Sergio Leone - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Sergio Leone - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Writer, Director, Producer, Actor.

January 3, 1929, Rome, Italy - April 30, 1989, Rome - Italian film director, screenwriter, producer.

Leone's first film work is associated with the peplum genre. Leone began his film career as an assistant director, in which capacity he participated in such large-budget peplums as "Kamo Hryadeshi" (1951) and "Ben-Hur" (1959). In 1958, he tried himself as a screenwriter and later acted as a screenwriter for all his directorial works.

In 1959, Mario Bonnard, who was filming The Last Days of Pompeii, fell ill, and Leone, who was an assistant director, was offered to complete the film. However, in the credits of "The Last Days ..." Leone was not listed, and his real debut as a director can be called the 1961 film "The Colossus of Rhodes". The film was shot entirely in French, nevertheless, all the scriptwriters were from Italy, and the director did not know much French at all and used translators. The main investors of the film insisted on this.

In the early 1960s, Leone switched his attention from the historical genre to the westerns. The plot of his first western, For a Fistful of Dollars (1964), was based on the plot of the film "The Bodyguard" by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Leone moved the action from Japan to the Wild West, and made the main character out of a samurai (played by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's film) as a free shooter. Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, who previously starred in westerns, were invited to play the main character, but they both refused. As a result, the main role was played by the then little-known American actor Clint Eastwood. Filmed in Spain, with Italian actors and music by Ennio Morricone, spaghetti westerns began. The film also ushered in the era of popularity of "spaghetti westerns" and defined many of their characteristics. In particular, these films are more cinematic parables than realistic works. The underlined fantastic accuracy of the characters, the shift of emphasis from the plot logic to the spectacular visuals, the epic integrity of the characters and other moments make it possible to clearly distinguish them from American-made westerns, which were perceived by the audience as claiming to be realistic, while Sergio Leone's westerns have no such claim.
while Sergio Leone's westerns have no such claim.
while Sergio Leone's westerns have no such claim.

While being a fairly accurate remake of Kurosawa's "Bodyguard", the film also made no reference to the original source. This prompted a lawsuit from Kurosawa for copyright protection. In a letter to Leone, the Japanese director wrote, "This is a very good film, but this is my film." The filmmakers lost the lawsuit and were forced to pay compensation in the amount of $ 100,000 and 15% of all the film's box office receipts, as well as cede the film distribution rights in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Two sequels soon followed - "A Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly." In addition to Eastwood, they were played by another American actor - Lee Van Cleef. All three films, united by one main character, "The Man Without a Name", were named "The Dollar Trilogy".

The next film in the trilogy, A Few Dollars More, was released in the same year as For a Fistful of Dollars. In the center of the film are two "bounty hunters" wanted in the Wild West bandits, a retired colonel of the Confederate army, Douglas Mortimer (played by Lee Van Cleef), and a masterfully wielding a revolver with one hand, a blonde named One-armed (Manco; played by Clint Eastwood). Their paths cross during the hunt for an Indian, an escaped gang leader who is carrying out a bank robbery in El Paso. This character is characterized by an addiction to marijuana, unmotivated fits of laughter and a mad look that accompanies the memories of the once brutal massacre he committed against a married couple. The musical motif of the chime of a pocket watch, which was passed through the film, hints that the girl the memory of the rape and suicide of which burns the soul of the Indian, was the colonel's sister. At the end of the film, the "bounty hunters" reach their goal - the Indian is killed, One-armed receives the promised reward, and Colonel Mortimer - satisfaction from revenge for the honor and life of his sister.

Filming took place in the vicinity of Almeria, where the scenery built for filming has been preserved. The interior scenes were filmed in Rome at the Cinecitta studio. After the release of the film, the producer of "For a Fistful of Dollars" filed a lawsuit against its creators, demanding compensation for the use of the figure of the hero of Clint Eastwood from the first tape of the "dollar trilogy". The court considered that the identity of Eastwood's characters in these films could not be considered established and dismissed the claim. Meanwhile, Eastwood's character in "A Few Dollars More" wears the same poncho as Joe in Leone's previous tape (even the patched bullet holes are visible). One of the minor characters (a hunchback from the Indian gang) was played by the famous German actor Klaus Kinski.

