Celebrating movie icons: Eli Wallach

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. This week, we're featuring our classic films and movie icons series of interviews from our archives. Today, Westerns. First up, Clint Eastwood. He became a TV star as Rowdy Yates on "Rawhide" but left that series in midstream to go overseas and make movies with Italian film director Sergio. Eastwood's stoic and vengeful character who appeared in several films was dubbed the Man with No Name. But those Italian films made Eastwood not just a star but an icon. Terry Gross spoke with Clint Eastwood in 1997. At the time, he was the subject of a biography by film critic Richard Schickel.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: Well, in some of your action roles in some of your Westerns and, like, "Dirty Harry" films, you not only don't say a lot, but what you do say you're saying often through clenched teeth, you know, in that really guttural voice. How did you develop that style of speaking?

CLINT EASTWOOD: (Imitating Dirty Harry) I don't know what you're talking about.

(LAUGHTER)

EASTWOOD: Well, I think that the character just drives you in that as a character who is maybe frustrated with the things that the common person on the street is frustrated with - the bureaucracy that we live in, the nightmare that we as a civilization have placed on ourselves. And it - I think this is a person who is frustrated with that, especially if you're trying to solve the case in a limited amount of time. So make my day line or the, do you feel lucky, punk kind of lines were lines that people gravitated towards.

GROSS: Did you have a sense of that reading the script that, you know, presidents would be (laughter), you know, making - you know, improvising on those lines and that they'd be - people just - they would just enter the general vocabulary? Could you read a script and say, these lines are going to last beyond the film?

EASTWOOD: Nobody can say that for sure. But I think the appeal of some of those early characters was the fact that the man would have the right answer. And it was always usually very terse and kind of right to the point but with a little bit of humor involved. So everybody said, God, I would love to be able to do that.

GROSS: Have you ever been able to do that, have just the right comeback at just the right moment?

EASTWOOD: Very rarely.

GROSS: Right.

EASTWOOD: (Laughter).

GROSS: Now, when you're doing a line like, make my day, and you know, OK, this is a really good line, do you, like, go home and do line reading - does it go, MAKE my day, make MY day, make my DAY? And just do it over and over until you figure out exactly how you want to do it?

EASTWOOD: Looking into the bathroom...

GROSS: Right (laughter).

EASTWOOD: ...Mirror and doing some of your best acting.

GROSS: Are you talking to me?

EASTWOOD: No, I don't go over the lines. I don't play them out loud. I just - I'd rather play them for the first time when I do them.

GROSS: No. Really?

EASTWOOD: And I usually do them by the motivation of what the feelings are at the time. So I start them from what the intent is and then let it kind of go out. It's sort of like blowing through a trumpet or something. You start, and the sound magnifies as it comes out. If you sit there and practice line readings to yourself, you'll just get confused.

GROSS: I want to get to your spaghetti Westerns, the films you made with Sergio Leone. You started the Sergio Leone films when you were still making "Rawhide," the TV Western. How did Sergio Leone get to see "Rawhide" and decide you were the one to star in His Western?

EASTWOOD: He had seen an episode that an agency had in Rome. And he had seen an episode, and they thought, well, here's a chance to hire an American actor who has been doing Western but is not very expensive.

EASTWOOD: They didn't have any...

GROSS: (Laughter) Right.

EASTWOOD: They didn't have any money to spend, so they didn't have a lot of choices as far as names of the moment.

GROSS: There's a lot of really interesting facial close-ups in your movies with Sergio Leone, and he had a very iconographic way of shooting faces, particularly your face. And your face in those close-ups is often, well, mysterious, unknowable. Instead of the facial close-ups like revealing this essence of who you are, they reveal the unknowability of who you are. And I've always wondered, what were you thinking during those close-ups to get the right expression on your face?

(LAUGHTER)

EASTWOOD: The first response would be to say absolutely nothing to get the - George Kuko used to say - he'd tell Greta Garbo, sometimes, to look into the camera and stare and don't think about a thing. But that's maybe a little oversimplification or a way to got a certain effect out of her at that time. But you think about what the demands are of the plot. Usually, because this character, though he wasn't saying a lot, he was plotting a lot, and so you just thought about what your next moves were. It's just a question of thinking like you would in regular - in real life. You have an inner monologue. Every actor plays an inner monologue as you're playing your outer character. And sometimes your outer character is saying, good evening. It's wonderful to see you. But underneath, you might be saying, dirty, rotten. So you really don't - so that's your inner monologue, and so I might have been saying something like that to myself at the time as, you know...

GROSS: You develop...

EASTWOOD: Like, these guys - I'd like to blow them all away, but I'd be very pleasant at the moment.

GROSS: You developed a squint, also, in some of those close-ups.

