Quentin Tarantino lauds Sergio Leone as “the greatest of all Italy’s filmmakers” in new essay
Perhaps more than any other director working today, Quentin Tarantino owes his success to the filmmaking greats who came before him. The years he spent working in a video rental store, obsessively watching every revered classic and forgotten B-movie, would directly inform the types of films he would pay homage to in his own work. In the forward to Christopher Frayling’s new book Once Upon A Time In The West: Shooting A Masterpiece, Tarantino pays tribute to a director that looms large in his list of influences, Sergio Leone, whom he claims is “the greatest of all Italy’s filmmakers.”
“[Once Upon A Time In The West] was almost like a film school in a movie. It really illustrated how to make an impact as a filmmaker. How to give your work a signature,” Tarantino writes. “There have only been a few filmmakers who have gone into an old genre and created a new universe out of it.”
