I did not want to make a biography of Lucky Luciano. Under the pretext of the Luciano’s character I looked at the Mafia trying especially to continue to reflect upon power, as I had started to do with Salvatore Giuliano and then with Le mani sulla città, Uomini contro and Il caso Mattei. […] Why a gangster? Why Lucky Luciano? Because I believed it would provide a good way of understanding the relationships between legal and illegal power and the interdependence between the two. Lucky Luciano is the first criminal genius to understand the importance of making illegal power at the service of legal power, but without doing any real criminal acts. He got rid of the old concept of the Mafia and looked for alliances with Jewish and Irish criminal groups, which were very important in America at the time. The problem of alliances of this nature had not previously existed […] Luciano represents the concept of a new, political Mafia. This is why it interested me, to make people understand that Mafia does not only mean shooting each other with machine guns and that it is a real political and economic power. […] We can say that there are more psychological elements typical to novel writing in Lucky Luciano, compared to my previous films, and that I could invent things that were linked, not to an interpretation of the facts, but to a man’s private life. Moreover, I wondered what was in a great criminal’s mind. Perhaps this is the reason I further investigated the character’s psychology; up until that moment I had ruled out psychology, only to find it again through the editing, in the overall psychology of the film. A man will always have the possibility for his story to be told. Mattei, far from being an insensitive type, was an extremely complex man. It is all in the way that men and facts are interpreted. In the case of Lucky Luciano it was very different, because it seemed like the theme was too rich, it had too many spectacular opportunities. So, for example I had to purposefully reduce the number of murders to a minimum. In fact, I put them at the beginning, like the contents of a catalogue. Mattei was someone who spoke without a pause, while Luciano hardly ever speaks. In Il caso Mattei it was the character that fascinated me, whereas in Lucky Luciano it was the relationships between the characters, Luciano seemed like a more complex character to me and it seems to me that the final result has more layers, in terms of subject, than Il caso Mattei.

Francesco Rosi, interview by Michel Ciment, in Michel Ciment, Dossier Rosi, edited by Lorenzo Codelli, Museo Nazionale del Cinema – Il Castoro, Milan 2008