English please...
A promise is a promise: I took Piribiriboing's transcript with me to Switzerland and on a rainy afternoon, I translated it. Enough of that: "When you have to write you write, don't talk!", so here it is:
I stopped being a producer and became an organizer and executive producer. While I was working on a movie, I met Sergio Leone and he proposed to make OUTITW. I was quite surprised, since I never made a western and Sergio was on his fourth.
He told me: "Go to Spain and choose the locations, since you are fresh and you love westerns!"
This was an act of trust, as normally the set designers take care of the locations.
And he asked me to play Bronson's brother, the one that was to be hanged, after looking at thousand actors who resembled Bronson, even in the newspapers, but in the end he selected me. He told me to grow a beard and he let his grow at the same time. I then cut it off, but he kept his.
While shooting the hanging scene, we were in the Monument Valley, after realizing that I could easily keep my balance on the boy's shoulders, I told Sergio: "Look, let's forget about the vest which is normally used for movie hangings, as people can easily spot the trick; I'll keep the rope in my hands behind my back and if anything happens, I just let the rope go."
But at one point I lost my balance and instead of letting go, I instinctively tightened my hands on the rope and I almost hanged myself!
He kept me 2 days in the Monument Valley and on the evening of the second day, since the boy was tired, he used a stepladder instead and in the end they left me on the ladder and everybody went back to the hotel. They had left a car with the keys in it and by the time I eventually got back to the hotel, everybody was already under the shower..!
It was during OUTITW that a job which I liked became a passion and turned into an adventure.
The passion started with Sergio, when looking at his professionalism and perfectionism. He was always the first to arrive on the set and the last one to leave.
He could break the crew's back with work, but he sure knew how to praise them and motivate them.
It's not easy to find a director with all these positive traits.
As a man, he very often made me f....ng angry, but these things can happen. Maybe I made hin even angrier, but as a man, never about the job.
Sergio, while he was producing "My name is nobody", called me desperately, it was almost like an SOS. He had some major disagreement with his executive producer and he wanted me to replace him. So it happened, and my adventure with Sergio started again.
I produced with him "Un genio, due compari e un pollo".
I knew that OUTIA was to become a huge project and I happily agreed to work in it, also because it was a big challenge. I had a double function, as I also represented a Company which gave me much more power than just being an executive producer.
It was a troubled and tiresome movie, but a major film which I'm very proud of and a movie people still talk about.
Sergio had several thousand photos of that period: he wanted everything to be perfect., but he always kept an european touch. He never really fit into the Hollywood mentality.
Moreover, it was a movie about jewish gangsters...it wasn't easy. But he succeeded.
The movie was 4 hrs and 30 min. long, but the one you have seen is only 3 hrs and 40 minutes. Probably no theater owner would have screened the 4,30 version. But it was really much better!
The opening scene was at night: you could see the heads of 3 men walking. The camera then backtracks and you see 2 men walking holding the third one in the middle and when you see the whole body, you realized that the one in the middle had his feet in two cement buckets. So they were carrying the man to the pier where they had to throw him into the water.
They reach the edge of the pier and throw the man who was still moaning into the sea where he naturally drowns.
The camera would follow the immersion underwater and at the bottom of the sea you could see many corpses, some of them skeletons, floating suspended in the underwater current as their feet were cemented.
Then the camera would re-emerge and reveal the other "normal" New York.
There was a lot of talk about Leningrad. Sergio had a lot of things in his mind, but almost nothing in writing, but he would describe what would have been the opening scene.
It showed a theater where an orchestra was rehearsing. The rehearsal finishes and a man puts his instrument back in its case.
He leaves the theater, the camera backtracking in front of him, that's important.
He starts walking in the street and you can see a devastated city, buildings gutted by bombs etc.
A tram passes by and the man catches it. He sees the ruins from the tram which is now moving.
All this without a single cut: how Sergio intended to do this, I really don't know.
The tram arrives at the end station, the man leaves and walks 100 meters to a small house; he enters and there is a woman.
While they embrace, the camera turns and you see a window, then a river and across the river 1.500 german panzers in position.
I said: "Sergio, you wouldn't be able to frame 1.500 panzers not even if they were small cardboard models! On screen you could probably frame 150!" But he envisioned 1.500!
I even told him that if he ever had to film the expedition of the 1.000 Garibaldi soldiers (an episode in italian history), he would have asked for 1.500 soldiers...!
There were also some dramatic episodes. One of the 3 actors waiting for Bronson at the train station, "Knuckles" Al Muloch, a canadian actor, committed suicide.
During the shooting, I realized there was something wrong with the guy: he would refuse to act and he stopped eating.
Yet I couldn't understand what was wrong with him.
We were all staying in a 5 storey building which we used as our hotel, in a town called Guadix. On Al's second but last day of shooting, while I was climbing the stairs, I saw through the window a duster falling to the ground. I heard a loud noise.
It was he who had jumped from the 5th floor.
I ran and told everybody not to touch him and while I was wetting his lips with water, I hear a voice behind my back: "Claudio, get the costume off his body! We need it for tomorrow!"
I turned around: it was Sergio.
This is how cynical one can be... but all for the movies.
The directors are like that, they can be cynical, passionate, they can praise you or hate you, but all in the name of cinema.
Directing is the best game in town, it's simply beautiful!
I got the idea of buying in an old depot in Spain a train and a locomotive. I thought it was a good deal, as I got it almost a the cost of scrap iron. And since Sergio was supposed to arrive in Madrid the next day to check what I had selected, I went to Madrid ful of excitement.
I told him: "Sergio, I got this train for what I think is a very good deal!"
He started mumbling:"....He is used to Ponti and De Laurentiis...the train and all this.."
I'm not a very calm man so I got even angrier than him and left.
A spanish journalist who had an appointment for an interview told Sergio: " Mr. Leone, not even John Ford ever bought a train for his movies!"
Upon hearing this and sensing that this would make the news, he shouted: "Get me Crazy Horse back! Get him back!"
And he bought the train.
We rented it out also for other movies and it was used for DYS. For the crash, we used models, but for the final battle with the help of special cranes we positioned the train on one side to the ground.
At every ciak, 300 rifles had to be reloaded and some people got hurt, since small stones would get into the barrels and they fired even with the blank ammo.
And Sergio would go: "Let's do one more take!"
But you gotta give it to him: he was a great artist, a great author, one who created a new genre and employed a lot of people and when you worked with him, you always had different experiences: anger, friendship, love, laughter. Maybe we were all a bit crazy at the time.
During the numerous rehearsals of the DYS soundtrack, the one that is called "SeanSean", the music was OK but Sergio tought there was something missing. Even Morricone agreed.
Leone's wife jockingly said: "Try to build in the name of the character, maybe that helps!".
So "SeanSean" was born, which made the music unforgettable.
