“What happened is unthinkable”: Sergio Leone waited for 30 years that he could make this movie that he would never see that day

He died on April 30, 1989, at the age of 68, Sergio Leone left an indefinite print in Italian cinema – and in a very short cinema – and millions of orphaned filmmakers.

The filmmaker was planning to see a project that he had been dealing with for years, or even for decades, the reality: filming for the terrible place of Leningrad during World War II. The project that, we imagine, dantesque.

“What happened is incredible”

Thus, Leone worked on adapting a novel 900 days: Leningrad siegeWritten by Harrison E. Salisbury and published in 1969, which tells the story of the city’s mind that the Nazi troops on the eastern front. The place, which lasted from 1941 to 1944 and from the Russian side, killed a million million hunger, 350,000 soldiers and lost more than 110,000. That is, the price of a terrible human being paid by the Soviet and civilians.

“Many are incomprehensible to Stalingrad’s events. But what happened in Leningrad is surprising. It is Dante’s hell. The whole city has been voluntarily sacrificed. Comment in one of the interviews conducted by Leone, Noël Simsolo that will be grouped in the book Talk to Sergio LeonePublished in 2024 by the publications of Caprica.

“This movie will be on death”

You have to see the story and tell an American photographer who was trapped in the city at the beginning of the quarrel, and who had to play Robert de Niro, who was moved by the filmmaker to be there in America.

“After De Niro’s smile, he was finally in America. What could this dream come true of the lost America? Leone said.

This photographer then lived with love and secret passion with a Russian woman, and both fought for the survival of the armch of the chair, in the middle of the trash, and hunger struck the population. The result of the story was fatal: the photographer was killed on the day of the city’s release ….

Open a fabulous movie

Leone became interested in the novel as soon as it was published in 1969, after he once finished in the West. If the scenario of this project seems to have never been completed, Leone obviously already had an idea of ​​the opening of his film, the very “Leonian” as in its West.

He wanted to start with a Russian composer’s hand in close distance Dimitri Chostakovich Plays it “Symphony n ° 7 for leningrad”. Before the camera expands the square and gives it a place to the armed Russian civilians and soldiers, then to heal the Russian trench, where the city’s defenders are held. The camera calms down then shoots a huge snowstorm outside the city, where hundreds of German panzer tanks are massaging, which start with Leningrad.

Leone went to the USSR in 1971 to make a scout repeat, believing that the film could only be filmed in Leningrad. But the Soviet authorities then – we were in the middle of the Cold War – refused to refuse them.

It is also interesting to note that it was not before the period Glasnost (Or Degel) Gorbachev was launched so that the Soviet authorities softened: Once in America the first film was the first film of the filmmaker to be screened in the USSR.

Leone had to wait until 1989 that the very high amount ($ 100 million) needed to make the film was finally assembled, and the work should have been the coexistence of the American Soviet Union. But Leone died of a heart attack at the age of 68, two days before the transaction, so that he finally realized the dream of the old movie. What a tragic sign of fate …