Between the worldwide box-office success of his Dollars films - A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) – and his untimely death in 1989 at the age of 60, Sergio Leone gave interviews to selected film journalists. He also wrote a series of thoughtful essays about his cinematic influences – and loves – such as Charlie Chaplin, Federico Fellini, Henry Fonda, Robert Aldrich and, of course, John Ford. To accompany his final film Once Upon a Time in America (1984) – 15 years in gestation – he published several articles about his obsessive quest to make the film, and how it eventually happened.

Most of these interviews/writings have never before appeared in the English language, and as a collection they have never before appeared anywhere. SERGIO LEONE by Himself, compiled by Leone’s acclaimed biographer Christopher Frayling, gathers together all his significant interviews, essays and articles, to create a director’s eye view of a body of work which over the past half century has had a decisive influence on world cinema, especially action cinema. The book is profusely illustrated with previously unseen photographs from the Leone family collection and the Angelo Novi archive, both now housed in the Cineteca in Bologna. It also includes previously unpublished commentary from Leone’s long-suffering producers.

Much has been written by commentators about the films of Sergio Leone – some of it good, some bad and some ugly. Here at last it is the turn of the man himself – larger-than-life, short-fused, astonishingly cine-literate, and a born storyteller.