Focus Features

Twenty years ago, on April 30th, Italian director Sergio Leone died.

Leone is mainly known for his spaghetti westerns – three of them (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) with Clint Eastwood. Previously, Eastwood was known mainly for his role in the long-running cowboy television series Rawhide. After appearing in the Dollars trilogy, he became an international star.

Spaghetti western is a nickname given to the particular kind of western that were made by Italian filmmakers, which were usually shot in the Spanish desert region of Almeria with a mix of American, Italian and Spanish actors.

According to Eastwood: "Sergio doesn't really know anything about the West. He is just a good director. I mean, he has his own ideas, and I think the fact that he doesn't know too much about the West is what works for him...I think his open, adolescent-type approach to film - I don't mean this in a derogatory type of way - gave to the film a new look...He did things at the time that American directors would have been afraid of in a Western."

Some of these innovations happened, Eastwood believes, because Leone was not acquainted with the Hollywood rulebook. For instance, the Hays Office had long stipulated that a character being struck by a bullet from a gun could not be in the same frame as that gun when it was fired: the effect was too violent. "You had to shoot separately, and then show the person fall. And that was always thought sort of stupid, but on television we always did it that way...And you see, Sergio never knew that, and so he was tying it up...you see the bullet go off, you see the gun fire, you see the guy fall, and it had never been done that way before."

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Twenty years ago, on April 30th, Italian director Sergio Leone died.

Leone is mainly known for his spaghetti westerns – three of them (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) with Clint Eastwood. Previously, Eastwood was known mainly for his role in the long-running cowboy television series Rawhide. After appearing in the Dollars trilogy, he became an international star.

Spaghetti western is a nickname given to the particular kind of western that were made by Italian filmmakers, which were usually shot in the Spanish desert region of Almeria with a mix of American, Italian and Spanish actors.

According to Eastwood: "Sergio doesn't really know anything about the West. He is just a good director. I mean, he has his own ideas, and I think the fact that he doesn't know too much about the West is what works for him...I think his open, adolescent-type approach to film - I don't mean this in a derogatory type of way - gave to the film a new look...He did things at the time that American directors would have been afraid of in a Western."

Some of these innovations happened, Eastwood believes, because Leone was not acquainted with the Hollywood rulebook. For instance, the Hays Office had long stipulated that a character being struck by a bullet from a gun could not be in the same frame as that gun when it was fired: the effect was too violent. "You had to shoot separately, and then show the person fall. And that was always thought sort of stupid, but on television we always did it that way...And you see, Sergio never knew that, and so he was tying it up...you see the bullet go off, you see the gun fire, you see the guy fall, and it had never been done that way before."

Leone on the set of Once Upon a Time in America

Another innovation was Leone's extraordinary use of close-ups, not as the traditional “reaction shots” or “reverse shots,” but as a series of portrait studies of faces staring at one another: Andalusian gypsy faces, scarred Italian actors, an American with two weeks of stubble. He also favored close-ups of eyes which revealed "everything you need to know about the character," as Leone put it: "courage, fear, uncertainty, death, etc." Or, in the case of the Eastwood character, complete impassivity: his eyes give nothing away. Eastwood remembers: "Leone believed, as Fellini did, as a lot of Italian directors do, that the face means everything. You'd rather have a great face than a great actor in a lot of cases.”

Eastwood also acknowledges Leone's innovative use of sound design: "A film has to have a sound of its own, and the Italians – who don't record sound while they're shooting – are very conscious of this in the post-production department. Sergio Leone felt that sound was very important, about 40 percent of the film...Leone will get a very operatic score, a lot of trumpets, and then all of a sudden, “Ka-pow!” He'll shut it off and let the horses snort and all that sort of thing. It's very effective...I think Sergio's films changed the style, the approach to Westerns. They “operacized” them, if there is such a word. They made the violence and the shooting aspect a little larger than life, and they had great music and new types of scores."

A Fistful of Dollars is based on Akira Kurosawa's samurai epic Yojimbo. A few years earlier, John Sturges had remade Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven.

For Leone's influence on Eastwood's work, check out Hang 'em High (directed by Ted Post, but produced by Eastwood's Malpaso company) and High Plains Drifter.

Extract taken from Sergio Leone: Something to Do With Death by Christopher Frayling (Faber & Faber, 2000).