Orbits: Once Upon A Time In Italy

Author(s): Bernardo Bertolucci

Source: Film Comment, Vol. 25, No. 4 (JULY-AUGUST 1989), pp. 77-78
Published by: Film Society of Lincoln Center
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43453797
Accessed: 05-08-2016 10:49 UTC

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Film Comment

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 öflwte
Once Upon A Time
In Italy

by Bernardo Bertolucci

After my first two movies, The Grim

It Reaper After was my 1967. andand
Reaper first BeforeBefore
I two was movies,the
very the Revolution
Revolution frustrated. The Grim,
I'd been inactive for three or four years. I
felt Italian cinema was entering a kind of
degrading phase: the values of neo-real-
ism had been transformed into Comme-
dia d'Italiana, Italian-style comedy.
It was as if neo-realism had lost its
great urge and direct line to life. It was
just a description of Italy during what
was called, in the early Sixties, the eco-
nomic boom. It felt like cinema of the
petite bourgeoisie with values I couldn't
share. I felt estranged, like a foreigner in
my own country.
So I waited anxiously for every new
Sergio Leone movie. He was the only
one, apart from the four big maestri-
Rossellini, Antonioni, Visconti, De Sica
-doing something different. I went to
the afternoon opening of The Good , the
Bad and the Ugly. The day after, he
called me: 'This is Sergio. I would like
to meet you." And so I went to see him.
"You were at the first show of The
Good , the Bad and the Ugly" he said.
"Why do you like my movies?" And I
said, "I like the way you shoot the
horses' asses. Directors always shoot the
horses in profile, where you have this
wonderful line. Very few directors shoot
the back, which is less rhetorical and
romantic. One is John Ford. The other
is you." He was very happy, and said,
"Okay, you should write my next movie."
And so [Italian horror film director]
Dario Argento, who was then a movie
critic, and I went to Leone's house
where he told us the beginning of a
story, a very crude idea that later Director Sergio Leone, once upon a time.
became Once Upon a Time in the West .

77

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Leone withwith
told the the
stories,passion
passion pieces of
of a storyteller of stories,
a storyteller
who is also a child. He looked at the
American western with the purity of a
child, that same quality of dreaming.
Dario and I started to write, and Leone
would intervene. We worked for three or
four months and wrote a treatment of
three or four hundred pages- very, very
long. But then I left to film an episode
with The Living Theater, and I let
someone else take over the screenplay.
Many things remained from my treat-
ment in Once Upon a Time in the West :
the beginning and the family massacre.
There was no dialogue. I wrote it think-
ing about The Searchers . I thought it
would be great if Sergio shot this quota-
tion without knowing it was a quotation.
When I saw the movie, these quotations
had been done without being perverted
by a cinephiles knowledge- reinventing
the same thing- an innocent quotation.
Then I teased him and he became furi-
ous, saying, "I knew it was!" "No," I
said, "You didn't." Very nice, very funny.
For many years Sergio was unique in
Italian cinema. Maybe I should say the
European cinema. Maybe I should say
Leone directs Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West.
78
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cinema. He was a mixture of incredible
sophistication and... vulgarity is the
wrong word. He grabbed directly from
life. Sometimes his movies looked like
Visconti- he had a very pop elegance.
Sometimes he looked for the prosaic but
vulgar moments of the characters. Like
only the primitives of cinema, Sergio
believed completely in the story he was
telling. Like the audience believed.
And yet the western was in agony in
And I said, "Ilike the
way you shoot the
horses ' asses. " He
said, "Okay, you
should write my
next movie."
America, more or less dead. And if it
revived, in some way it's thanks to Ser-
gio Leone. Sergio took the American
western and he gave something back to
Hollywood. The new westerns owe eve-
rything to Sergio.
Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma all
rediscovered American cinema through
European cinema. There was such a
love and reverence in European cinema
for American cinema in the Sixties. And
the echo went back to the States.
If you ask why, it's because just in the
look between two of Sergio's characters
you feel the tension and weight of an
epic. His movies are good directly at the
surface level. There are other layers but
I think Sergio was stronger as a pure
talent of mise-en-scène- the relation-
ship between the camera, the bodies of
the people in front of it, and the land-
scape-than as a philosopher.
After he finished Once Upon a Time
in America he said, 'They cut the mem-
ory of my film." He was talking a bit like
a supercritic, almost a philosopher of
the cinema. That was the weaker part
of him.
He was generous with ideas about
the camera and emotions and his
extraordinary tricks. That's why I went
to see The Good , the Bad and the Ugly
on the first day at 3 p.m. And that's why
I had to work with him. ®