David Warbeck acting without words 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: How do you feel about being seen as an Action Man type character?

How do I feel about it?

Q: How did you feel about it in those days?

Amazed! Well, initially amazed when I went off to do Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE and that sort of stuff. I wasn't really acting, I just got my head shot off!...

If you actually think it and put yourself properly into the situation, for some reason the eyes telegraph the intent of what's going on without any dialogue...

...if you remember the one I did with James Coburn in A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE; we had to do a whole complicated conversation with no words, where he has to tell me with his eyes that has to kill me because of the politics. And my eyes have to say "I want you to kill me and I understand why you have to kill me. I still love you as my best mate and friend. Please kill me. You have to." So he shoots me and in my last few seconds of dying, my eyes say "I forgive you, you had to do it." And he's saying "You're dying with my love." We had to do all that stuff and I thought this would never come over. I think probably the highest compliment I ever had in my life was in the Camden Town food market one day when one of the stall boys cried out (falls into mock barrow boy accent) "Oi! Dave! You're in that film!" And I said "Oh, yes, yes, yes," and he said, "that was brilliant that sequence." And he told me what I just told you and I was flabbergasted and I said "Oh, you've read the book or something?" and he said "No, no! That was brilliant that. It was really good that you could do that without words." So that's going back to everything with being "action man"; the trick here is telling a story through a million things; the head turns, hand on a gun, the way you respond to it. It's all visual stuff and I'm very, very lucky.

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.

Sophia and Clint

From: HOLLYWOOD IS A FOUR LETTER TOWN

by James Bacon

Sophia and I run into each other all over the world.

Once she was making a movie in Paris with Paul Newman. She took me aside on the set one day and asked: "Do you know a cowboy in Hollywood by the name of Clint Eastwood?" I told her he was an old friend. "Well," said Sophia, "he is the biggest box office star in Italy, bigger than Mastroianni. He made a picture called A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and at every theater where it's playing the lines are four blocks long and four abreast. I have never seen anything like it."

I knew that Clint, during a hiatus in his Rawhide TV series, had gone to Spain to make the first of the spaghetti westerns. He had done it for $15,000 - peanuts. I also knew he was about to make another one for the same money. As soon as I got home, I saw Clint and relayed Sophia's message. He hadn't heard a damn thing about the picture. In fact, didn't even know it had been released in Italy. I caught him in time to renegotiate the contract so he could get a piece of the action. A series of these spaghetti westerns starring Clint made him a fortune and also made him into the number one box office star in America and a top draw around the world. Clint is now the world's richest cowboy. Last time I saw Sophia was in an Etruscan field near Rome, and we talked about the conversation in Paris some years previously.

Sophia and Clint had never met, but Clint is eternally grateful to her. He had figured that A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was a European western and nothing more. He was convinced that he had been paid $15,000 for a disaster:

"You can't imagine the problems I had making that picture. The director and producer wanted me to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots. It took me a week to talk them out of it. Then the character killed everybody in sight. He was supposed to be the hero, but he was one of the rottenest villains alive. I never dreamed it would catch on." The Europeans love violence and Clint gave it to them. "I come into town to save the place, then proceed to kill everybody in it and finally burn down the town - and be heroic about it."

Amazingly, the pictures became as big a hit in the United States as they were in Europe. Some theaters showed all of them at one time - a Clint Eastwood festival - and the lines were just as long as they were those first days in Italy.

Sophia knew what she was talking about: "I was in Rome and I saw this line trying to get in to see an American cowboy I had never even heard of. I got out of my car and introduced myself to the theater manager, who let me right in. I had to see him for myself."

Clint had director Sergio Leone over a barrel when he negotiated for that second picture. All told, Clint made millions off his spaghetti westerns - the three made with Leone, followed by three of his own American-made films of the same genre. The money is still coming in. The least Clint could do, it seems, would be to do a picture with Sophia. Those two would be dynamite together.

Leone Prepping $5,000,000 Saga

From: Variety 1968

Rome, Jan. 9.

After three straight years of absolute boxoffice leadership with "For A Fistful of Dollars," "For A Few Dollars More" and "The Good, The Ugly, The Bad," Sergio Leone missed the marquee last Dec. 25 though indirectly represented by his ex-assistant Tonino Valeri, and a Leone-like western, "Days of Anger."

Prepared to abandon the school of Italoaters he brought to life, Leone last week discussed his return to coproduce and direct a $5,000,000 saga, "Once Upon a Time In the West," and explained his long absence since "The Good, The Ugly, The Bad" as a period filled with preparation to complete the screenplay commit a big cast and set locations in Arizona and Spain.

Partnering with Euro International Film, Leone signed Charles Bronson as the male lead (though billed below the title), Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards (above the title) and a supporting cast including Enrico Maria Salerno, Frank Woolf, Robert Hossein, Robert Ryan, Jack Elam and Woody Strode.

Europe International prexy Count Giuseppe Cicogna said "Once Upon a Time" would enter production April 1 near Guadix in southern Spain for a two-month location period, then move to Monument Valley for four more weeks of exteriors and wind on interiors in Rome either in Cinecitta or Dinocitta.

Budget, he said, was over 3,000,000,000 lire ($5,000,000) an investment totally financed in Italy - the biggest project of its kind backed entirely by national capital. However, the investment risk is considerably lighter since Cicoqua's recent deal with Paramount topper Charles Bluhdorn for Yank release worldwide, less Italy where Cicogna hopes Leone will climb back in the b.o. saddle with another of his shattering grosses for the Euro distrib banner.