The last film of the "dollar trilogy" was filmed in 1966 and was titled "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly." After its release in 1966, the film was received controversially due to the abundance of episodes of torture and violence, as well as the cynicism and immorality of the main characters.

The film received a substantially larger budget than the first two films of the "dollar" trilogy. Only Clint Eastwood received $ 250,000 for his participation in the filming (not counting a percentage of the fees) - a deal that Leone was extremely reluctant to make. Filming took place in the Tabernas Desert (Spain).

The director recalls that he set himself the task of showing the absolute absurdity of the war and the fundamental absence of "good intentions" in it. In an interview, he admitted that all three main characters embody different sides of his personality. The role of Tuco was originally supposed to be given to Gian Maria Volonte, but Leone found Wallach's natural comedy more appropriate for the role. They improvised a lot on set and became friends.

In Good, Bad, Evil, the artistic techniques of early Leone - such as close-ups of heroes' faces and extended retardations - have reached a new level. Characteristically, not a single word is spoken during the first ten minutes of the film. In order to shorten the timing, a number of filmed scenes were excluded from the final version; they can be seen on the 2004 DVD.

The next spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the Wild West (1968), was filmed with the participation of the American company Paramount Pictures. It stars the actors Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda, and the female lead was played by Claudia Cardinale. The script was written by Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci.

In 1971, the director made the film For a Fistful of Dynamite. The drama, set during the Mexican Revolution, stars James Coburn as an Irish revolutionary and Rod Steiger as a Mexican mobster.

Following this film, Leone began producing films, sometimes directing individual scenes in them, as in the parody westerns "My Name Is Nobody" and "Genius, Two Countrymen and a Chick" starring Terence Hill.

The next film directed by Leone was released only in 1984. It was the saga Once Upon a Time in America, which tells how a Jewish company of New York boys (the leaders were played by Robert De Niro and James Woods) turned into a serious gangster group.

The film was completed in 1984 and was based in part on an autobiographical work by Harry Gray. The film, in the form of a combination of scenes from different time periods (retrospective, flashback), tells the story of several gangster friends who met in the Jewish quarter of New York in the early twentieth century and became rich during Prohibition in the United States in the 1930s. The film is built as an interweaving of three temporal (1920s, 1930s and 1960s) and two semantic storylines.

Leone's latest directorial work has won 11 awards and 5 nominations.

Leone was originally inspired by Harry Gray's autobiographical novel "The Hoods" (The Hoods=The Neighborhoods="slums" or "neighborhoods", but in Russian it is known as "Gangsters") by Harry Gray (it took the director years to get the copyright for it ), but then, as the plan grew in scale, he recruited Norman Mailer and Stuart Kaminski to write. As a result, during the work on the film, the 10-hour footage was cut down to 6 hours. At first, Sergio wanted to release his picture in the form of two three-hour episodes, but the film studio did not appreciate this idea. The film was reduced to its current size by a new editor, Zach Stenberg, who was specially invited to the production team for this purpose.

For the last 15 years of his life, Leone planned to shoot a large-scale film about the blockade of Leningrad during World War II. The working title of the painting was "900 days". Leone focused on the following story: an American war photographer, played by Robert De Niro, finds himself during the Second World War in Leningrad, besieged by German troops, and is forced to spend all the years of the blockade in the city. In the second half of the 1980s, it was already possible to implement the project the way the director saw it. Leone was going to shoot in the Soviet Union, but the plans were not destined to come true.

In March 1989, he came to the USSR for negotiations on the draft of the future picture, but on April 30, returning to Rome, Sergio Leone died of myocardial infarction while watching TV.

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Author: Jane Watson