EASTWOOD: Well, that was just the sunlight.

GROSS: Was it?

EASTWOOD: Yeah. They bomb me with a bunch of lights, and you're outside, and it's 90 degrees. It's hard not to squint.

GROSS: Now, in Richard Schickel's book about you, he says that, you know, "Rawhide" followed the strict production code of the time. You couldn't show a fired gun and the victim of the bullet in the same shot. There had to be an edit in between. What was your reaction to Sergio Leone's really vivid approach to violence?

EASTWOOD: Well, that was true. The Hays Office at that time had a rule for Westerns only, ironically, and you couldn't show the shootee and the shooter in the same shot. It couldn't be a tie-up shot, in other words. So you'd have to do it as an individual cut. And if you look at even later American Westerns - "High Noon" - you won't see the tie-up. But Sergio didn't know about all that. And I wasn't about to tell him because I was really enjoying this. It was breaking - we were trying to break all the molds. And in breaking all the molds, it made those pictures a hit or somewhat of a revisionist idea or certainly an outsider's point of view.

They became popular, but they also brought with it some resentment. There were a lot of people felt, who was this upstart? We didn't come in and bless this guy to come along, and we didn't bless these movies to come along, an Italian interpretation of the great American genre. So there was a certain resentment that hung around with those pictures for some time. Now as people look back on them, they enjoy the fact that there was a different period, and then it went on to somebody else, and Sam Peckinpah came along later, and he did another look at the Western. Then someone else comes along and does another one. And I come back to them and take another shot. And somebody else down the line - that way, it keeps the great American art form alive.

GROSS: Clint Eastwood, I thought that your choice of directing and starring in "The Unforgiven" (ph) was such an interesting choice because it's a movie about a man who goes from bad man to good man to myth. And it's also interesting because it's about the difficulty of killing someone and what it takes out of you when you do kill someone. And you'd been in so many mythic movies and been in so many movies where the character that you played killed a lot of people. So I'm interested in how you related to the story in "The Unforgiven" and how it dealt with myth making and with violence.

EASTWOOD: Well, those exact things that you mentioned are what attracted me to the project. The fact that - but - even though I had done pictures where I've been a police officer and Western films where I had done - had a lot of gunplay and stuff, it's not that I approved of that sort of thing. And I don't necessarily approve of the romanticizing of gunplay. And I don't think it's - and I thought here was a chance - here was a story that had sort of shot holes in that, if you'll pardon the pun...

(LAUGHTER)

EASTWOOD: You know, and it was - it brought out the truth about gunplay and the fact that there is some loss to your soul when you commit an act of violence. And to play a person who was deeply affected in his life because of some of the mayhem that he'd been responsible for was to me - made the character more interesting and was more interesting for me to play. And that particular - in fact, I never thought the film would be really commercial when I was making it because it had all these statements about mayhem and violence. And I thought maybe this might not be a straight-ahead action movie that people wanted. But I like the story, and I felt it was worth telling.

GROSS: Well, Clint Eastwood, I feel like I must talk with you a little bit about music. Let's listen to this.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T FENCE ME IN")

EASTWOOD: (Singing) Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide-open country that I love. Don't fence me. Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze, listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever, but I ask you please, don't fence me. Just turn me loose. Let me straddle my old saddle...

Terry, you should have seen the pain in this room, right?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: And that's from the album "Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites." And there's a picture of Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on the cover, "Rawhide's Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites."

EASTWOOD: That was - actually, I was the Milli Vanilli of the moment there.

GROSS: (Laughter)

EASTWOOD: That wasn't me (laughter).

GROSS: Oh, yes, it was. I actually like your singing voice. I really do. I mean, this is a strange album with strange arrangements and not always good songs. But I really like your singing. I imagine you're also, like, influenced by Chet Baker in your singing.

EASTWOOD: Well, that wasn't - first place, that wasn't the kind of songs that I would normally like to sing.

GROSS: The songs on here, I'd imagine not. But you got to sing Cole Porter, "Don't Fence Me In."

EASTWOOD: There's nothing wrong with that. Cole Porter is certainly wonderful. But what happened is that somebody had the brilliant idea that I should do some cowboy songs, not country-western songs, Nashville type, but real straight cowboy songs. And I wasn't sure whether I like the idea, but they said, well, you'll do it, and we have a session tomorrow. And I said, well, tomorrow, I'm leaving. Well, you do it. You just stop by the studio on the way to the airport.

So I did a whole album. You think about people who take six months to make an album, but this one that - we did the whole album in one session. And I didn't know the songs. I had to come in and, you know, learn them real quick. And some of them I knew. Some songs like that, you've heard as a child, but you don't really know them. And so it was a little frustrating. It wasn't my favorite musical experience in life. But it was, you know - there, again, you learn something every day.

