How Spaghetti Westerns Shaped Modern Cinema

“The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West. It was almost like a film school in a movie.”

In the foreword to Christopher Frayling’s Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece, Quentin Tarantino talks about the influence of Spaghetti Westerns on Hollywood filmmaking, as well as his own career, singling out Sergio Leone’s masterful Once Upon a Time in the West as “both the end of something and the beginning of something,” while noting the specific contributions of designer Carlo Simi and composer Ennio Morricone.

Read an edited extract reproduced in the British politics and culture magazine The Spectator, then see a beautiful 35mm print of the restored version of Once Upon a Time in the West at the New Beverly on June 16th & 17th.

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