Sergio Leone

Once upon a time there was a future filmmaker who was born in Rome on January 3, 1929. His interest in cinematography came from the breed, since he was the son of Vincenzo Leone, actor and film director, until in 1943 Benito himself Mussolini asked him for an opinion on a script he had written, and he decided to be honest, so they never gave him a job in any film again. His mother, Edvige Balcarenghi, had been a silent film actress until she married. “I was almost born in the cinema. My parents worked there. My life, my reading, everything around me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice versa”, recalls the director.

Determined to resume his parents’ profession, he entered the industry at a very young age, and although his father, now in his seventies, neither gave him much advice nor helped him much, he did provide him with good contacts. At 20, he became Vittorio de Sica’s assistant director in the legendary Bicycle Thief, where he also played a small role. “I was around all the time, trying to make myself as useful as I could. I carried messages and errands, made the coffee… basically everything the ‘signor’ director asked me to do,” Leone recalled.

Those were the years in which the Cinecittà studios in the Italian capital were on the rise, due to the large number of Hollywood productions that were filmed there, and the boy did not lack work, as an assistant director for great compatriots of his, such as Mario Camerini or Alessandro Blasetti. Although he did not speak English, he was also an assistant to foreign directors, specifically Fred Zinnemann, in The Nun’s Story , Mervyn Le Roy in Quo Vadis? and Robert Wise in Helen of Troy. Wise was so admired by the talent of the young Italian that he proposed that she study English and continue to be his assistant in later jobs in Hollywood. However, he decided to continue in his hometown, where projects were piling up. Over time, in addition to continuing as an assistant, he also became a second unit director on various shoots, for example with William Wyler, in Ben-Hur (1959) , a film for which he shot, with Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, the famous chariot race.

In 1960, Leone married Carla, who was to be his companion for the rest of his life. The couple would eventually have three children. At the time, Italy was churning out peplums, almost always adventures of brawny Greek or Roman heroes battling mythological creatures. Leone lavished himself on the genre as a screenwriter, co -writing Under the Sign of Rome and Romulus and Remus .

When the director Mario Bonnard fell ill before finishing filming in Spain for The Last Days of Pompeii , the production company appointed Leone as director, although he did not appear in the credits. He was so successful that the same producers hired him to shoot a very similar film, The Colossus of Rhodes., officially his first feature. He then took charge of the second unit of Sodom and Gomorrah , shot in Italy by Robert Aldrich, but the film was a huge flop, and the peplum was no longer profitable, so they began to look for alternatives.

Leone found his way when he went to a movie theater to see Yojimbo, by Akira Kurosawa, with Toshiro Mifune as a samurai who provides his services to two different groups of criminals, to get them to face each other. Leone thought that if Hollywood had converted a Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai, into the western The Magnificent Seven, he could carry out a similar maneuver with this other title, and shoot in Spain, which offered facilities and technicians trained in Samuel’s films. Bronston. He himself wrote the script with Duccio Tessari, moving the action to San Miguel, a town on the US-Mexico border. He forgot about the small ‘problem’ of acquiring the rights to the original…

After Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson turned down playing the lead, Leone watched an episode of the series Whip, starring a certain Clint Eastwood who fascinated him by his empty gaze, which made him seem imperturbable to what was happening around him. Eastwood wasn’t having much success and he took the job for a very small handful of bills, $15,000. He thought that the film would not have any repercussions on his career, since European productions are not released in the United States, but he took it as a paid vacation in sunny Spain.

The filming of A Fistful of Dollars, in Hoyo de Manzanares and Almería, it was not entirely idyllic, as there were financial problems and Eastwood could barely speak with Leone, who still did not know any English, except when the specialist coordinator volunteered to translate. There was also some joy, especially when the production company announced to Leone that he had a young composer on the payroll who should be interviewed to see if he could take charge of the soundtrack. Although he wanted another musician, Leone agreed to meet Ennio Morricone, whom he thought he had never seen in his life. But Morricone did seem to know him.

“He announced that we had gone to school together. I thought he was joking, that it was some kind of joke. Not at all. He showed me a picture of the class and I had to admit that we were both in it. It was a nice touch, but! not enough for me to use it! We hadn’t seen each other since we were eight or ten years old. Twenty-five years ago,” says Leone. Although he wasn’t going to hire him just because he was an old acquaintance, as soon as he heard his compositions he realized that he was his man. Leone was looking for a sound similar to “degüello,” the Mexican funeral theme with trumpets from Río Bravo, and Morricone was ideal for the job.

After finishing filming, Kurosawa filed a lawsuit for plagiarism, which delayed the release outside of Italy, until an economic agreement was reached. Although Eastwood had returned to Hollywood thinking that he would never hear from Leone again, one day he was flipping through Variety and discovered that the film was taking Italy by storm and that critics were raving about his work as an actor.

