Politics & Power Quote by Sergio Leone

America, for Sergio Leone, begins as pure iconography: a faith built from flickering images, heroic poses, and the clean moral geometry of movie myths. Calling it “like a religion” isn’t casual praise; it’s a confession about how cinema evangelized the postwar imagination in Europe, selling a distant country as destiny, swagger, and salvation. The line works because it captures worship as a media experience, not a civic one.

Then the punch: “real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps.” The parenthetical detail is Leone’s scalpel. Jeeps don’t belong to dream-America; they belong to occupation, logistics, authority, and the heavy bootprint of history. He’s not describing tourists or jazz records or Hollywood glamour. He’s describing a sudden, loud materiality that interrupts the private liturgy of fantasy. The Americans arrive not as characters but as vehicles: mechanized, anonymous, undeniably present.

Subtextually, Leone is diagnosing his own artistic fuel. The Westerns he later made aren’t love letters to the United States; they’re revisions of its scripture, retold by someone whose first “Americans” were soldiers, not cowboys. That fracture between the myth and the men becomes his signature: reverence without innocence, spectacle laced with distrust. It’s also a neat inversion of cultural power. America exports the dream; Europe experiences the aftermath. Leone’s genius was turning that disillusionment into a new cinematic religion, one built from dust, irony, and the sound of approaching engines.