Sergio Sollima

Sergio Sollima (17 April 1921 – 1 July 2015) was an Italian film director and script writer.

[1] After the war, he gradually progressed from working as a film critic to screenwriting to becoming a director[2] Like many Italian cult directors, Sollima started his career as a screenwriter in the 1950s and wrote many peplum films in the 1960s.

He made his directing debut doing one of the four sequences in the anthology film Of Wayward Love.

The Big Gundown (starring Lee Van Cleef and Tomas Milian) was released in 1966 with big success, despite the fact that it had to compete with Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Sergio Corbucci's Django.

Although Sollima directed only three westerns and they never reached the level of popularity as the ones by the other Sergios (Leone and Corbucci), each of them is highly regarded among genre enthusiasts.