“I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life. Not the other way around. Americans treat Westerns with too much rhetoric.”

— Sergio Leone

As quoted in Hollywood and After: The Changing Face of Movies in America (1974) by Jerzy Toeplitz, p. 141, and in The Pop Sixties: A Personal and Irreverent Guide (1985) by Andrew J. Edelstein, p. 148.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life. Not the other way around. Americans treat …" by Sergio Leone?

Sergio Leone photo

Sergio Leone 3

Italian film director, screenwriter and producer 1929–1989

Related quotes

“I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema … I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Midi-Minuit Fantastique, Oct. 1968

“The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 1 : Introduction: Flags And Cultural Identity

“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.”

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) Armatian

As quoted in Fodor's New England (2008) by Debbie Harmsen, p. 194

“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Quoted in: Richard Roud, Godard, introduction (1970).

“The idea that Ilhan Omar could — even as a matter of mass-dunderhead rhetoric — be treated as a non-citizen because the president and his admirers do not like her politics (which are quite unlikeable) does violence to the idea of citizenship per se. In that much, it is fundamentally and literally un-American.”

Kevin D. Williamson (1972) American writer

Trump's Omar Comments and Our Eroding Sense of Citizenship (2019)

“Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”

Rudyard Kipling The Man Who Was

The Man Who Was (1891).
Other works

“I believe that cinema picks up ideas from society and not the other way round.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Reported in Cinema in India‎ (1991), p. 37.

“And by the way, unless the United Nations stops becoming simply a debating society for anti-American rhetoric, I'm going to show them the door.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

“It would serve the Americans right if we emptied the prisons and let the subversives take power. They'd soon show Washington just how much they appreciate good old American values.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, page 465
Attributed

“Religiosity distinguishes America from most other Western societies. Americans are also overwhelmingly Christian, which distinguishes them from many non-Western peoples. Their religiosity leads Americans to see the world in terms of good and evil to a much greater extent than most other peoples.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

"Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite," The National Interest (November 2002), p. 16

Related topics