David Warbeck on Bobby Rhodes

Tony King, Bobby Rhodes and David Warbeck in L'ULTIMO CACCIATORE, aka THE LAST HUNTER.

David Warbeck
The Man and his Movies
David Warbeck was interviewed by Jason J. Slater with the assistance of Harvey Fenton, Julian Grainger and Michelle Perks. The interviews were transcribed by Matt Pelton

Q: What about Bobby Rhodes?

Ah! Now Bobby Rhodes, he's an absolute sweetheart. He's an Italian black.

Q: Really? Does he speak English?

Oh, he speaks very good English. I bumped into him outside the railway station not so long ago. Great big guy.

Q: He's massive isn't he? Looks like a killer!

He's a pussycat, he's so sweet.

Q: He's always in Margheriti's films... And he recently made that Western with Castellari, JONATHAN OF THE BEARS. He's dressed just in white and he's big and powerful, on a horse, shiny black head. He looks so imposing.

Oh he's a sweet guy. He knows what to do and he's so modest, almost embarrassed all the time and quiet and gentle.

David Warbeck on GIU LA TESTA

From: David Warbeck

The Man and his Movies

David Warbeck was interviewed by Jason J. Slater with the assistance of Harvey Fenton, Julian Grainger and Michelle Perks. The interviews were transcribed by Matt Pelton.

Q: Did you think that A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE would mean that you would have a career in Westerns?

No, not at all. I didn't know what it was about. I didn't have a clue! I'll try and make this story short...

I was doing this play in the Birmingham Rep., very prestigious, the last play in the old theatre. We were doing "The Barretts Of Wimpole Street" and I had a ten minute role that got all the applause and one of my favourite friends had to do all the slog work. I said to him "I've worked out how to get applause when I come on stage, let alone when I go off", being all clever and terribly glamorous. Anyway, during this production my agent in London called and said "some Italians at the Dorchester want to see you about some Italian crap", so I went and saw them and this huge guy bear-hugged me at the door and said "Darling! You're the one!", and he literally carried me into the room and there was Sergio Leone, who I didn't know from a bar of soap, and all his family. They all leapt up like a bunch of hyped-up baboons (mad Italian babble noises). "Have a drink, have a drink!" (laughs), and when they calmed down I said "What's going on?!", and they said "You're coming now! To Heathrow!"

But I had to finish the play, another week or two weeks to go so I said, "Hang on just a minute, let me phone my...".

They jumped in, "No, you don't phone blah, blah...", so eventually I got hold of my agent, a guy called Jimmy Frazer and I said "I'm with these Italians," and he said, "Oh God! That crowd! Have they offered you a drink?" and I said, "Yes! That's all they've been doing!", so he said "Get out of there, hit them if you have to, get out, cry kidnap!" (laughs)

Another preposterous story...

So I hung up and said to them, "Look, I've got to go" and they said "Have another drink" (laughs) and as you know I rarely touch the stuff, so I had another drink and was getting woozier and woozier and they said "Now we take you to Heathrow"; they wanted to fly me directly to Dublin where they were shooting the scenes. They filmed all around the world, but they filmed all the Irish stuff on location. That was where I was being shot up and stuff.

So I don't know how I managed to get out of it but I went back to the theatre that night. I spoke to my best friend - who I was giving a hard time about getting all this applause on my entrance - and I asked him this quite recently, about thirty years later, I said, "Did you engineer it so I'd go and do that film so you wouldn't have me fucking up your life?" (laughs), and he said, "Darling, whatever made you think that?"

Anyway, they very luckily got hold of the manager and said that I'd been offered this film part by all these mad barmy people and I was on the plane the next day to Dublin. I did not have a clue what they were doing...

When I got there I met James Coburn, very sweet, charming, he was an absolute pleasure, and none of us knew quite what Sergio was on about, because Sergio did not speak a word of English. Well, he did, he spoke "Yes, No. Stop. Go. Good. Bad". That was it! And he had worry beads.

Basically Sergio was a peasant, and absolute... vomiting at the table, grabbing the waitresses by the cunt peasant, staggeringly crude behaviour. And his cronies!...

One of his reasons for film making, a bit like Russ Meyer, was to get as many birds on the end of his fingers as he could basically (laughs) It's as crude as that...

