Clint

In 1964, Clint Eastwood agreed to travel to Spain to shoot a low-budget film that, in his own diagnosis, “was probably going to be a total failure.” What he found when he arrived (an international team in perpetual chaos, actors and director unable to understand each other without an interpreter, a tree stolen through deception and a crane obtained thanks to a bishop) only confirmed his worst suspicions. Several decades later, he still remembered it. For a handful of pesetas. ‘A Fistful of Dollars was not a high-risk project, but quite the opposite: it cost around $200,000, co-financed by Italy, Germany and Spain, and Eastwood (then a television actor with no relevant film credits) was paid $15,000. Sergio Leone did not even sign his name: in the credits he appears as “Bob Robertson.” Ennio Morricone, as “Dan Savio.” Why Spain. The choice of Spain was not an aesthetic whim. The Franco regime had been facilitating the presence of foreign productions in Spanish territorypartly because of the economic benefits and partly because the presence of international stars served to soften the external image of the dictatorship. And for the production companies it was a bargain: the costs were much lower than those in the United States, the army provided extras when necessary and the landscape of Almería (one of the poorest provinces in the country, with very high unemployment) functioned as a perfect substitute for the American West. A single hat. Conditions on the set were, to put it mildly, spartan. There was no electricity or trailers with basic services and Leone and Eastwood did not speak the same language (one Italian, the other English), so they communicated through specialist Benito Stefanelli. Filming was done completely without sound: this was added in post-production, and Eastwood did not dub his own voice into English until the film was released in the United States in 1967. Your own clothes. Eastwood himself explained in 2007 who arrived with his own wardrobe to the filming: the black jeans he had bought on Hollywood Boulevard, the boots he brought from the series ‘Rawhide’ and the hat he got in Santa Monica. They bought the poncho in Spain. And that hat, unique and irreplaceable, sums up the project’s production philosophy well: “If I lost it, it was finished. There was no way to replace it.” They don’t shut up, they don’t shut up. What caught the most attention, however, was not the material precariousness but the atmosphere: off-screen people were playing frisbeetold jokes, talked non-stop. “They were not used to the silence of a shoot, where sound is important,” he recalled. He ended up using the need to play his part in the middle of that revelry as an exercise in concentration. There is no tree. Decades after filming wrapped, Eastwood still remembered two anecdotes as if they had happened weeks before. The first happened when they needed a specific tree for a hanging scene, they couldn’t find a suitable one and the only one available was on private property. Leone counted that the technicians convinced the owner that the tree was dangerous. In the version that Eastwood told in 2007, the alibi was different: they introduced themselves as highway department workers. There is no crane. The second anecdote that Eastwood remembers is from the filming of another film, ‘Death Had a Price’. The team needed a crane that they couldn’t afford. A company near the filming location had one, but it was a religious holiday and that company could not work. Leone went to see the local bishop and explained that his company was Jewish and therefore not subject to the Catholic holiday, so the bishop gave him permission to work. With that permit in hand, he went to the company with the crane: they couldn’t use it that day, but the Italians could, and they lent them the material. In Xataka | The 25 best movies on HBO Max: a selection of masterpieces and modern classics brimming with the best cinema