Yarn deals with three bandits (Bronson, Fonda, Robards) and prostie Cardinale in the '60s of the last century who find the West closing out on them with advent of the chemin de fer and unity between East and West. Film will retain the violence and irony that characterized Leone's earlier trio of school-founding oaters. But the director said he hopes to incorporate a big social vista of mid-18th century America.

[Again, I've reproduced the original article with mis-spellings and factual mistakes; i.e. the film takes place during the 19th century - the 1800s, not the 18th century - the 1700s.]

Duccio Tessari on the intention to demythologize

[In 1986, Lorenzo De Luca conducted an interview with director Duccio Tessari which was published in both Lorenzo's fanzine FAR HORIZONS and his book C'ERA UNA VOLTA IL WESTERN ITALIANO.]

LDL: As with American Westerns, Italian Westerns had good and bad characters, but for us it was only a convenient distinction as our heroes were all but honest and clean. Was the reinterpretation of the classic hero intentional or did it just happen?

Duccio Tessari: I don't think there was a clear, precise intention. I say so, because I remember well the scripts for PER UN PUGNO DI DOLLARI (aka A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS), made with Sergio Leone, and UNA PISTOLA PER RINGO (aka A PISTOL FOR RINGO). We must not forget that our cultural ground is not American, but European. For us the distinction between Good and Evil, Black and White, doesn't exist. Even the Good one commits wicked actions and even the Evil caresses children. I would say that the attitude of demythologization is typically Italian and not only concerning the Westerns. It was not intentional, it was natural for us to write Western stories that way.

Duccio Tessari on Italian Western heroes

[In 1986, Lorenzo De Luca conducted an interview with director Duccio Tessari which was published in both Lorenzo's fanzine FAR HORIZONS and his book C'ERA UNA VOLTA IL WESTERN ITALIANO.]

LDL: In the '60s, the American Western was in a crisis. Had the audience grown tired of the upright hero?

Duccio Tessari: I should say so! Upright heroes are typically American heroes; originated from a Protestant culture. They are round, complete characters; doubtless. Our horoes, however, are always somewhat defeated heroes. From the beginning, doubtful and perplexed.

At first, America was a country where people from different groups lived - Englishmen, Irishmen, Greek, Italian and so on. Then these groups melted together inorder to face the adversities of the new frontier and to defend themselves from the Indians.

And then America could be said to be one people, and from them arose the image of the heroic American, upright and invincible. It is highly probable that during the '60s, the American hero was not very popular, but it is clear that such a crisis does not exist now - consider RAMBO. Today the heroic myth rises again.

Our Cowboys were rogues, fearful, shot people in the back, and had little in common with the heroic Cowboys - starting with Corbucci's violent ones, to my free and easy ones, and ending with the studied and serious characters of Sergio Leone.

The Leone influence.

From: National Catholic Office For Motion Pictures Films '69/70

Film Education The Western: A Genre in Transition prepared by Frank Frost USC

The disillusionment we see in THE WILD BUNCH is not exactly new, nor is the public unprepared for its degree of violence. The unabashed violence of the Sergio Leone Westerns (A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and so on) was no hindrance to their very popular success. To a public saturated with the saccharine goodness of men who shoot only when they have to, and then only to wound, in the defense of delicate women (whether they be devoted wives or pretty prostitutes), Leone's films offered a cynical and textured real world in which men are ugly, unshaven, sweaty, and irritated by horse flies. Likewise women are plain, earthy, and as hard, calculating, and self-seeking as anyone else. Peckinpah also creates such a texture, tempered, however, with characters who have some human feelings

Sergio Corbucci on Steve Reeves

From: Cine Zine Zone #50

Interview by Carlo Piazza, May 1989

Translated into French by Pierre Charles and then translated into English by Arcides Gonzales

CP: The film, THE SON OF SPARTACUS, with the character of Randus-Zorro, is another in the Western style.

Sergio Corbucci: I would say so. Yes, absolutely. As far as I am concerned, if I have to refer to someone, I refer to John Ford and not to Cecil B. DeMille. In Italy, at any rate, we have had directors who did sword and sandal films formally more correct than from a DeMillean point of view, but that goes back to the silent film. ROMULUS AND REMUS and THE SON OF SPARTACUS are two current, modern films, which seem to have been shot yesterday and not about 30 years ago.

CP: What can you tell us about Steve Reeves?

SC: A great guy. He always did everything I told him without a fuss. There are actors who seem to know it all. That makes me go mad. Not Reeves. I cannot complain about him.

During the shooting of ROMULUS AND REMUS, he showed me some resentment nonetheless because he thought I favored Scott over him. Of course, that wasn't true. I have never favored any actor over another. I have always treated everybody equally. Reeves had gotten this idea because he would often see me laughing and joking in the company of Scott. But Scott is the extrovert type; happy, who would cheer you up, and I preferred, frankly, to be with him than with Reeves, who was always taciturn and sullen.

CP: Do you think Leone thought about Reeves for the leading role in FISTFUL OF DOLLARS?

SC: I don't think so. Reeves does not know how to walk - perhaps because of his big thighs which impeded his movement. He wasn't right for a Western, and Leone knew it.

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.

Tessari on Leone

Duccio Tessari: The idea of giving IL COLOSSO DI RODI (THE COLOSSUS OF RHODES) a pronounced epic sense was Leone's. I did two screenplays with him: this one and FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. All that was epic in these screenplays was his; all that was ironic was mine. Sergio is epic even when he eats! In Sergio there is the desire to tell these stories, he is an extremely receptive person, as soon as you give him an idea, he begins to play tennis with you, he pushes you to develop the idea. Now they say that he is afraid of failure, and as a consequence, he is very attentive to everyone.