Behind the Scenes: For a Few Dollars More (Leone, 1965) with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cle

A Fistful of Dollars was the first big screen protagonist I played. I had total freedom in the character because we didn't even speak the same language. And it was Sergio's second picture. He had done one picture called Colossus of Rhodes prior to that, and he'd never done a picture before that except he'd been assistant director. And then it was Marconi. I don't know if it was his very first score, but it was certainly one that put him on the map. And so we all kind of jumped out and had decent careers based upon that picture. After the first one took off and did so well, then the second one I thought would do well. I think I was one of the people who inspired him to do a sequel. Originally, Sergio wanted to have Henry Fonda and Lee Van Cleef's part, because he felt that I had a similarity to Fonda that would have been sort of a father-son mentor kind of situation. He couldn't get Henry Fonda, and at that time he couldn't get anybody. Nobody knew Sergio, and the dollar pictures hadn't come out and been as effective as they were a few months later than that. So he goes to California, and he comes back with Lee Van Cleef. I said, Lee Van Cleef, that's interesting. He always had a great face, and I used to see him around at Universal years ago. He was sort of a well-known character actor, worked quite a bit. Nice guy. He came over there and did a part. I thought it was interesting. Sergio, one good thing he had, he was great with faces. If you notice those films, all those faces, those gypsies he would use to play the Mexican guys in those pictures, he always got really good faces. He was very, very detail-oriented when it came to casting. He didn't just say, get me four or five people to be in the background here. Every one of them had to have a different look. He loved life, though. He was a very humorous guy, and I was told that before I ever worked with him. They said he was a man with a great sense of humor. He loved to tell jokes. He was very, very funny. He loved to laugh, loved to eat. The first week I went over there on Fistful of Dollars, the first day of work, we broke for lunch, and all of a sudden, instead of breaking for lunch for a half hour, like you would in this country, or an hour at the most, we sat down for a two-hour lunch, and everybody's drinking wine and eating spaghetti and everything. I thought, God, this is really something. The only problem was, after you get back from lunch, that next couple hours of work is just in slow motion. It's almost in slow motion, everything. And it's very, very hard to get back up to speed. So you sort of write off those two hours, and then later on in the day, you sort of get back cooking again. I learned a lot just watching other people work. You just sort of see things that you like. You would say, if I'm ever directing, this is the kind of thing I like. And you also, conversely, see things that you don't like. You say, gee, if I'm ever directing, I won't do that. Sergio was very, very conscious of art. I know he did like painting. He'd see a certain painting, and he said, that's the lighting for this sequence and that sequence. Sometimes he'd show me a picture and say, this is the kind of thing I'd like to duplicate here. Sergio loved long pictures. He loved long sequences and long pictures. But if you're just telling a long picture to produce more production value, I think you can shorten some of that down. If you have a really depthy story and you need to have that time, then that's fine. And that's where he and I would differ, I suppose. He was a guy who was trying to become much more of a big production type director. He wanted to be David Lean. I, on the other hand, was trying to go for a smaller picture. I just wanted to do smaller character-driven things, because selfishly I was coming from the actor's point of view at that particular time. When we were doing Good, Bad and Ugly, Sergio talked about doing Once Upon a Time in the West. I just thought I'd done enough of that style. I just didn't want to repeat myself too many times. I thought it was time to come back here in this country and work on some other type projects. I don't know why. There was no great intellectual strategy. It just felt that it was time to come back. I got involved with Leone very simply because For a Fistful of Dollars opened in Italy with great success. So I approached him and I told him that I wanted to do something with him. At that point, he told me that he had offered me For a Fistful of Dollars and gave the script to somebody who was working for me at that time. But this man didn't like Leone, so he didn't tell me that Leone wanted to do the film with me. And so that's the way it started. At that point, I approached Sergio after For a Fistful of Dollars was released in Italy. He called me and he said, I'm not completely happy with the script. Secretly, I rewrote many things, especially dialogues. That was the way it worked. The original script is Italian double count style and everything is in it. It looks like a script you find on the internet after the movie. Everything is in it, even every move of the camera. I used to say a funny thing. I used to say, think of these people talking like in Roman dialect. Because it's true. It's translated from, very ironically, from Roman dialect. Many, many things. We understood the kind of humor of