GROSS: Would you like to sing more or play more or...

EASTWOOD: No. I don't have any - one of my key sayings...

GROSS: Yes?

EASTWOOD: A man must know his limitations.

(LAUGHTER)

BIANCULLI: Clint Eastwood speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. Coming up, we hear from actor Eli Wallach, who co-starred with Eastwood in the classic Sergio Leone Western "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Eli Wallach already had played villains in Westerns before he appeared opposite Clint Eastwood as Tuco in "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly." Tuco was the ugly one and also was one of the toughest of the tough guys in the 1960 movie "The Magnificent Seven." Terry Gross spoke with Eli Wallach in 1990 and asked him how he got that part.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

ELI WALLACH: When I first read the script, I said, well, I want to play the crazy - it was based on the "Seven Samurai." I want to play the crazy samurai. Oh, no, they said. That's the love interest. Horst Buchholz is going to play it. What do you want me to play? They said, the head bandit.

I said, well, in the Japanese movie, you just see his horse's hoofs, and he's a man with an eye patch. I don't want to play that. Then I read the script carefully, and I come in - ride into town in the first minute of that movie, shoot somebody and ride out. The next 50 minutes of that movie are devoted to me, saying, is he coming back? When is he coming? I said, I'll do it. I'll do it. And I loved - I used to arrive on the set early in the morning, put on my outfit, get on my horse with my 35 bandits, and we'd go for an hour ride through the brush in Tepoztlan in Mexico. I loved it. I loved it.

TERRY GROSS: Did you have to learn gunplay and horse riding for the role?

WALLACH: No. If it says I shoot somebody, I shoot them. I'll never forget what my son said. Yul Brynner shot and killed me in this movie. And my son was about 7, and he said to me, gee, Dad, couldn't you outdraw Yul Brynner? I said, Peter, when you read the script, you read whether you're shot or not shot, so...

I love those kind of films. They're fun.

GROSS: Now, another famous Western that you did is "The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly."

WALLACH: Right.

GROSS: Now, this was - this is the most celebrated of the spaghetti Westerns.

WALLACH: Correct.

GROSS: And the director, Sergio Leone, is now considered one of the great directors of our time. He was not known, though, when you worked with him on "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly." Did you think of him as a great, or potentially great, director then?

WALLACH: No. I - when - I was making a film in California when the agent out there said, there's an Italian here who wants you to be in a movie. I said, what kind of movie? He said, a Western. I said - he said, a spaghetti Western. I said, that's an anomaly.

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: That's like Hawaiian pizza. I don't know. He said, he wants you to look at a few minutes of one of his other movies. And I looked at a few minutes, and I said, I'll do it. Where do you want me to go? He said, I want you in Rome on such-and-such a date. And I arrived, and I spent the next 4 1/2 months working every day in that movie. And it was a exhilarating experience.

GROSS: Well, now, what had he seen of yours?

WALLACH: Evidently, "The Magnificent Seven" - saw that. I don't know how - you never know how things happen in the movies.

GROSS: Did it seem ironic to you that you and Clint Eastwood, who had played in American Westerns, were now making a Western for an Italian director?

WALLACH: Originally, all those Italians changed their names. Two of the biggest stars in Italy are Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: Their real names are Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli, and they changed their names because no one wanted to go and see Italians playing Westerns. But I - after "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly," I spent about six years off and on in Italy, doing Westerns.

GROSS: You played a Mexican in "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly."

WALLACH: Yeah.

GROSS: So once again, you had to do a Mexican accent, but it was a light one. It was kind of...

WALLACH: Yes.

GROSS: ...Light Mexican accent. I want to play a short clip from the movie.

WALLACH: Oh.

GROSS: OK? And this is a scene - if anyone remembers the story, I'm sure a lot of our listeners do, you and Clint Eastwood have this scam going. There's a big price on your head,

WALLACH: Right.

GROSS: So Clint Eastwood brings you into the law. And just as they're about to hang you, he cuts you loose, and you both ride away, and you split the bounty.

WALLACH: Exactly.

GROSS: (Laughter) So you split the price that was on your head. So this is after the first time, when you're about to be hung, Clint Eastwood frees you, and you're splitting up the bounty.

WALLACH: Right.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY")

WALLACH: (As Tuco) There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend - those with a rope around their neck and the people who have the job of doing the cutting. Listen, the neck at the end of the rope is mine. I run the risks. So the next time, I want more than half.

CLINT EASTWOOD: (As Blondie) You may run the risks, my friend, but I do the cutting. We cut down my percentage - cigar? - liable to interfere with my aim.

WALLACH: (As Tuco) But if you miss, you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco (laughter). Nothing.

GROSS: Oh, that little sadistic laugh at the end (laughter).

