Sergio Leone

Sergio Leone (3 January 1929 – 30 April 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, credited as the inventor of "Spaghetti Western" genre.


 * See also: Quotes from Sergio Leone films.

Quotes

 * I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life. Not the other way around. Americans treat Westerns with too much rhetoric.
 * As quoted in Hollywood and After: The Changing Face of Movies in America (1974) by Jerzy Toeplitz, p. 141, and in The Pop Sixties: A Personal and Irreverent Guide (1985) by Andrew J. Edelstein, p. 148.


 * Even in the greatest Westerns, the woman is imposed on the action, as a star, and is generally destined to be “had” by the male lead. But she does not exist as a woman. If you cut her out of the film, in a version which you can imagine, the film becomes much better. In the desert, the essential problem was to survive. Women were an obstacle to survival! Usually, the woman not only holds up the story, but she has no real character, no reality. She is a symbol. She is there without having any reason to be there, simply because one must have a woman, and because the hero must prove, in some way or another, that he has "sex-appeal."
 * Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981), p. 129. Quoted in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (2007), ed. R. Wilson, ‎C. L. Connery, Ch. 6: "'But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy': Dubbing the Yankee Frontier" by Louis Chude-Sokei, pp. 158–159, as well as in The A to Z of Westerns in Cinema (2009) by Paul Varner, p. 198, and in The Quick, the Dead and the Revived: The Many Lives of the Western Film (2016) by Joseph Maddrey, p. 104.