I wanted to show human imbecility, together with the reality of war, in a picaresque film. Somewhere I read that in the camps of the South, such as that at Andersonville, 120,000 people died. And I was not unaware that there were similar camps in the North. We always know everything about the atrocities committed by the vanquished, never those of the victors. So I decided to show the extermination in a Northern camp. This did not please the Americans. The American Civil War is an almost taboo subject, because its reality is mad and unbelievable. But the real history of the United States was built under a violence which neither literature nor cinema has ever shown as it should. Personally I always tend to contest the official version of events – without doubt this is owing to the fact that I grew up under fascism. I have seen for myself how history can be manipulated, so that I always question what has been written. For me it has become an unconditional reflex.

Sergio Leone, in Noël Simsolo, Conversations avec Sergio Leone, Stock, Paris, 1987.

The spirit of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was particularly heretical. In Leone’s film, there is no moral touchstone – just a lot of dust. The Civil War is something very nasty happening in the background, against which the surreal adventures of the central characters can be played out, and to some extent judged. It is someone else’s war; like the Second World War must have seemed to the adolescent Leone, growing up in Rome. It is refracted through anti-heroes who are as suspicious of idealism as they are of rhetoric; again, like Leone during the political compromise of the postwar period in Italy. The Civil War is not an obstacle to the long march of progress, an aberration. On the contrary, in Leone’s film, the Civil War contains the seeds of the “rule of violence by violence” which followed it, in the Wild West.

Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: to Do with Death, Faber and Faber, London – New York, 2000