6
LEONE:
‘Y'm a Hunter by
Nature, Not a Prey”
uring the filming of Once Upon a
Time in America, Sergio Leone
was generally unavailable for inter-
views. However, earlier this spring, he
found time to talk about his approach to
filmmaking. The interview took place in
Rome and was translated by Michel De
Mattei
Question: When you were a boy, was
there an America in your head?
Sergio Leone: Yes, certainly, as a oa
America existed in my imaginatio
think America existed in the i ee
tions of all children who bought comic
books, read James Fenimore Cooper
and Louisa May Alcott, and watched
movies. America is the determined ne-
gation of the Old World, the adult
world, I lived in Rome, where I was
born in 1929, when it was the capital of
the imperial Mussolini melodrama—
full of lying newspapers, cultural ties
with Tokyo and Berlin, and one military
parade after another, But I lived in an
antieFascist family, which was also de-
voted to the cinema, so I didn’t have to
suffer any ignorance. I saw many films.
Anyway, it was mainly after the war
that I became decisively enchanted by
the things in Hollywood. The Yankee
army didn’t only bring us cigarettes,
chocolate bars, Am-lire army-issue
money, and that peach jam celebrated
by Vittorio de Sica in Shoeshine—to-
gether with all this, they brought a
million films to Italy, which had never
been dubbed into Italian, | must have
seen three hundred films a month for
two or three years straight. Westerns,
‘comedies, gangster films, war stories—
everything there was. Publishing houses
came out with translations of Heming-
way, Faulkner, Hammett, and James
Cain. [twas a wonderful cultural slap in
the face.
‘And it made me understand that
America is really the property of the
world, and not only of the Americans,
who, among other things, have the habit
of diluting the wine of their mythical
ideas with the water of the American
Way of Life. America was something
dreamed by philosophers, vagabonds,
and the wretched of the earth way be-
fore it was discovered by Spanish ships
and populated by colonies from all over
the world. The Americans have only
rented it temporarily. If they don’t be-
have well, if the mythical level is low-
ered, if their movies don't work any
more and history takes on an ordinary,
day-to-day quality, then we can always
evict them. Or discover another Amer-
ica. The contract can always be with-
held.
Question: Your father, Vincenzo Leone,
was a film director. How did that affect
your first impression of films?
Leone: As a child, I was convinced that
my father had invented the cinema him-
self. | knew that my father was Santa
Claus and that, on the other side of the
cinematic field, beyond the geometric
lines of the screen, great masses of tech-
nicians, makeup artists, scene shifters,
and hairdressers crowded in. I knew all
about electric cables, cameras, micro-
phones, reflectors. It’s probably also be-
cause of this that the technical side of
my moviemaking is so important. I go to.
the dubbing room as if I'm going to
Mass, and mixage, for me, is the most
sacred rite. I think filming itself is fun,
especially in Death Valley and under
the Brooklyn Bridge, where coyotes cry
and ships toot their horns.
But the Moviola is the altar of a
voodoo rite. One sits down in front of
the console and plays his hand with the
heights of the heavens. I always knew
that films were made by men and struc-
tured like prayers.
Question: Could you describe the ardu-
ous process of coming up with a screen-
play for Once Upon a Time in America?
Leone: It was after 1 made The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly that the subject
of Once Upon.a Time in America began
to buzz in my ears. | found this book,
The Hoods, by Harry Gray, ina Rome
bookshop. More than anything else, it
was a perfect and loving hymn to the
cinema. The story of these Jewish gang-
sters—unlucky three times over and de-
termined five times over to challenge
the gods—attached itself to me like the
malediction of the Mummy in the old
movie with Boris Karloff. I wanted to
make that film and no other.
We began to procure rights to the
cinematographic adaptation, which,
however, was already in the hands of
other film-world hombres. It wasn’t
very easy, but we finally managed, with
cleverness and many dollars, to rip off
the rights from the legitimate holders,
That was already the first sign of where.
things were heading. Then the infernal
screenplay-writing season began. Nor-
man Mailer was among the first to work
on it. He barricaded himself in a Rome
hotel room with a box of cigars, his
typewriter, and a bottle of whiskey. But,
I'm sorry to say, he only gave birth toa
Mickey Mouse version. Mailer, at least
to my eyes, the eyes of an old fan, is not
a writer for movies.
Mysterious arguments within the pro-
duction cropped up—material prob-
Jems and supernatural problems, meta-
physical mess-ups of every type—and
cach successive screenplay came out
inferior to the concept. And then, a long
time after I had willingly gone over to
the enemy—that is, to the production
side—there was this meeting with Ar-
non Milchan, who, before dedicating
himself to cinematographic production,
must have been employed as an exorcist
at some Gothic cathedral. The fact is
that everything, from one moment to
the next, began to take form. Leo
Benvenuti and Stuart Kaminsky, the
detective writer and the film devotee,
miraculously concluded the screenplay,
the sun shone again in the sky, and away
we all went to the great adventure. We
worked solidly for two years straight
and we finally reached port, it seems to
me, with banners waving in the wind
and the crew intact.
