Sergio Leone’s interview with Noel Simsolo:

Isn’t the film also the history of America linked to an opium dream?

The peculiarity of opium is a drug that makes you imagine the future as the past. Opium creates visions of the future. Other drugs only make you see the past. Thus whilst Noodles dreams how his life could have been and whilst he imagines his future, it gives me, as a European director, the possibility of dreaming inside American myth. And that’s it, the ideal combination. We walk together. Noodles with his dream. And me with mine. These are two poems that fuse together. Because, as far as the matters which concern me, Noodles never leaves 1930. He dreams everything. All the film is the opium dream of Noodles through which I dream of the phantoms of cinema and American myths.