WALLACH: But I don't think it's a very good Mexican accent. You know, it's standardized. It isn't - I didn't do the cliche of, (impersonating Mexican accent) I think maybe I do - you know, I don't...

I didn't do that. I wanted specifically to be clear in what I was saying.

GROSS: "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" is really one of the most kind of brutal, sadistic Westerns, in a way.

WALLACH: No, it's done with tongue in cheek. It's not brutal.

GROSS: I know. I know. It is - I know there's a lot of humor in it, but what kind of mood did Leone - or Leone? I'm never sure which it is...

WALLACH: Leone.

GROSS: ...Tell you that he wanted?

WALLACH: One of the things he said to me, he said, I want every shot to be done like Vermeer. I want the light to come in from the side windows. And he said to me, I don't want you to have your gun in a holster. I said, where will I put it? He said, with a lanyard around your neck. I said, oh. And then it dangles between my knees, right?

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: He said, yeah. He said, when you want it, you twist your shoulders, and I cut, and the gun is in your hand. I said, show me. He put it around his neck. He twisted his shoulder. He missed the gun. It hit him in the groin. He said, keep it in your pocket. So that's...

GROSS: (Laughter) It's interesting that you became a kind of action hero when you were - what? - probably in your 50s already.

WALLACH: When? "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly?"

GROSS: And "The Magnificent Seven."

WALLACH: Yeah. I was - no, I was a little younger.

GROSS: No, you must have been in your 40s in "The Magnificent Seven."

WALLACH: Yeah. Yeah.

GROSS: But, you know, like, today, most action heroes are a lot younger. It's like, they start off in their 20s and 30s playing that...

WALLACH: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Kind of role.

WALLACH: Yeah.

GROSS: Did you feel like it was an odd match?

WALLACH: Well, you wear very tight pants in these movies.

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: And to get up on a horse, they'd always have to cut. I'd put my foot in the stirrup, but then they'd cut away to somebody looking at me.

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: And the next thing, I was on the horse. So no, I tell you...

GROSS: (Laughter).

WALLACH: ...In "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly," I did most of the stunts, and they were very dangerous. I was sitting on a horse with a noose around my neck, and Clint's supposed to shoot the rope. Then they put a little charge of dynamite in the rope, and it would explode, and then I would ride off on this horse.

I said, did you put any cotton in the horse's ears? They said, what do you mean, cotton in the horse's ears? I said, he can hear the explosion. He's going to be terrified. My hands are tied behind me. Well, they didn't do it. They shot the rope, and that horse took off. And I'm riding, not using reins, just using my knees, and praying that that horse would eventually stop. And eventually, he did, but it was frightening.

BIANCULLI: Actor Eli Wallach speaking with Terry Gross in 1990. He died in 2014. Coming up, we talk about the films of Italian director Sergio Leone, who bucked the traditional Hollywood Western for his own version. Also, what it's like to jump on the back of a galloping horse while it's pulling a stagecoach. We hear from stuntman Hal Needham. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ENNIO MORRICONE'S "EL BUENO, EL FEO Y EL MALO")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Let's continue with our series about classic films and movie icons featuring interviews from our archives. Today, we're looking at Westerns. And though it's common to think of the genre as classically American, thanks to the films of John Ford and others, in the 1960s, some of the best Westerns were imported from Italy. That's when the Italian director Sergio Leone made such films as "A Fistful Of Dollars," "For A Few Dollars More," "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" and "Once Upon A Time In The West."

His brutal Westerns revived the genre, made a movie star of Clint Eastwood and created a visual style that influenced many film directors around the world. He also introduced many of us to the film music of Ennio Morricone. Yet despite all that, Leone's films at the time were disparagingly called spaghetti Westerns. In 2005, Terry Gross spoke with Christopher Frayling, one of the world's leading experts on Leone. At the time, Frayling had written the book "Once Upon A Time In Italy: The Westerns Of Sergio Leone."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: What's a scene from Leone's first Western, "A Fistful Of Dollars," that you loved in 1967 when you first saw it and that you still love now, that you could describe for us?

CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING: (Laughter) Gosh. Four or five bad guys sitting on a five-bar gate in the main street of a flyblown Spanish town standing in for a northern Mexican town. And the man with no name, the hero, walks up to them. And there's this satisfying sort of crunch on the soundtrack as his boots walk down the main street, and lots of dust. And they start - in true macho style, they start abusing each other, and they start laughing at him. And he looks down and lights his cigarillo and says, my mule don't like you laughing. He gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you just apologize to my mule - and then there's silence. And there's a whirring sound on the soundtrack. And you get the eyes, and you get the puff of smoke, and suddenly an explosion and all five bad guys fall off the five-bar gate.

