Italian director and screenwriter (1929–1989), father of the spaghetti western. He revolutionized genre cinema with his Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in America.
Sergio Leone(1929 — 1989)
Sergio Leone
Italie
9 min read
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« Cinema is the most beautiful way to tell lies.»
« I don't make films about violence. I make films about violent men.»
Key Facts
- 1929: born in Rome, son of a silent film director
- 1964: A Fistful of Dollars launches the spaghetti western and introduces Clint Eastwood to the world
- 1966: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a masterpiece of the genre, with music by Ennio Morricone
- 1968: Once Upon a Time in the West, considered one of the greatest westerns ever made
- 1984: Once Upon a Time in America, an epic saga about the American Mafia and his artistic testament
Works & Achievements
Leone's first feature film as sole director. This spectacular *peplum* allowed him to learn how to direct actors and master the techniques of large-scale filmmaking.
The first installment of the Dollars Trilogy and the founding film of the Spaghetti Western genre. By transposing Kurosawa's *Yojimbo* to a Far West setting, Leone invented a cynical antihero who revolutionized the conventions of the genre.
The second installment of the trilogy, refining the formula by introducing a second protagonist (Lee Van Cleef) and deepening the theme of revenge. The collaboration with Ennio Morricone reaches new heights here.
The pinnacle of the Dollars Trilogy and one of the most celebrated Westerns in cinema history. The final three-way standoff (the *triello*) and Ennio Morricone's score have become part of the world's collective memory.
An elegiac masterpiece often regarded as the greatest Western ever made. A twilight film about the end of the frontier era and the rise of industrial capitalism, it stands out for its hypnotic slowness and spellbinding soundtrack.
A political Western set during the Mexican Revolution of 1913. It explores themes of political commitment, betrayal, and memory, with Rod Steiger and James Coburn in the lead roles.
An epic nearly four hours long about friendship, betrayal, and nostalgia within New York's Jewish gangster underworld. Leone's artistic testament, the film is a meditation on time, memory, and the corruption of the American Dream.
Anecdotes
For his first true western, 'A Fistful of Dollars' (1964), Sergio Leone chose a virtually unknown American actor for European audiences: Clint Eastwood, glimpsed in the TV series 'Rawhide'. Paid only 15,000 dollars, Eastwood would become a world star thanks to this film, marking the beginning of a revolution in genre cinema history.
Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone were classmates in primary school in Rome. Decades later, their artistic collaboration would transform film music: Leone would hum the musical themes he had in mind even before filming began, and Morricone composed the music BEFORE the scenes were shot — a radically new practice at the time.
For 'A Fistful of Dollars', Leone used the pseudonym 'Bob Robertson' (literally 'son of Bob', a nod to his father Roberto Roberti). The film was very loosely inspired by Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo', and Kurosawa did indeed acknowledge the borrowing: he obtained the film's distribution rights in Japan in exchange for dropping any lawsuit.
The shooting of the Dollars Trilogy took place not in the United States but on the arid plains of Almería, Spain, and at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Sergio Leone had never set foot in the United States before making three 'American' westerns: the Spanish desert landscapes perfectly mimicked the Wild West, at a fraction of the cost.
'Once Upon a Time in America' (1984), Leone's masterpiece, originally ran 229 minutes. The American distributor, fearing audiences would not endure such a length, cut the film to 139 minutes by rearranging the chronological order of scenes, destroying the entire narrative structure in the process. Leone never recovered from this, and the film was a commercial failure in the United States before being recognized as a masterpiece in its full-length version.
Primary Sources
I wanted to demythologize the American western. John Ford's hero is a saint, Hawks's is a fearless professional. My character, on the other hand, is ambiguous: he is neither good nor bad — he is trying to survive.
It is a very beautiful film, but it is my film. You have copied Yojimbo scene by scene. I will not allow this film to be released in Japan without prior agreement.
This film is my whole life. I carried it for ten years. What the Americans did to it is a crime against cinema. They cut out the memory of the film, and without the memory, there is nothing left.
The spaghetti western is not a subgenre of the American western. It is a European genre that uses the codes of the western to talk about other things: money, betrayal, survival.
Key Places
Sergio Leone's birthplace and the city where he died. He grew up in Rome surrounded by the world of cinema, began his career as an assistant director, and spent his entire life there. He died on April 30, 1989, of a heart attack.
The legendary Roman film studios where Leone built his Western sets and recreated the streets of 1920s New York for *Once Upon a Time in America*. Nicknamed "Hollywood on the Tiber," they are the cradle of postwar European cinema.
An Andalusian province with desert landscapes that served as the natural backdrop for Leone's Westerns from 1964 onward. Its barren plains and intense light were a perfect stand-in for the American West, and several movie-set villages built at the time still exist today.
The main setting of *Once Upon a Time in America* (1984). Leone filmed real scenes in the Lower East Side while recreating most of the neighborhood at Cinecittà. The film embodies his poetic and tragic vision of the American Dream.