‘Leningrad’: The ambitious epic Sergio Leone died days before signing on to direct
Sergio Leone, one of cinemas most influential directors, had much more to offer before he was killed by a massive heart attack in April 1989 at the age of 60. In fact, he was already deep in pre-production on what should have been his next feature, and it would have been his biggest yet.
Leone was no stranger to a masterpiece or two having helmed A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, and Once Upon a Time in America, with all of the signs were pointing towards Leningrad: The 900 Days being the latest addition to an esteemed catalogue of credits.
Plenty of major pieces were in place, and had things gone according to plan, it would have been the industry’s first-ever $100million production. That was an eye-watering amount of money back in the late 1980s, especially for what was ostensibly a romance, but Leone’s financial backers clearly believed that their investment would be justified and vindicated in the end.
He’d been toying with adapting Harrison Salisbury’s nonfiction book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad for years before making a concerted effort to get it in front of cameras, to the point where Leone had already planned the opening scene and storyline that would give audiences a ground-level perspective on the human cost of the titular event that lasted from September 1941 to January 1944.
The director was planning to reunite with his Once Upon a Time in America star Robert De Niro, with Leone hoping to cast him as an American photographer deployed on assignment to cover the siege, who ends up becoming trapped in the city. While there, he falls in love with a local woman, which places them in the crosshairs of the secret police in a country where relationships with non-nationals were forbidden.
Not that it was going to end on a happy note, with De Niro’s protagonist to be killed on the very same day the city is liberated, which his pregnant paramour finds out by watching it happen on the news as the rest of Leningrad celebrates the official end of one of the most destructive moments in its history.
It was a World War II love story at heart, but as Leone explained in an interview with Marlaine Glicksman, it would have been rooted in the current Cold War tensions between America and Russia, too. “My basic idea is to do a great love film set in the hell of 1942. At that moment, hell was Leningrad,” he said.
Adding: “Underneath all this, of course, is a film about dissension between the two most important countries in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. I think it is a must at this point to talk about cooperation instead of the rancour and hatred and competition between nations.”
His long-time collaborator Ennio Morricone was on board to compose the score, as was his favoured cinematographer, Tonino Delli Colli. Leone had been location scouting in Russia and even been given the seal of approval to set up shop by then-president Mikhail Gorbachev, with the contract making Leningrad official set to be signed on May 2nd, 1989.
Unfortunately, Leone passed away 48 hours before he was supposed to put pen to paper, and that was it for what could have been his magnum opus. Repo Man director Alex Cox volunteered to step in and replace him at the helm, but there was nobody willing to stump up the funding without the original director steering the ship.
