The film's script was written by Leone and his longtime friend and collaborator Sergio Donati, from a story by Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, both of whom went on to have significant careers as directors.

His first film was 1977's Berlinguer ti voglio bene, also by Bertolucci.

Bertolucci was born in the Italian city of Parma, in the region of Emilia-Romagna.

He is the elder son of Ninetta, a teacher, and Attilio Bertolucci, who was a poet, a reputed art historian, anthologist and film critic.

His cousin was the film producer Giovanni Bertolucci ( 24 June 1940 – 17 February 2005 ), with whom he has worked on a number of films.

Because of the exploitative nature of Bertolucci's depiction of Jeane, the film can easily be seen as a sexist, masculinist rape fantasy, especially given that Bertolucci himself openly admits that the film was inspired by his own sexual fantasies, though many critics dismissed the concerns as moralistic.

During the actual scene, she has also said she was crying real tears as she felt humiliated and violated by both Brando and Bertolucci.

He felt it was a violation of his craft, specifically his use of the Method acting technique, for Bertolucci to cause him to inhabit such a vile character.

The film caused criminal proceedings to be brought against Bertolucci in Italy for the anal rape scene, and the film was sequestered by the censorship commission and all copies were ordered to be destroyed.

Many years after, when the censorship commission had been abolished, the film reappeared ( because Bertolucci had kept a clandestine copy ) and was projected in a slightly censored version.

Bertolucci wrote two screenplays, the first draft was written almost entirely as a political film, from which emerged a story inspired by socialist syndicalism of the late 1920s in America.

In Rome, Bertolucci and Warren Beatty talked in great detail about the film, and in 1982 Bertolucci left Europe for Los Angeles, where he was to shoot Red Harvest, but five years went by and the film was never made.

The screenplay for the movie was written by Bertolucci himself, Umberto Contarello and Niccolò Ammaniti, and expected to release late 2012.

On 27 September 2009, Bertolucci was one of the signers of the appeal to the Swiss government to release Roman Polanski, who was being held while waiting to be extradited to the United States.

The Last Emperor is a 1987 biopic about the life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China, whose autobiography was the basis for the screenplay written by Mark Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Independently produced by Jeremy Thomas, it was directed by Bertolucci and released in 1987 by Columbia Pictures.

Bernardo Bertolucci proposed the film to the Chinese government as one of two possible projects-the other was an adaptation of La Condition Humaine by André Malraux.

An extended version currently available on DVD runs 218 minutes ; cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and director Bernardo Bertolucci have confirmed that this version was created for television and does not represent a " director's cut ".

In Italy, he was always dubbed into Italian, and his work stretched into collaborations with renowned Italian directors, including Valerio Zurlini in Summer Violent and The Desert of the Tartars, Ettore Scola in La terrazza, Bernardo Bertolucci in The Conformist, and Dino Risi in the cult film The Easy Life.

His most notable work was for Sergio Leone ; he and Bernardo Bertolucci collaborated on the story for the spaghetti western classic Once Upon a Time in the West.

Having been raised in such an environment, Bertolucci began writing at the age of fifteen, and soon after received several prestigious literary prizes including the Premio Viareggio for his first book.

The 1987 epic The Last Emperor ( recently re-released at an extended 219 minutes ) allowed Bertolucci to influence politics both through his characters and through the act of making the film itself.

Bernardo Bertolucci has stated that he looked at a map of the southwestern United States, found the name of the town in Arizona, and decided to incorporate it into the film.

Others, such as Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and Alfred Hitchcock had no formal college film training at all.

This period brought him work on several European productions, with directors such as Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Bertolucci released a documentary in 2006, Pasolini prossimo nostro, based on an interview with Pasolini done on the set of Salò in 1975.

In 1975, Benigni had his first theatrical success with Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia, written by Giuseppe Bertolucci.

The boom of Italian cinema, which gave Bertolucci his start, slowed in the 1970s as directors were forced to co-produce their films with several of the American, Swedish, French, and German companies and actors due to the effects of the global economic recession on the Italian film industry.

Bertolucci left Pasolini's poetic ideas behind in order to follow his own personal idea about cinema, based primarily on the individuality of people who are forced to deal with sudden changes in their lives.

Bertolucci became infamous in 1972, with the controversial film Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Massimo Girotti, when a scene featuring the anal rape of character Jeane by character Paul using butter as a lubricant, among other depictions of the young Schneider that were thought to be exploitative, caused serious concern due to its representation of women.

Bertolucci answered this by saying he too much identified with Brando's character to humiliate him in such a way.

Brando too felt raped by Bertolucci, and did not speak to him for many years as a result of the trauma of being involved with the film.

Bertolucci increased his fame with his next few films, from Novecento ( 1976 ), an epic depiction of the struggles of farmers in Emilia-Romagna from the beginning of the 20th century up to World War II with an impressive international cast ( Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden, Burt Lancaster, Dominique Sanda ) to La Luna, set in Rome and in Emilia-Romagna, in which Bertolucci deals with the thorny issue of drugs and incest, and finally La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo ( 1981 ), with Ugo Tognazzi.

During the making of Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci toyed with the idea of adapting Dashiell Hammett's book Red Harvest into a feature film.

Bertolucci has worked almost exclusively with Thomas from then on.

Bertolucci co-wrote the film with Mark Peploe.

After his divorce from Adriana Asti, Bertolucci married Clare Peploe, screenwriter and director with Mark Peploe of Professione Reporter, and who had already collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni.

It includes a booklet featuring an essay by David Thomson, interviews with production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, a reminiscence by Bertolucci, and an essay and production-diary extracts from Fabien S. Gerard.

He has worked under major directors, such as Stephen Frears ( in the 1988 period drama Dangerous Liaisons ); Gus Van Sant ( in the 1991 independent film My Own Private Idaho ); and Bernardo Bertolucci ( in the 1993 film Little Buddha ).

* 1941 – Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian film director

** Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian writer and film director

Then Bernardo Bertolucci cast him in a small speechless role as a window upholsterer in the film La Luna which evaded American distribution due to its subject matter.

Bernardo Bertolucci (; born 16 March 1941 ) is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and The Dreamers.

In 1987, Bertolucci directed the epic The Last Emperor, a biographical film telling the life story of Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China.