Politics & Power Quote by Sergio Leone

Leone’s America is a fever dream built from distance. “I can’t see America any other way than with a European’s eyes” isn’t an apology for outsider status; it’s a declaration of method. He’s naming the lens that made his films possible: the idea that the United States, viewed from postwar Italy, is less a country than a myth factory. You don’t travel into it so much as you project onto it.

The pairing of “fascinates” and “terrifies” is doing the real work. Fascination is the pull of American scale: its money, its violence, its glamour, its promise that reinvention is always one train ride away. Terror is the bill that comes due: a society where ambition easily curdles into brutality, where power has a casual, transactional edge. Leone’s West is full of men who treat morality like a negotiable contract; his America is magnetic precisely because it doesn’t pretend to be pure.

Context matters: Leone came of age under Fascism, then watched Italy rebuild under the long shadow of American cultural dominance. Hollywood exported an America that was clean, heroic, and inevitable. Leone’s European eye takes that export and roughs it up, stretching time, amplifying grit, turning gunfights into rituals and capitalism into atmosphere. He’s not just observing America; he’s re-authoring it, exposing the violence and desire embedded in the legend.

The subtext is almost political: distance creates clarity. The outsider sees the seams in the costume, and that’s why Leone’s America feels both larger than life and uncomfortably believable.