the dialogue, what he called indirect, not direct. For instance, in the final scene when Clint counts the money, that was an idea of mine because he just said the names. But I said, he's a bounty killer, so he makes the sum of the money. In January of 1965, Sergio and I went to Los Angeles to discuss with Clint, his agent, the deal for a few dollars more. In that occasion, we wanted to cast the role of Lee Van Cleef. Lee Van Cleef told me that Leone and his brother-in-law were at a restaurant in Hollywood. They came to find an actor for that part. Leone looked up at the bar and he said, there he is. I know that actor. Can you go talk to him and tell him to come over? So he brought him over and Sergio looked at him. He said, listen, he said, translate this. Ask him if he can leave Sunday for a movie in Italy. That must have been on a Friday night. Lee Van Cleef said, I can leave now. I'd do it with pleasure. Leone recognized him. The actors with small parts were more interesting than the leads then. He was an extraordinary human being. So sweet, so nice. He loved Sergio. He was grateful to Sergio. He was so nice. You know, he couldn't slap a woman. He said, I cannot. I cannot slap a woman. Actually, the actors said, come on, I'm an actress. The actors trusted him. At that point, he had such a tremendous reputation. They looked terrific on the screen. Because he gives you the closest close-up you can get. What more can an actor want than that? The whole screen. Your eyes. And, you know, actors have to show their eyes to prove how good they are. Leone did that. He got Klaus Kinski, who, oh, he wanted that wild look. And Kinski was like that. He didn't have to act it. The Italian actor who dubbed Clint was Enrico Maria Salerno, a very good theater actor. He was the one who dubbed him with us, you know, that kind of slow voice. So Clint, watching the Italian dubbing, took that for the other movie. Because if you look at Fistful of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, you notice that in A Few Dollars More, they start to talk so slowly. And it comes from Salerno. He was just smart. He learned a lot. Ennio Morricone wrote the music of both films. Before that, they were shot reading the scripts. And Sergio, many times, was playing the music while shooting. So a big component of Sergio's films has been Morricone's music. Also with Morricone was close work together. For instance, Morricone said, but it's nothing. There's an empty, empty street. They say, ah, here, I want something nervous. The little thing of Morricone, born this way. I remember how was born the team of Tirolino. Because I was in the movie Hola with Morricone and Leone. And Leone said to Morricone, here, I want something classical. But I want also that Mexican trumpet. And so Johann Sebastian Bach and Degheio. The style of Sergio was epic. He had directed other films before, historical films. But in general, he liked epic films. And I don't know if he wanted to be like David Lean. But certainly, he had in his mind the work of the best directors of the world. And he thought that he was a great director himself already. And he was. With For a Few Dollars More, the second Dollars film, Leone at last had a sensible budget to play with. $600,000, which in 1965 is a lot of money. He had a sympathetic producer, Alberto Grimaldi, the Neapolitan lawyer. And he also had quite a good deal. So he made some money out of this film. He hadn't made any money out of Fistful of Dollars. There's also a sense that, yeah, I've had a hit. I want to prove that it wasn't just a fluke and that I've got more in me. So he begins to relax in his style and in the way that he tells the story. The first 20 minutes of For a Few Dollars More is interesting because he actually has the confidence not to start the story until he's done an exercise in pure style for 20 minutes. Introducing the Lee Van Cleef character and having a couple of incidents involving him. And you have enigmatic shots that you don't quite understand or moments like a flashback that isn't explained. So he's having the confidence to hold back from his audience, to keep them on the edge of their seat so that they'll be intrigued with what happens next. And the Leone trademarks emerge. The circular duel at the end, the careful framing, big faces on the right here and in the background, something else going on. For a Few Dollars More, they find their voice and the Leone style emerges. When it was time to cast For a Few Dollars More, Eastwood was a given. But who do you have as the bad guy? Leone chose Jean-Marie Valente again from For a Few Dollars because he wanted a huge, larger-than-life baddie, who in the script is called Tombstone, who shoots women, children, he smokes dope, he does everything, shoots his own men. They piled on the theatrical attributes in the second film. Occasionally, there's a whirring noise on the soundtrack in case you hadn't noticed he was a psychopath. He had to be a big, big, big character to contrast with the Americans. So Valente was the man again. He got a bit tense on the set in Elmeria because Valente's theatricalism was getting on Leone's nerves by this stage and he wanted to reduce the size of his performance. There were rows on For a Few Dollars More about this, that Valente got a bit of a short fuse because he kind of felt he wasn't being used and he referred to making westerns as a tiring genre in which I do not have much interest. Then he moved on to a