For example when we got to Dublin he saw this bus... now Sergio loved guns; every time we had a gun sequence he would practice with them, "kapow, kapow, kapow", that would be part of his jollies, and he also likes things like tanks, cars, trucks and buses... you'll notice that this little bus gets about 3 seconds of screen time, and it's the bus from RYAN'S DAUGHTER, which just happened to be parked on the back-lot, so he said "We've got to have the bus!"

And he said "What do we have in the bus? Virgins! Lots of virgins! Schoolgirls!"

They auditioned for the length of time I was in Dublin. The corridor of the Intercontinental Hotel was always lined up with all these virgins being groped and interviewed by this Italian porno crew... all these girls, little Irish virgins.

So finally they got them all on the bus and if you see the film, well... that was their intro to the world of films.

I'm doing a bit of a jump here...

I used to meet Sergio at these Cannes festivals because he was the President of the Committee for some reason... I couldn't believe it, all these imposing desks and libraries and stuff behind him, trying to look like the Gent! But he did become very sophisticated, but not in the early days! He always kept on to me and he wanted me to do ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA.

Sergio Leone on Rod Steiger

Sergio Leone: Steiger is a child without any personality of his own, who assumes a different character in every film, and even takes it home with him. Three months before the start of DUCK YOU SUCKER, he began taking lessons from a Mexican woman to learn the cadence and accent of one for whom Spanish is one's mother tongue, and how he'd express himself in another language (i.e. English). That's the sort of character he was going to play in the film. Well, for the three months preceding the first fall of the clapper, then throughout the shooting, and after till the end of dubbing, Steiger always spoke that way, on the set and in private. To the point that some girls who looked him up in New York for the weekend (he was divorced at the time) asked me: "What's happened to Rod? He speaks in such a way that, even in intimate situations, you can't understand a word he's saying."

For DUCK YOU SUCKER, the choice of Steiger and Coburn was somewhat imposed by the Americans. So, obviously, in order to adapt a movie that was already costing a lot to my criteria, I was forced to rewrite the screenplay day by day as we shot, and to tell the actors not to ask me today what we'd be filming tomorrow. From the start, Steiger complained a lot, even saying to me: "You belong to the type of presumptuous director, like Fellini and Rosi. I've worked with you, and I know that you detest actors, but I must make you aware that there are only six true actors in the world, every continent has one and you'd better learn to live with that."

I said, "Since it seems that I've hired one of those six, would you please do me the courtesy of telling me who the other five are, so I can remember in the future not to hire them."

Whereupon, we began to see eye to eye, also because, upon his nth outburst, I made such a scene a kilometer away. Whatever the reason, he became very docile, he didn't even protest doing the same scene over thirty times as happened for certain takes. I came to realize that on the first take, he'd chew the scenery, and the best method to obtain what I wanted was to tire him out.

Sergio Leone on DUCK YOU SUCKER

Sergio Leone: I was only going to produce GIU LA TESTA (aka DUCK YOU SUCKER, aka A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE), and I proposed Peter Bogdanovich as director to the Americans. He had done revisionist takes on some old genres successfully (i.e. PAPER MOON and WHAT'S UP DOC?). But he wanted to "revisit" the Western along very conventional and stale lines, and, in any case, he understood he wouldn't be able to get away with that - not with me around, and not with that budget! - and he turned it down. I thought about Peckinpah, who'd have worked, or of my assistant director Carlos Santi - with me supervising, but the actors rebelled at this proposal. "Euro" was anticipating lots of cash returns, and we were ten days away from starting, and so I ended up directing it myself, and - slowly, slowly - I became enthusiastic about it, even though, at the beginning, I was feeling frustrated. I was already aching to do ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. There had been problems with the actors, because I wanted Jason Robards and Malcolm McDowell - two seperate generations - but Steiger and Coburn worked out just fine: the intellectual in counterpoint to the naif set down into world war, which also represents the world of today with all its horrors and looming problems. It's necessary to take as the subject the smallest characters taking on the biggest situation. In the end, it's the small character that explains to the intellectual - the slightly presumptuous intellectual who wants to serve the naif.

A Pygmalion in reverse in short.

And in the end, the intellectual throws away his books.

A character in the film says at some point: "He who talks revolution, talks confusion", and this was another theme at the heart of the film; a film in which the historical framework simply supplied a pretext to speak of much more general things.