“It was an outrageous story”: the B-movie Clint Eastwood rewrote into a classic
Typically, when an actor is handed a script and given a part, the story of the movie is done and presented to them as a polished package. However, some of the best moments in movie history are when the actor, rather than the director or writer, has taken liberties, made some changes or even improvised new moments within the story. In the case of one Clint Eastwood film, his edits might just have saved the entire picture.
When an actor is cast to play a role, it starts a whole bigger process of that person becoming their character. While also rehearsing their lines and getting to grips with the logistics of making the movie, there is a whole mental process going on behind the scenes where a performer has to truly get to know the person they’re playing. They have to understand their motivations and intentions, figure out their personality and understand how they tick in order to properly portray a person with any level of depth.
All of the best performances come from actors who know their characters inside out so they can not only deliver the lines written for them, but can go beyond that. Some go beyond simply through actions and reactions in their performance, but other take it further by adding a level of improvisation into the script or even grabbing a pen and reworking entire sections.
It’s something we still see today. After Mia Goth stepped into her role in X, she added so much depth to the character that Ti West invited her only to the writing team for the follow-up, Pearl. Anthony Hopkins improvised all of Hannibal Lecter’s creepy noises in The Silence Of The Lambs, adding them to his scenes with no prompting in the script. Joaquin Phoenix made his Joker dance instead of speak, changing the character’s response to his own violence in a masterful stroke of nuance.
Time and time again, an actor’s insight into their own character helps to elevate a project, but never has it been so crucial than during the making of A Fistful of Dollars. With just a few changes, Clint Eastwood managed to save the picture from being just another average spaghetti western flick and transformed it into a classic.
For the actor, it all came down to an understanding of what makes a good movie versus what makes a great movie. “In a real A picture, you let the audience think along with the movie; in a B picture, you explain everything,” the actor recalled telling the film’s director, Sergio Leone.
From the second he got the script, Eastwood was fighting to make changes in order to shuffle the picture from B to A. To him, it was too wordy to be a truly great picture. “The script was very expository,” he explained, wanting there to be less talking and more space for intrigue as he said, “I thought there should be much more mystery to the person.”
So when it came to one key scene, Eastwood ripped it up and started again. “There was a scene where he decides to save the woman and the child. She says, ‘Why are you doing this?’ In the script he just goes on forever. He talks about his mother, all kinds of subplots that come out of no-where, and it goes on and on and on,” he recalled.
He said, “I thought that was not essential,” thinking that the tell-not-show approach was holding the movie back, “So I just rewrote the scene the night before we shot it.”
That one bold move might have saved the movie, cutting out the waffle to instead deliver one iconic line as the Man With No Name is asked, “Why are you doing this?” and instead simply replies, “Because I knew someone like you once and there was nobody there to help.”
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