Spielberg, Eastwood, Scorsese, De Niro, Tarantino…these modern-day titans of cinema all gave extensive interviews to Francesco Zippel for his new feature documentary, Sergio Leone – L’italiano che inventò l’America, screening in Venice Classics, produced by Sky Studios and Sky Italia and due to be released in Italian cinemas by 01.
How do you net such big fish? It helps that Zippel’s earlier documentary Friedkin Uncut (2018), which also premiered in Venice, was so highly regarded. Then there was the pull of Sergio Leone himself, the director of the Dollars trilogy, Once Upon A Time In The West and Once Upon A Time in America. Even Steven Spielberg reveres Leone.
“He [Leone} is the Italian filmmaker who is the most contemporary and most influential,” Zippel proclaims. “I was not surprised that everyone I reached out to was enthusiastically wanting to find the time to sit down with me for an interview.”
As the title of his film suggests, Leone’s Italian westerns made Americans see their own country – and their own film history – in a different way. He was the link which connected classical Hollywood studio filmmaking and the in-your-face modernism of the Easy Rider generation of the 1970s. The Italian director kickstarted the careers of many of his collaborators, everybody from Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars to the teenager Jennifer Connelly, who appeared in Leone’s gangster epic, Once Upon A Time In America.
Leone’s children Raffaella and Andrea were keen supporters of the project. Raffaella had seen Zippel’s Friedkin documentary. She approached him to see if he had any ideas about paying a similar “homage” to her father.
“It was really a beautiful way to shape the project, to make it happen,” Zippel says of the collaboration with the Leone offspring. The Leones shared ideas but never tried to impose their vision on Zippel, he stresses.
The director has a vivid memory of when he was a schoolboy and saw The Good, The Bad And The Ugly for the first time. “I was really struck by the film. I thought, what is this! My father was a big John Wayne film but this was completely different.”
Zippel began to watch other Leone pictures on VHS and became more and more obsessed. Leone’s work was vivid and violent. Those widescreen close-ups of “the faces” of actors like Eastwood and Charles Bronson stuck in his mind.
Eastwood was in very high spirits when Zippel met him. “There was this constant thing he told me during the interview, the fact that they [Leone and Eastwood] managed to make three wonderful films without basically understanding each other.”
When he began the ‘Dollars’ trilogy, Eastwood (whose biggest credit previously was TV’s Rawhide) didn’t understand Italian. Leone didn’t understand much English. Somehow, though, they communicated through gesture. “He [Leone] understood that I had to go back to my own country and speak my own language,” Eastwood told Zippel of how the collaboration eventually ended – without recrimination.
Tarantino, meanwhile, was in typically impassioned mood. Zippel has interviewed him before and has always been amazed by how the Reservoir Dogs and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood director gives the impression he was there on set with his idols when they were making the films he so loved. “[Tarantino] gives you the feeling he was there, maybe at a certain casting, when he [Leone] cast Eli Wallach or Lee Van Cleef [in The Good, the Bad And The Ugly]…his love for his favourite directors, and Leone is certainly one of them, takes him to a level of understanding not just of his technical skills but also of what happened during the production.”
It’s as if Tarantino “becomes a member of the [Leone] crew,” Zippel adds.
Steven Spielberg was one of the final interviews for the documentary. Zippel finally spoke to him only a few weeks ago. The US director had been busy finishing his new autobiographical feature The Fabelmans.
“He took a long time [to agree to speak]. He was in the last stage of post-production [for his own film]. He asked me to wait until the very last moment,” Zippel says. Once Spielberg was on camera, though, he seemed more like a star-struck fan boy than one of the great figures of contemporary cinema.
Another key interview, conducted near the start of the production, was with composer Ennio Morricone. This was the final occasion on which Morricone spoke to anyone in the media before his death in the summer of 2020.
The documentary hasn’t been made to mark any particular anniversary or re-release of a Leone film. None is needed. The justification for the project is Leone himself – a filmmaker whom so many other directors still regard with a child-like sense of awe. If both Spielberg and Eastwood are convinced he is a genius, who are we to demur?
