Italian filmmaker said that he “really wanted” a different actor to play the now-iconic part in a 1977 interview with the news.
In a harsh desert town, a man swaggers down an empty street wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a dusty poncho. He gives a coffin manufacturer the order, “Get three coffins ready,” before going up against the men who have been making fun of him. “My mistake,” he says after shooting the assailants. “Four coffins”. This is among the key scenes that shaped Clint Eastwood’s melancholy gunslinger character in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), so altering the course of film history.
Eastwood makes an entirely different appearance and adopts a friendlier demeanor in an interview from 1977 with BBC reporter Iain Johnstone. The charismatic and endearing performer barely resembles the severe, grizzled lead character in Sergio Leone’s Western.
Originally, Eastwood remembered, he was “not particularly” interested in starring in the European low-budget movie. Since he was starring in the popular television series Rawhide, which approached the genre in a far more conventional, American way, he was no stranger to Westerns. “I liked [A Fistful of Dollars], though, and I felt that maybe a European approach would give the Western new flavour.”