lot of political film. He's very left-wing, Valente, and he made a lot of political films in Italy in the mid to late 1960s and became a sort of icon of political cinema. Someone suggested, why don't you have them smoking marijuana? Now, I don't think they knew very much about marijuana. The assistant director, Tonino Valeriu, remembers them saying, yeah, in third world countries like Brazil and Mexico, they smoke marijuana to sort of take their mind off the cost of living. So that fits with this kind of Mexican thing, a bit of stereotyping there. But maybe they'd seen Rifa Madness once too often. And originally, he wanted Henry Fonda again, but it wasn't to be. He wanted Bronson again, Charles Bronson, it wasn't to be. And then he thought Lee Marvin would be great. And they were almost at the point of signing Lee Marvin when Lee Marvin went off to make Cat Baloo. He remembered Lee Van Cleef from all those Hollywood movies that Lee Van Cleef had made in the 1950s, where he was the second bad guy from the left who almost died about halfway through the film. His career was small part bad guys. Occasionally he got a line, usually he didn't. But he had a very distinctive look, his face, this aquiline face that they only reckon resembled Van Gogh. And this silhouette in the way that he walked. Somehow he tracked Van Cleef down in Los Angeles and arrived with the production manager with a suitcase full of dollar bills. Caught sight of Van Cleef across the car park and Van Cleef was wearing a long raincoat. And Leonie turned to the production manager and said, don't even get that man to talk. He looks so great and I might change my mind if he starts talking. Just sign him, give him some of the dollars in the suitcase and let's get over to Italy with all speed. This guy's perfect. So Van Cleef was signed there and then, given a few dollars more out of the suitcase and found himself on a plane to Rome where he was given the script, which was a rather wooden translation. And I think he was probably quite baffled on this flight to Rome. And Leonie said, what do you think of the script? And Lee Van Cleef said something very strange. He said, I think it's Shakespearean. He was a bit muddled, I think, jet lag. Shakespearean it ain't. He arrived and the following day, he was at Chino Chita shooting sequences of looking out of the window through the binoculars. And God, it was an extraordinary story. And he never looked back. He became a huge superstar in Europe after that. Leonie had a very long cinematic memory. For him, Lee Van Cleef was the sum total of all those parts in 50s Hollywood Westerns. You know, you're not casting him for what he does. You're casting him for what he stands for. And in audiences' mind, he stands for all those bad guys. As someone once said, in traditional Hollywood movies, the hero was the best shot. In Italian Westerns, the best shot is the hero. He was short of stature, Leonie. And he wore a funny cowboy hat and thick glasses and, you know, looked a bit like Yosemite Sam. And it must have been a rather bizarre thing, this little tubby Roman guy being a huge macho hero. But he'd acted up. Watch me, Clint. Watch me, Lee. You know, and all this sort of thing. And in the process, he would Romanize the character. That if on the page, it looked just like, your common or garden Hollywood hero. In the acting out, it became a Roman villain. Someone who's a bit sly, a bit on the take, and has a bit of a twinkle in his eye. He's a trickster, a rogue, a lovable rogue, a sort of harlequin figure from culture. And I think in miming, it came through in showing the actors what he wanted. Watch me, Clint. And Clint was watching. But at a deeper level, what's mocked in all his films is the religious iconography of the Southwest. I associated Westerns with the Middle West, with Wyoming, or with the Rockies, or with Shane territory. What I hadn't associated the West with was bells, crucifixes, and coffins, and bell towers, and the rock angels, and cemeteries, and all the paraphernalia of the Southwest. And that iconography is very, very strong in Leona's films from the word go. But it isn't just that. He then goes one step further and mocks all those symbols. So don't think for a minute that the church provides a moral alternative. It's not just getting the Catholic church. It's getting morality. It's saying, old-fashioned morality's out. Come on, it can't have been like that. We know life isn't like that. The Wild West would have been a much tougher place. And it's part of that project. But one thing Leoni felt about the classic Hollywood Western was that it sanitized violence and brutality too much. Good guy pulls out gun, cut, guy falls over. You don't see the bullet hole. He falls over in one. And Leoni knew a bit about firearms. And he knew that that very, very seldom happened in the Wild West. He wanted to emphasize how messy and nasty the brutality was. It was a huge hit at the time in Italy. In terms of influence on the Italian Western, for a few dollars more is the one because that really opened the floodgates. By 1967, 68, between 50 and 60 Westerns are being made in Italy while they're shooting once upon a time in the West. Hollywood was making 13 a year in a good year at that stage. 50, 60, 65 Westerns. It was an avalanche. For a few dollars more was so successful commercially and everyone loved it so much. From 1965 to 1971, it was the most successful Italian movie that had ever been made.