It's a sort of parody of the Western confrontation. It's so extreme and very, very stylish. And it was the first really big close-up of the young Clint Eastwood, who was fantastically good-looking in those days, only with a designer stubble smoking a cheroot with his eyes screwed up as he looked into the sun. It's a very memorable moment. It's stayed with me ever since.

GROSS: Well, I think we should hear that scene because it's classic Clint Eastwood...

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: ...Talking between his teeth. So here's that scene that you're talking about. And the explosion that we hear at the end is him shooting all those guys who are waiting for him.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS")

LORENZO ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Adios, amigo. Listen, stranger. Didn't you get the idea? We don't like to see bad boys like you in town. Go get your mule. You let him get away from you?

CLINT EASTWOOD: (As Joe) See, that's what I want to talk to you about. He's feeling real bad.

ROBLEDO: (As Baxter Gunman #1) Huh?

EASTWOOD: (As Joe) My mule. You see, he got all riled up when you went and fired those shots at his feet.

LUIS BARBOO: (As Baxter Gunman #2) Hey, you making some kind of joke?

EASTWOOD: (As Joe) No. You see, I understand you men were just playing around. But the mule, he just doesn't get it. Of course, if you were to all apologize...

(LAUGHTER)

EASTWOOD: (As Joe) I don't think it's nice, you laughing. You see, my mule don't like people laughing, gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologize like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUN FIRING)

GROSS: That's a scene from Sergio Leone's first western, "A Fistful Of Dollars." Why did Sergio Leone love Westerns? Why did he want to make them in Italy?

FRAYLING: Well, you got to imagine a child growing up in 1930s Rome at a time when Mussolini was the dictator and when most American movies were banned, and those that were seen were dubbed into Italian. And the young Leone first saw Hollywood Western movies in the 1930s at that time, and his heroes were Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and films like "Stagecoach." And to him, they represented an absolute model of freedom. He lived in suburban Rome in cramped conditions. And he saw these wide-open spaces, this unimaginable desert that goes on forever. He saw these - he couldn't understand what they were saying. He never heard - in fact, he never learned to speak English, Sergio Leone. That's what's so extraordinary. But they were dubbed into a different language, not very well.

But nevertheless, they clicked in his mind. Then in the 1950s, when he went into the film industry, he found that nobody was really very interested in the Western. A lot of Hollywood veteran directors went over to Italy to make epics, films like "Ben-Hur" and "Helen Of Troy" and "Quo Vadis." And Leone hung around these films. Sometimes he was the assistant director. And he talked to directors like Fred Zinnemann, who'd made "High Noon," Robert Aldrich, who'd made "The Last Sunset" and "Apache" and films like that. And they all said to him, the Western's dead. It's finished. We don't make Westerns anymore.

So basically, Leone made Westerns because Hollywood had stopped making them, and because in Europe, and particularly in Italy, there was this huge interest in the Western and a huge knowledge of it, as well. So the whole thing starts in a kind of folk memory of American Westerns that went back to the 1930s. And it's partly political. But the other thing was that Leone felt that Westerns had got a bit talky. There was too much talking in them. He liked Westerns where Rin Tin Tin did all the thinking, you know?

GROSS: (Laughter).

FRAYLING: Old-fashioned Westerns where - lots and lots of action and not too much talk. He didn't like psychology. Freudian Westerns got on his nerves.

GROSS: Well, you know, but he knew he was making Westerns that were different from American ones. Like, he said - and I think this is to you that he said this, in your interview with him - that John Ford, the great director of Westerns, was full of optimism, whereas I on the contrary am full of pessimism.

FRAYLING: Well, that's the thing. He loved the look of the Western and the idea of the Western and the fairy tale of the Western. But he didn't like some of the ideologies. He didn't like John Wayne very much and some of the sort of crusading element of the Western that you got in '50s and early '60s Westerns. So loved the visuals, didn't like the ideology very much. So he takes the concept of the Western and makes it much, much more cynical. I mean, the hero, for example, when people ask him - why are you doing this for us? - as someone actually asks in "A Fistful Of Dollars," the first of his Westerns, why are you doing this for us? Instead of saying, you know, because a man's got to do what a man's got to do, or there's some things a man can't just ride around, things like that, he says $500? He works strictly for ready cash, so he has a very streetwise, 1960s cash-only attitude to life, and this was a very different kind of hero to the old-fashioned crusading hero.

And I think that the modern movie action hero begins with the Clint Eastwood character in "A Fistful Of Dollars," where you identify with the hero not because of what he believes in anymore 'cause he doesn't actually believe in anything. You identify with him because of his style - you know, the way he wears his clothes, the way he walks, the personal style of the man. And that, of course, is the basis of identification of all modern action heroes, and I think it begins with Clint Eastwood in "A Fistful Of Dollars."

