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.

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.”