They made their names with A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a series of spaghetti westerns that became classics of 20th-century cinema. But the Italian director Sergio Leone had such a poor grasp of English that, between takes, he would repeatedly rely on the words “watch me” before miming whatever he wanted from his leading man, Clint Eastwood, and his other actors.
Now previously unpublished photographs show him doing just that, acting out particular scenes.
Sir Christopher Frayling, a leading cultural historian, has been given access to hundreds of images in archives that had belonged to Leone and his set photographer Angelo Novi. Frayling said that when A Fistful of Dollars was made in 1964, the words “watch me” were “the extent of Leone’s English”, adding: “He’d mime what he wanted and then start filming.”
A Fistful of Dollars was a box-office hit that led to two sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in which composer Ennio Morricone recreated the wild west of Leone’s imagination with a soundscape of haunting whistles and cracking whips.
Eastwood was a minor television actor when he was cast as the “Man with No Name”, the cool, laconic gunslinger in a poncho – a role that catapulted him to international stardom.
Leone, whose own father had made silent movies in Italy, became a master of mime in making up for his lack of English. He once said: “My films are basically silent films… The dialogue just adds some weight.”
Singling out photographs of those miming scenes from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Frayling said: “There’s one of Clint Eastwood between two people being carried in front of a wagon, the arrival scene at a mission hospital – and one of Leone miming that. They’re virtually the same.
“I also love one of Eastwood, in the desert, which no one’s ever seen, where he’s obviously a bit confused about what’s going on around him, scratching his head and looking very frustrated because they couldn’t understand each other.”
Photographs from A Fistful of Dollars show Leone in a poncho, standing behind Eastwood in his poncho, having just acted out a scene, the showdown in the main street.
Some of the photographs will feature in a forthcoming book, Sergio Leone by Himself, to be published this month.
It brings together interviews that Leone gave to selected film journalists over the years before his death in 1989 at the age of just 60, as well as essays that he had written on his cinematic influences, from Charlie Chaplin to John Ford. Most have never before appeared in English.
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There are also images from the set of A Fistful of Dynamite, starring Rod Steiger as a Mexican outlaw.
Frayling said that the two men disliked one another: “There are a couple of priceless photos of the two of them glaring at each other. Steiger’s style of acting, which was all ‘motivation’ and internalised acting, was the exact opposite of Leone’s.
“Through an interpreter, Steiger was constantly asking: ‘What’s my motivation?’ At one point, he asked Leone: ‘Do you know whether I loved my mother or not?’ And Leone said: ‘It’s a bloody story, Rod.’”
Other previously unseen images include Robert De Niro’s makeup tests for the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America. Frayling said: “It’s set in the early 1930s and in the 1960s. For the character, De Niro has to age a lot. They chop between different time periods. So it took a very long time to get his makeup so that he looked incredibly old.
“One of the photographs, which is unpublished, is of De Niro standing with his own father, looking at each other. Leone brought in De Niro’s actual father to give him an idea of what De Niro might look like when he gets older.”
Sergio Leone By Himself is published by Reel Art Press RRP £39.95. For further information and full list of stockists visit reelartpress.com