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about the casting in those Westerns. His casting is so good. Of course, Clint Eastwood is the most famous character in his Westerns, the Man With No Name in the "Fistful Of Dollars" trilogy. Clint Eastwood was known as Rowdy Yates on "Rawhide," the TV cattle herding series. What did Leone see in Eastwood, you know, in the mid-1960s when he cast him?

FRAYLING: Well, it was partly because Clint Eastwood wasn't very expensive (laughter). He came for $15,000-16,000 in those days, and they had a very, very limited budget on "Fistful Of Dollars." But mainly, he wasn't the first choice, either, that Leone had in mind Henry Fonda, right at the - even at that early stage. He had in mind James Coburn and one or two other actors, but they all proved to be - and Charles Bronson - and they all proved to be either too expensive, or they didn't read the script. And it has to be said, the script, in its early stages, which was badly translated from the Italian, is a very peculiar read. We will go to the Hill of Boots, you know, that sort of thing.

(LAUGHTER)

FRAYLING: And so I'm not surprised that they turned it down. Then Sergio Leone watched an episode of "Rawhide" on 16mm in Rome, at an agency, and saw Clint Eastwood. And what he saw was this man who walks in this very cat-like, light way - that light Californian voice, the squint of his eyes. And the legend has it - I don't know if it's true or not - that Leone started coloring in the picture with some stubble and some rough clothes, a sheepskin waistcoat, a dirty denim shirt. Roughed him up a bit, made a lot of makeup. There's a lot of makeup in these films. There's a surprising amount, by today's standards, to make him look much more dark and sunburned. He wanted a sort of rougher character. And, of course, the cheroot, the cigar, 'cause in the 1960s, the cheroot was sort of masculine and hard and a controlled person.

So he roughed Clint Eastwood up a bit, and together, they discussed the part. I think that Clint Eastwood is probably the only actor in history who's actually fought hard for less lines (laughter), that he read the script and thought he was saying much too much. It was much too talky. And he had these long speeches of motivation and everything, and Clint Eastwood just put a line through them and said, look - you can say this in one line.

BIANCULLI: Christopher Frayling, speaking with Terry Gross in 2005. Coming up, broken bones and near-death experiences. We hear from former stuntman Hal Needham. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ENNIO MORRICONE'S "ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Hal Needham probably was one of the most famous Hollywood stunt doubles. He did all kinds of stunts in all kinds of movies, but he got his start in Western movies and TV shows such as "Laramie," "Laredo" and "Have Gun - Will Travel." On that show, he was the show's stunt coordinator and the stunt double for its star, Richard Boone. After many years of jumping on horses and stagecoaches, and falling from great heights after being shot, Hal Needham became famous for car stunts. Terry Gross spoke with him in 2011, when he had written a memoir called "Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life."

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS: Now, what were some of the standard Western stunts of the '50s and '60s when you were making the Westerns?

HAL NEEDHAM: Well, it had mostly to do with what we call a saddle fall, where you get shot and fall off the horse. We did horse falls, rear-end falls, wagon wrecks, buggies and so on. Also, a thing called a bulldog, where the bad guy's trying to get away, the good guy comes up behind him, jumps from his horse and then knocks the guy off the horse, and it normally winds up in a big fight. And we did high falls and some roping stuff, and - pretty well covers the major of them, anyway.

GROSS: Yeah. Now, one of your early stunts was for "Have Gun - Will Travel," and you were jumping from a rock about 30 foot high onto a stagecoach that was moving by.

NEEDHAM: Oh, yeah. Yes.

GROSS: And you're supposed to land on the top of the stagecoach as it rides by. Tell us what happened.

NEEDHAM: Well, first of all, that was my second stunt on "Have Gun - Will Travel." I had doubled Boone the day before, and he was kind of impressed, and he said, all right - you can do some stuff tomorrow. I got out there and they said, can you jump from that rock to the top of a coach as it's going by, as it's passing. I said, I think so. So anyway, the rock was 30 feet high, and the top of a coach is 6 feet long and 4 feet wide. They said, you want to see a rehearsal? I said, why not? They brought that thing under me, and I thought, I might have let my alligator mouth overload my jaybird back end again.

GROSS: (Laughter).

NEEDHAM: But - 'cause it really looked small. It looked like a postage stamp. Anyway, they brought the coach through, and I hit it right in the center. As matter of fact, I broke through the top, right up to my armpits, and that kind of shocked the folks inside the coach. And when they got us stopped, Boone came over and offered me the job of being his stunt coordinator, as well as his double on "Have Gun - Will Travel."

GROSS: So let me ask you - when you're jumping off a 30-foot-high rock onto a moving stagecoach, the top of which looks like a postage stamp because it's so relatively small from the height that you're at, what kind of mental calculation do you do to figure out when to jump?

