Sergio Leone by Himself

Compiled writings and interviews from the director who pioneered the "spaghetti Western" film genre

Between the worldwide box-office success of his Dollars trilogy and his untimely death in April 1989 at the age of 60, Sergio Leone gave several interviews to selected film journalists. He also wrote a series of thoughtful essays about his cinematic influences such as Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Henry Fonda, Robert Aldrich and John Ford. To accompany his final film, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), he published several articles about his obsessive quest to make the film and how it eventually happened. Most of these writings have never before appeared in English; as a collection they have never before appeared anywhere. Sergio Leone by Himself, compiled by Leone's acclaimed biographer Christopher Frayling, gathers all his significant interviews, essays and articles to create a director's-eye view of a body of work that over the past half century has had a decisive influence on world cinema. The book is illustrated with previously unseen photographs, posters and related ephemera from the Leone family collection and the Angelo Novi archive, both now housed in the Cineteca in Bologna.

The architect of cinema's American West, Sergio Leone (1929-89) did not speak English. His "spaghetti Westerns" were filmed in Italy and Spain and received both critique and acclaim for their violence, grittiness and camera work. Leone is best remembered for his two "trilogies'' of films: the Dollars trilogy starring Clint Eastwood and his Once Upon a Time films.

Christopher Frayling is the leading scholar on the life and legacy of Sergio Leone and is the author of his bestselling biography, Something to Do with Death. He served as rector of the Royal College of Art from 1996 to 2009 and as chairman of Arts Council England from 2005 to 2009. As Sergio Leone once said to him, "it took an Englishman to take my films seriously."