We don’t control or evaluate what they are spending
on their side. But they can certify and discuss what we are spending because we
are going to budget our expenses.
The film will mostly be shot
there. Therefore, our costs will mostly be the men that we take, the talent we
bring, the organizers, and all that. Their costs are a city, extras, war
costumes…. However much it is going to cost to rejuvenate a World War II tank
is something that I don’t think even they can evaluate.
MG: Will you have free reign
over the film, or will it be with the participation of the Soviet authorities?
SL: Artistically, they have
given me carte blanche. I’ve only asked for one thing, and that would be a
historian, a writer who lived through that moment, who could also act as a
referee for the historical points in the story that we are writing, who could
collaborate with the Western writers. In that respect, we could arrive at an
optimal product for us and for them in terms of historical and political
values. But in requesting this collaborator, I’ve asked for one who has the
ultimate word on it, in that, what we write together—we and the Russian
collaborator—he is the last word. Someone cannot come in and say, “No, no. I
don’t like this. I don’t like that.” This man who I collaborate with is the
last word.
MG: How do you work on a film
and with actors when it is not in your own language?
SL: I’ve shot films in Africa.
I’ve shot in America—English is not my language.
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. And I beg
them not to imitate me, because I’m not a good actor. I tell them this is the
idea, so they understand exactly what I want. And if they don’t understand,
they redo the scene until they understand [laughs].
MG: Previously, you’ve made
films about the frontier. Is the Soviet Union then, for you, the new frontier?
SL: For me, it’s not a new
frontier. It’s a very cosmopolitan world that all eyes of the world go and look
at, just as they do with the United States. For one clear reason: Either side
pushing some button could destroy all of humanity.
MG: Have you made all the
films you have wanted to make on America? Was Once Upon a Time in America your
last?
SL: It’s difficult to talk
about the last film that is going to deal with America. Who knows. America is
so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it
completely changed. 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.
MG: What type of
contradictions?
SL: 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.
One of these contradictions
that I like to sight is that two of the biggest moneymaking films in America
were Mary Poppins and Deep Throat. One, of
course, is the opposite of the other. But most likely seen by the same public.
They are alive, these
contradictions. And they give vitality and fervor to the nation. But they are
nonetheless great contradictions.
MG: You once said that America
was the world of infants.
SL: 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. The American public is a very
specialized public.
All the people I’ve met, many
outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or
one area. And less about a lot of things. But 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’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’m not sure of this, but I think even
in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner. 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. We, on the other hand,
probably know less about Italy, but we probably have a broader outlook. This
doesn’t mean that this is a better system, because I really do believe that the
Jesuit system is better for a country.
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. 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.
“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. The American public is a very specialized public.”
MG: Why did you decide to
become a filmmaker?
SL: My mother was an actress.
My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers. I was born
with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.
MG: And why did you decide to
make westerns?
SL: I had never thought of
making a western even as I was making it. 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. 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.
MG: What would you say your
discussion was? Is it about money? Violence?
SL: 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?”
But, of course, this happens
in other parts of the world, and not just in America. But in America, it is
particularly sure that you’ll hear this question asked. Therefore, 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.
Of course, 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. So it is clear that the vehicle of
the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my
ideas.
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. And I am
searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human
beings. I haven’t found them yet.
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. 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. And 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.
MG: Which filmmakers
influenced you, and what were your favorite films?
SL: 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. But if it is badly realized
and not completely expressed, sometimes that is more provocative and
interesting than when you see something that is perfectly and beautifully done.
But if there is an auteur who influenced me—and there is only one—that is Charlie
Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.
MG: Why was Chaplin such a
great influence for you?
SL: Because he, too, through
spectacle, contrabanded certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today
are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.
When one goes to see Modern Times, for instance, one understands much more
about socialism than listening to the man who was then head of the Socialist
movement in Italy.
I think politics should be
expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics—sentiments,
even certain states of being. 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.
I’ve always believed that true
cinema is cinema of the imagination. 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. On the other hand, 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.