NEEDHAM: You know what? You can't say, all right, when the coach gets there, to that mark, I'm going to jump. You just have to look at it because you don't know how fast those horses are going to be running or anything else. It's just a thing that - it's a clock inside of you that you say, now, and you go. There's no way to set a mark or anything like that to leave the rock.

GROSS: Now, on that stunt, was there protection for you? Like, if you missed the coach, was there padding on the ground?

NEEDHAM: Nothing.

GROSS: Nothing.

NEEDHAM: Nothing. It'd be impossible. First of all, they'd have to pad the road in front and behind, and the horses can't go through that, and over the side. They'd have to camouflage it. No. It's just too much of a problem. And if you say you can do it, they expect you to do it.

GROSS: I say this with the greatest of respect. I think you have to be crazy to be a stuntman like you.

NEEDHAM: I won't argue that point.

GROSS: (Laughter) OK. So one of the standard shots that you'd have to do is, like, you're the bad guy, and you're being shot, and you have to fall. So...

NEEDHAM: You mean fall off the horse or fall off of what? A rock?

GROSS: Fall off a balcony, fall off a horse...

NEEDHAM: Sure. Yeah.

GROSS: ...Fall off a rock. You've fallen off all of them. So say, like, you're fall - you're shot. You're falling off from a height.

NEEDHAM: Yeah.

GROSS: So when you started making Westerns, what protection was there for you to fall onto?

NEEDHAM: Well, when I started, and that's a long time ago, they would take sawhorses, you know, like carpenters use. They'd take those, and they'd put 1x12 - pine 1x12s across the top, put some cardboard boxes underneath it and put a mattress or two on top of it. And that's what saved you from being killed, because the boards would bend about 6 inches, and then they'd all break, and then the boxes would catch you. So that's what they had, and believe me, 45, 50 feet off of that into those, about all you could handle.

GROSS: It sounds so makeshift.

NEEDHAM: Oh, it definitely was. But, you know, that's all they could come up with at the time, and I'm going to be really braggadocious here. I'm the one that brought airbags into the stunt world.

GROSS: What's the highest jump you've done?

NEEDHAM: Hundred feet.

BIANCULLI: Former stuntman Hal Needham speaking with Terry Gross in 2011. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Today, we're talking about Westerns as our week of interviews from the archives celebrating classic films and movie icons continues. Let's get back to Terry's 2011 interview with former stuntman Hal Needham, who got his start on Westerns.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)

GROSS: You say one of the most dangerous stunts in Westerns - and if you've seen a Western, you've seen this one - it's the stirrup drag, where a guy falls off his horse, but his leg is still in the stirrup, and the horse keeps galloping, dragging the cowboy across the ground over rocks and brush and who knows what else. Why is that the most dangerous Western stunt?

NEEDHAM: Well, there's a couple of things. Matter of fact, I saw one of our stuntmen get killed doing a stirrup drag.

GROSS: Wow.

NEEDHAM: He had to go through the gate of - entrance to a ranch. And when he fell off the horse, the horse - you rehearse them so they'll go where you want him to go. Well, this horse didn't follow where he's supposed to go. And when he came to the gate, he swung around, the horse did, and it flung the guy way out to the side, and he hit his head on the post - a fence post and killed him. So that reason it's so dangerous, one reason.

The other is when you fall off the horse and hit the ground, you're tied to the horse with a cable to the stirrup. And when you hit the end of that cable, it flings you back under the horse's feet, his back feet. And so you got to put one foot up against the horse's belly to keep yourself from being stepped on by his back feet. It's pretty dangerous.

Now, the way we get released, you have a release on your foot to the cable, and you just put a little wire up to your belt, and you pull that, and that's supposed to release you. If that doesn't work, you have a second release on hooked with a cable, something back - way back by camera, and that releases the whole saddle. And if that doesn't work, you put two or three what you hope are your buddies on the fastest horses you can find, and they're called pickup men. They get out there, and if they see you're in trouble, they're supposed to come in, stop the horse and get you loose. It's really, really dangerous.

GROSS: Were you ever hurt during one of those yourself?

NEEDHAM: Thank God, no, I never was. And I've done quite a few of them, and I just got lucky.

GROSS: So what goes through your mind when a stuntman is killed? Is that - it must be a very sobering experience.

NEEDHAM: We're all aware of the fact that it can happen. And hopefully, when you get ready to do the stunt, you've got it figured out. You got your confidence up. You say, this is going to be OK, and you go for it. And when something goes wrong, we all understand it because we've all had things go wrong. One stunt I did, I broke my back, six rib, punctured lung, knocked out some teeth. That wasn't the way I had it planned at all.