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, | 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 hori-
zon—El Dorado. | believe that cinema,
except in some very rare and outstand-
ing cases, has never done much to incor-
porate these ideas, And if you think
about it, America itself has never made
much of an effort in that direction ei-
ther. 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. |
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 en-
chanted 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?
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Leone: The Western isn't dead, either
yesterday or now. It's really the cin-
ema—alas!—that’s dying. Maybe the
gangster movie, in contrast to the West-
ern, enjoys the precarious privilege of
not having been consumed to the bones
by the professors of sociological truth,
by the schoolteachers of demystifica-
tion ad nauseam. To make good mov
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 coura-
geous 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 extinc-
tion.
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 mar-
ble, which he chose among hundreds of
others, he replied that he saw Moses. 1
would offer the same answer to your
question—only backwards. When they
ask me what I ever saw in Clint East-
wood, who was playing I don’t know
what kind of second-rate role in a West
ern TV series in 1964, I reply that what
AMERICAN FILM
Leone: “During
the filming, I was
as fense as Dick
Tracy's jaw. It
is goes like
that. Shooting a
fil is avvful, but
to have made a
movie is
delicious.”
BT
Cte ra
Ee 4
I saw, simply, was a block of marble
Question: How would you compare an
actor like Eastwood to someone like
It to compare East-
wood 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 him-
self into this or that role, putting ona
personality the way someone else might
put on his coat, naturally and with ele-
gance, 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. East-
wood 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, 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 be-
come an actor. | wouldn't be able to
hide my surprise if all he did was take
on worse films than those done by cer-
tain actors who became presidents of
the United States. Anyway, 1 don't
know many presidents, but I do know
too many actors. So I know with cer-
tainty that actors are like children—
trusting, narcissistic, capricious. There-
fore, for the sake of symmetry, I imag-
ine 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, accord-
ingly, 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: | have nothing against women,
and, asa matter of fact, my best friends
are women. What could you be think-
ing? I tolerate minoriti
kiss the hand of the majori
can just about imagine then how I genu-
flect three or four times before the
image of the other half of the heayens. 1
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 Icast 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 defini-
tion, 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, fora 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—
asis only human, and even too human, |
prefer not to talk about it now. I remem-
ber that once in 1966 or °67, 1 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 vi-
sions disturb me.Question: How do you think you fit
among the Italian and other European
directors? Which directors do you ad-
mire? 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
ick, 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 4 Fistful of Dollars. My
producer fon that film] wasn’t all that
bright. He forgot to pay Kurosawa for
the rights, and Kurosawa would cer-
tainly have been satisfied with very lit-
tle 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 direc-
tory. If I'd been named Antelope in-
stead of Leone, I would have been num-
ber 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 and Truffaut. However, I’m
not an expert on overrating. You should
ask a critic—the only recognized ex-
perts 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 direc-
tors?
Leone: | 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 movie-
makers, and the mothers of petulant
critics. A successful movie communi-
cates with the lowbrow and the high-
brow public alike. Otherwise, it’s like a
hole without the doughnut around it
Question: F. Scott F
“Action is characte!
Leone: The truth is that | am not a
director of action, in my view, nei-
ther was John Ford. I'm more a director
of gestures and silences. And an orator
of images. However, if you really want
it, Pll declare that | agree with old F
Scott Fitzgerald. | often say myself that
Old Yuri
Andropov, if he
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neice Rome MeO)
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satisfaction and—
who knows? —he
prayed Nm OFA oN Cae
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action is character. But it’s true that, to
be more precise, I say, “Clack! Action
and character, please.” Certainly we
must mean the same thing. At other
time for example when I’m at the
dinner table—I sometimes say, “Clack!
Let’s eat. Pass the salt
Question: When you're not making
movies, what do you do?
Leone: I will confess that since I was a
child, when no one dreamed of asking
me these questions, I always imagined I
would respond with a preemptory and
dry “Stop right there! Nothing doing. I
won't even hear of it. My. privacy is
sacred and I have no intention of.
putting it on display in the piazza just
for the amusement of nosy journalists
like you.” I try, every time, but then
they shame me like a dog and I end up
admitting all the horrible truth. That is,
the following: that I sunbathe, go to the
movies and to the stadium, think about
my next films, read books and screen
plays, meet friends, go on vacation
sometime: hess and hang around
the house irritating my family with,
what's worse, superfluous observations.
I’m very fond of my family, as all Ital-
ians are, including Lucky Luciano and
Don Vito Corleone, but | wouldn’t know
how to talk to them. They say they put
up with me, but the truth is that I put
up with them.
Question: Now that you've ed
Once Upon a Time in America, are you
able to step back and assess the film?
Leone: Once Upon a Time in America is
my best film, bar none—I swear—and I
knew that it would be from the moment
I got Harry Gray's book in my hand.
I'm glad I made it, even though during
the filming I was as tense as Dick Tra-
g0¢s like that. Shoot-
ing a film is awful, but to have made a
movie is delicious —P. H.
JUNE 1984
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