Sergio Leone and the American Fable
Leone’s story is a masterclass in summoning things into existence. He viewed cinema as a medium for creating modern fables, but his life also reads like one.
My fatuous question du jour is this: if you had £20 million to spend on a vanity project, what would it be? (It is of the utmost importance that the project’s sole purpose is self-indulgence.) If your answer is too reasonable, you lose. My favourite answer to date was from my colleague, Dhruv, who would buy a Rothko solely to host a touring club night called “Under the Rothko” where he would play house music on vinyl… under the Rothko.
My own answer: a western, written-by-produced-by-directed-by-and-starring me, Kitty Mayo, culminating in a scene where I ride off alone across the desert on my way to avenge some wrong done to my family, while The Story in your Eyes by the Moody Blues plays.
I don’t make much of a secret of the fact that I like Westerns (for the uninitiated, I’ve put an essential viewing list at the bottom of this page). I would love to say I got into them for a better reason than being into horses and cowboys, but that would be a barefaced lie. I came for the cowboys and stayed for the cinematic grandeur (and the cowboys).
It’s impossible to care about westerns and not care about Sergio Leone - the pioneer of the spaghetti western genre. You’ll know him for his films set in the American past- For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984 - epic, but not a western). He is an all-time great. When you call the Wild West to your mind’s eye, you’re probably picturing something originally picked out by Leone and his people, in the same way Andy’s cerulean sweater was picked out by Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada.
And the wildest thing about Leone’s westerns, the films that contributed more than their fair share to the myth of the American West? They were all made in Spain, by Italians. The remarkable thing about Sergio Leone is that he only made American films, but he spoke no English, spent his whole life in Rome and didn’t visit America until 1967, after he had made most all his best westerns. For me, Leone’s story is a masterclass in summoning things into existence. Leone viewed cinema as a medium for creating modern fables, but his life also reads like one.
He was born in Rome 1929, to a pioneering Italian film director and an actress.
“…as a child, America existed in my imagination. I think America existed in the imaginations of all children who bought comic books, read James Fenimore Cooper and Louisa May Alcott, and watched movies. America is the determined negation 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 anti-Fascist family, which was also devoted 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—but, with their ships, they brought a million films to Italy, which had never been seen there. Before then, I had 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 Hemingway, Faulkner, Hammett, and James Cain. It was 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 before 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 behave well, if the mythical level is lowered, if their movies don’t work anymore and history takes on an ordinary, day-to-day quality, then we can always evict them. Or discover another America. The contract can always be withdrawn.”
I love this idea of the “cultural slap in the face”. As a kid, his European myopia was corrected; he was no longer gazing at the Old World, in all its distressed finery. He saw the American myth and for him all the local maxima dissolved.
The important thing here is not that he was obsessed with the quality of the outputs - they did not become a bar for him to aim for. What mattered was the volume and variation; the potential of it all. America was a state of mind.
“I can’t see America any other way than with a European’s eyes, obviously; it fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time. The more I love her [America] the more I feel light years away from her. I’m aware of becoming a part of a generation that is now becoming decrepit—Europe is old and decrepit and I feel part of that generation of Europeans more than Americans. I’m fascinated by the youthful aspect of Americans even when it includes contradictions, and naive qualities of being incredulous at certain things.
It’s this mixture of all these things— the contradictions, the youth, the growing pains—that makes it fascinating, that makes it unique. America is a dream mixed with reality. The most beautiful thing is that in America, without any notice, suddenly, dream becomes reality, reality becomes dream. That’s the thing that touches me the most. America is like Griffith and Spielberg together. It’s Watergate and Martin Luther King at the same moment. It’s Johnson and Kennedy. All those contrasts: dream and reality always clashing together.
Since we don’t know each other, I want to give you a complete picture of myself, why I’m interested in America, why I’m always occupying myself with America: because in America, there’s the whole world. In Italy there’s Italy and in France there’s France. The problems of America are the problems of the whole world: the contradictions, the fantasies, the poetry. The minute you touch down on America, you touch on universal themes. For better or worse, that’s the way it is.”
Based on these assertions, it would be easy to assume that Leone’s next step was to make his way across the Atlantic to make his name in America, as many of his fellow countrymen were doing. Instead, he took on roles in the Italian film world. He worked with Vittorio de Sica on Bicycle Thieves (1948), and then had a strong line in writing “sword and sandal” screenplays for American-financed films being produced in Rome.