Leone had completely reshaped the classic American western, with its fast pace, dirty aesthetics, humorous elements, etc. He made the spaghetti western fashionable, overexploited in subsequent years. And even so, the unfortunate Leone did not earn a handful of liras, because due to economic problems and Kurosawa’s complaint, he had renounced all of his salary, except for the exploitation rights in Mexico. But there it was a flop because all the Mexicans that appeared on the screen were villains.

He soon launched the sequel, Per qualche dollaro in più (for a few more dollars), translated in Spain as Death Had a Price ., which had double the budget, so Leone could hire another American actor, Lee Van Cleef, so that at the box office the film would do the trick, as if it came from Hollywood. Eastwood dons the poncho again and plays basically the same character, this time vying with another tough bounty hunter (Van Cleef) for the capture of “Indio”, a dangerous outlaw. Better shot and with a more complex story than its predecessor, Death Had a Price caused queues to form in theaters around the world.

After selling the rights to the film for the United States to some United Artist executives, they asked Leone what his next project was and how much he needed to shoot it. The filmmaker improvised as he went: it was going to be the story of three guys in search of a treasure, and he was going to shoot it for a million dollars; to his surprise, they replied that they would finance it. Thus was born The Good, the Bad and the Ugly , the most expensive of the Dollar Trilogy, again with Eastwood and Van Cleef, and with a third American, Eli Wallach, as Tuco, “The Ugly”, a rather humorous character. It devastated again, despite the fact that due to its long duration, fewer passes could be made in theaters.

Although Leone had had enough of gunslingers by then and wanted to change genres, Paramount offered him an astronomical budget for another western. Although Leone had his eye on a movie of gangsters in New York during the Prohibition era, adapted from Harry Grey’s book “The Hoods,” he agreed to go back West. He was born that way until his time came(translation that has little to do with the original “Once upon a time in the West”) which would be a very different work from the previous ones, more mature and reflective and less parodic. The director commissioned the script to Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, two friends with whom he shared a passion for the classics of the genre, although the final writing was done by Sergio Donati. This time, Leone gives a large role to a woman, Claudia Cardinale, which is unusual since in the films he had made with Eastwood they only appear episodically. Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Jason Robards play the main male leads.

Although Paramount, aware of his intention to tackle the subject of the mafia, offered him to shoot The Godfather before Francis Ford Coppola, it had just taken place in May 1968, and Leone signed up for a production that was going to be a political western. to reflect on recent events, but through the Mexican Revolution. It would be titled Get Down, Damn(although he intended it to be “Once upon a time in Mexico”) and Leone only wanted to produce, while he appointed Giancarlo Santi as director, who had been his assistant director on his two previous shoots. But James Coburn and Rod Steiger refused to be directed by Santi, because they had signed believing that Leone would be in charge. He assured them that Santi was going to be advised by him, but Steiger was blunt: “And if I send someone tomorrow in my place? I’ll explain everything you have to do!” The Italian had no choice but to give in.

Concluded this filming as an unexpected director, Leone had finally done, after long negotiations, with the rights of the aforementioned book “The Hood”, and launched the adaptation, although it took almost ten years to finish the work. “When he was filming, he felt all the emotions that a person would normally feel (laughter, tears, fear), only in a more intensified form. And he missed all of this a lot during that decade. A lot,” recalls Carla Leone, his wife. And when he finally got his big project going, he put into it everything he had been missing in those years. He asked himself just before shooting: How many years have I spent not working on this film?”

Once upon a time in Americafollows in the footsteps over the years of two suburban kids, Noodles (played as an adult by Robert De Niro) and Max (played as James Woods), of Jewish origin, who form a gang of gangsters that thrives during prohibition. In Europe, the final cut reached 229 minutes, so in most countries, including Spain, it was shown as if it were two installments, despite the fact that this was never Leone’s intention. It is essential to talk about the work of his usual composer, Morricone, more inspired than ever. The capo performance of Joe Pesci, one of the great regulars of the genre, also drew attention. “Hey, here are the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!” He said when they introduced him to the protagonists. More leisurely and reflective than his previous films, it is a completely different work,

At the end of the 80s, Leone launched the pre-production of Leningrad: The 900 Days , an ambitious reconstruction of the siege of Leningrad, through the story of an American journalist (it was going to be Robert De Niro), who fell in love with a Soviet during the Nazi invasion. But the filmmaker was ill, and doctors had diagnosed heart problems. At the end of ’88, he was visited by his old partner Clint Eastwood. The director did not once mention his health problems, but he did not deceive the actor, who missed his acid comments when they barely understood each other, due to language problems. “We got along better than all the times we had worked together,” recalls Eastwood, who realized that his teacher – he and Donald Siegel dedicated Unforgiven– She had called him to say goodbye to him.

Before the scheduled shooting began, Sergio Leone suffered a heart attack that put an end to his life, on April 30, 1989, at his house in Rome.