Cuarón and Hitchcock and Scorsese, Oh My! The Greatest Directors Of All-Time

17. Sergio Leone

Image Source: Oscars.org

Controversial yet brilliant, cheap yet classy, populist yet artistic – no director in history could divide critical and popular opinion as much as Sergio Leone could. After assisting Italian filmmakers, he invented the spaghetti Western genre. Mr. Leone, who co-wrote many of his films, gained fame and catapulted Clint Eastwood to international stardom by directing and co-writing three violence-packed hits — A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

The director, who hailed John Ford as his mentor, said, ”All the killings in my films are exaggerated because I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek satire on run-of-the-mill westerns.” Leone’s works are marked by depictions of violence, long shots and deglamorization of humanity.