The first must that any
director has is to not force his public. He 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. It’s very easy with the
camera to show the positive side of something. 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.
MG: Many stylistic elements in
your films seem as though they were the forerunners of music videos.
SL: Before I saw them in
videos, I saw them in other films. 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.
MG: Your female characters are
often very strong.
SL: My films are often
characterized by the lack of women present in them, except for this last one [Once Upon a Time in America].
Would you like to know why I
create the women as I do?
Well, because I think women
have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns. And
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.
Virginia Woolf was one
example. She was called the “Lover of 100 Gangsters.” Which is why, in the
context of westerns, when I used a woman in my films or wrote a woman into my
film, I wanted her to be a central point and a motivating point or a catalyst to
function in the film. I didn’t want her 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.
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. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone
[owners, masters] of America. Therefore, when they are put into a film, I think
they have to be put in for a distinct purpose and have a reason to exist. Not
as some superficial or gratuitous presence. You see in Once Upon a Time in the West the whole film moves
around her [Cardinale]. If you take her out, there’s no more film. She’s the
central motor of the entire happening. It’s the same for Deborah [Elizabeth
McGovern] and for Carol [Tuesday Weld] [in Once Upon a Time in America].
MG: You’ve made commercials,
been a producer.
SL: Producing films was a
distraction for me for which I payed dearly. Because I realized than an author
cannot also be a producer. Therefore, 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.
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.
And it was interesting for me for that reason. I even had success with them,
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.
MG: You’ve always waited to
make the film that you’ve wanted to make the way that you’ve wanted to make it.
That is different than most directors’ experience.
SL: Because there are
directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a
director. 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.
MG: Why do you think your
films are more widely received in Europe than they are in America?
SL: Because there is no
Disneyland in Europe.
MG: Ennio Morricone writes the
music to your films before you shoot them.
SL: From Ennio 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. What I do is give him 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. And records with a small
orchestra—12 pieces—and then we listen to it. And then we go on to the script.
I don’t enter into particulars
with him. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters. This
almost caused a scandal at one point, with some of the actors, when they first
found themselves in front of a playback recorder for the rehearsals of a scene
that was just to be shot. But I have to say, in the end, that some actors even
prefer to dub themselves later in the film in order not to lose the music
underneath them while they are acting. They would rather have the soundtrack
ruined by the music and dub themselves after. During shooting, it is very
important and helpful for an actor to fall into an atmosphere created and
sustained by the music.
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. When you manage to express something
with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the
character speak, I think it’s a more complete work.
MG: You’ve live through many
difficult periods of history. What do you think of this period, the eighties?
SL: I think that men of my
generation—not me in particular—are among the most fortunate men in the
universe. Because 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. 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.
MG: Do you think it is become
more difficult to make a film that says something today, during a time when so
many people are concerned about money?
SL: It is hard to do a film
that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been
said. It’s very difficult to be original; it’s difficult to find new
solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
Because I do think that less and less cinema is being done. And this is due to,
of course, television, commercials. They are starting to rethink these things
in America, as well, because I’m noticing that the cable stations are having
more success, because of the non-interruptions, no commercials, than the
national networks. And they are starting to talk about this and to discuss the
problem.
I’m terrified by young people
who are doing what they think is filmmaking. What they’re really doing is
taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It’s not filmmaking. 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.
Just like you would if you would walk into a discothèque or anyplace else, with
noise and lights. Because they need to get away for one or two hours. So they
go, but nothing remains inside of them.
MG: Why, unlike many other
Italian filmmakers, have you not made a film in Italy, about Italy? That’s very
unusual. What do your fellow Italian filmmakers think about that?
SL: 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. 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.
I think, to go to the bottom
of it all, that the films I have made and my kind of filmmaking is a hybrid
type of filmmaking—in that it isn’t American, it isn’t Italian. It 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.
An important Italian critic once gave Fistful of Dollars a very bad review when it came out. Then he became a fan of mine later. 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.’ ”
http://www.marlaineglicksman.com/
In opening: Sergio Leone in Taormina (ME) Sicily
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