Due to restrictions on moving Italian lira out of Italy in the wake of World War II, MGM poured huge amounts of their trapped cash into the 1959 production of Ben-Hur at Cinecittà - the ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ that Mussolini founded in 1937 to reanimate the Italian film industry, with the motto "Il cinema è l'arma più forte" ("Cinema is the most powerful weapon”). At the time, it was the biggest budget film ever made, and Leone was part of it as a production assistant.
This opportunity to witness the making of a massive-budget American movie firsthand, along with being pulled in to finish the filming of Last Days of Pompeii (1959) with Steve Reeves (aka Hercules aka Mr Universe), was pivotal. It meant Leone was able to deduce the most important elements that make a film of Hollywood-quality (the sound, the camera work, the mise-en-scène) and he was able to whittle away all the parts that didn’t move the needle (the expensive actors, the thousands of extras, the ornate sets). By applying the Pareto principle to his craft he developed a unique line in being able to make films that looked like they had blockbuster budgets, on a shoestring.
All of this meant that when in 1964 Arrigo Colombo and Giorgio Papi pulled together $200,000 for Leone to make a movie, Leone didn’t set his sights on making a Italian film with a level of commercial success to suit the budget - he made an American classic, A Fistful of Dollars.
A combination of budgetary constraints and lack of reputation meant that American stars Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Henry Silva, Rory Calhoun, Tony Russel, Steve Reeves, Ty Hardin ,James Coburn and Richard Harrison all turned down the lead role. Undeterred, Leone eventually procured Clint Eastwood, an unrated TV actor, who he paid $15,000 for the role. Leone said of his choice:
“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.”
A Fistful of Dollars was filmed in various locations around Spain, including the Tabernas desert where the sets still stand (I know this because I duped an ex-boyfriend into going on a holiday to to south of Spain with me so that I could go and visit them) and many of the actors were locals pulled in off the street, who spoke neither Italian nor English. In spite of all of these constraints, Leone stuck to his grand visions. He pulled together his appreciation for the Old West, operatic arias, sweeping landscapes borrowed from the legendary John Ford, Renaissance portraiture and chiaroscuro in his magnificent close-ups and made something altogether new. As Roger Ebert put it:
“…art it is, summoned out of the imagination of Leone and painted on the wide screen so vividly that we forget what marginal productions these films were--that Clint Eastwood was a Hollywood reject, that budgetary restraints caused gaping continuity errors, that there wasn't a lot of dialogue because it was easier to shoot silent and fill the soundtrack with music and effects."
Leone couldn’t have done it without his childhood friend, composer Ennio Morricone, who spun up an iconic, atmospheric theme and the aforementioned soundtrack.
And the result? In the box-office, the film made just shy of $20 million ($200 million in today’s money). While some international viewers were initially sniffy about the spaghetti western genre, the quality of the filmmaking and the enormity of the vision made it impossible for these opinions to persist. The release cemented Leone’s reputation on the global stage. Claud Lelouch even said that Leone is his favourite American film director.
In a more recent review of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, Ebert commented:
“In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule […] that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.”
This is how Leone perceived his own existence, not within his practical geography, but within the boundaries of his own creation. He brute-forced his own dreams of America into existence, somewhere between Italy and Spain.
(And now, please hold that thought while I shoehorn in something about my work.)
For the aspiring (largely European) founders I work with, the idea of America looms large.
The less agentic founders feel constrained by their geography - find themselves flinging themselves against the fences, looking for ways out, because to them American ambition is found in America. Many of them think in terms of “getting to America”. It is the obvious place to go - it has the ambition, the pace, the capital. It is both a trajectory catalyst and a signal.
However, the most impressive founders I work with realise that, to begin with, the existence of America is enough. They can hunker down and start creating their own myths, building their own American company straight away because America will be there when they need it. For them, as with Leone, America is a state of mind.
Essential Sergio Leone interviews:
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sergio-Leone-Interview.compressed.pdf
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/sergio-leone-interviewed-elaine-lomenzo/
My best Westerns:
The Big Country (1958)
True Grit (1969) (but the Coen brothers’ one is also good)
Unforgiven (1992)