Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America

Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America (2022) is a documentary you can watch online about the director who reshaped the Western. Francesco Zippel directs. 107 minutes on the man who rebuilt a whole genre.

Leone grew up in Rome, yet he dreamed up a frontier no American filmmaker ever shot: extreme close-ups holding on a single squint, silences that run longer than the gunfights, Ennio Morricone's score doing the talking. The film gathers the people who learned from those frames. On camera: Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Damien Chazelle. For the first time, his daughters Raffaella and Francesca Leone open up about their father.

Zippel digs into rare material from the Cineteca di Bologna — behind-the-scenes reels, lost audio, Leone's own voice. The result reads less like a biography and more like a study of how one European outsider rewrote America's myth of itself. Best suited to anyone who replays Once Upon a Time in America or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the craft, not the plot. Stream Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America (2022) online on iFILM.