In the mid-1960s, an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given $200,000 and some leftover film stock, and set out to make a Western. With a script based on a samurai epic, a TV actor named Clint Eastwood, a composer named Ennio Morricone and a cameraman named Massimo Dallamano, Leone was expected to make what was essentially a throwaway film... what he ended up making was A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a trilogy of films that came to define the ‘spaghetti western’.

The films that complete the trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are, like, the first film, violent, cynical and visually stunning. With each film, Leone’s visual style, offbeat sense of humour and elliptical way of telling stories became more and more sophisticated. Together they form the backbone of an important film genre that has influenced many contemporary filmmakers.

Sergio Leone includes interviews with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, production designer Carlo Simi, Lee Van Cleef, Bernardo Bertolucci and Claudia Cardinale, as well as an essay by Sergio Leone on director John Ford.

This authoritative book is illustrated with a wealth of visual material, including production stills, lobby cards, pictorial source sketches, costume and set designs, and release posters from Italy, Spain, Belgium, Japan, Britain, France and the USA.