GROSS: Yeah. I'm sure it wasn't. One of your most dangerous stunts was for a Western, "Little Big Man," about Custer's Last Stand.

NEEDHAM: Right.

GROSS: And - so describe the stunt that you had to do here.

NEEDHAM: Dustin Hoffman and his wife are heading west. And they're on - in a stagecoach. They've got a six-up of horses hook to it. They get attacked by the Indians. The shotgun guard gets shot off the coach. The driver turns chicken, and he's up hiding - in the boot of the coach hiding. So the horses run away.

A stuntman doubling Dusty got out of the coach, climbed up on the seat and jumped to the closest horse to the coach. I, as an Indian, came up on the outside and transferred from my horse to the one right next to him. Then he stands up and jumps from that horse to the back of the one ahead of him, and I follow him. Then does it again out to the leader, and I followed him out there. So we did that three times, but we did the whole scene 13 times. And here's what's really hard to believe. We had to do a standing broad jump from the back of one horse to the back of the next one of 14 feet. And I tell you what. There's no athlete, I don't think, can do that standing still.

GROSS: These are horses that are in motion.

NEEDHAM: Oh.

GROSS: They're galloping.

NEEDHAM: They're runaway.

GROSS: Yeah.

NEEDHAM: Runaway - yeah, a coach running away. When we were training the horses to accept us jumping on their back and everything, the way we found we could jump the furthest was to get in motion, get in sync with a horse so when he pushed off his back feet, we would use his momentum to get aside an extra two or three feet so we would get to the next horse. It was the toughest physical stunt I ever did in my life...

GROSS: Now...

NEEDHAM: ...The toughest.

GROSS: I hate to bring this up, but had you failed, you would have been trampled by the horses...

NEEDHAM: Oh, well...

GROSS: ...Or run over by the coach, depending where you were. Yeah.

NEEDHAM: You'd have two, four, or six horses run over you plus a 4,000-pound coach. Yeah. You couldn't fail. If you messed up, you was going to be in big trouble.

GROSS: So you worked with a lot of horses doing Westerns. You owned horses. You trained horses. Two of your most beloved horses were named Hondo and Alamo. And Hondo lost his life as a result of a stunt. He broke his leg doing a stunt.

NEEDHAM: Yep. That's right.

GROSS: What happened?

NEEDHAM: Well, you know, matter of fact, it was on "Little Big Man." I played the Indian that came down and jumped from my horse to the horse pulling the coach. The director wanted a shot of me coming off the hillside prior to that shot, prior to me transferring. So he said, come fast as you can. I said, all right. And it was fall, and the hillside - the grass was all dead and everything. So here I come up field just as fast as Hondo could run. And in a blink of an eye, I was sailing through the air, and he had stepped in a gopher hole and broke his leg. And so he slid a long way. So do I. And I looked back, and I could see he was trying to get up. So I went back to take a survey and see what was wrong and so on, and I realized he had broken his leg.

NEEDHAM: So I held him down. Here's the part that I think is - shows how much I love my horse. We were way out in the country, and I said, does anybody got a gun? When a horse breaks a leg, unless he's a thoroughbred or something, you destroy him. You put him out. So anyway, I said, anybody got a gun? And the prop man said, no, I don't have one. And my buddy said, well, he had one in the car. So I said, go get it. And he came back and handed me that gun. You know, I could not shoot that horse. And the reason I had to shoot him or somebody had to shoot him was they said, if you don't get a vet out here and verify that he had a broken leg before you kill him, you can't collect the insurance. I said, well, hell, it's going to take an hour and a half, two hours to get a vet out here. I don't want that horse to lay there suffering. Get me a gun, you know? So anyway, we wound up shooting him. And don't tell me a big man don't cry 'cause I did.

GROSS: Did it change how attached you allowed yourself to become to your stunt horses?

NEEDHAM: No. You know what? I made so much money with him, and I was such buddies with him. I'll tell you two stories if you'll let me. One was I had one of them, and I was just practicing a little bit. And I fell, and I came up. And I was in my backyard or right close to my backyard, and my wife is out there. And I fell off this horse. And I was sitting, and I sat up on my butt, and I was just sitting on the ground. And he came up, and he put his head over my shoulder. And I scratched his chin, under his chin. My wife said, if you did that to me, we'd get along a hell of a lot better, you know?

GROSS: (Laughter).

NEEDHAM: So that's how - but also, I have a thing in my book about when a horse - if I got two together, I kept those two together all the time so they become buddies. When you take one away, the other one would just pace back and forth in the corral until they worked up a sweat. Or sometimes, if they're ill, a little ill - they've got a stomach ache or something - they'll do the same thing. I've been known to go out in the corral, out in the barn, take some hay and make myself a bed and get a tarp and just cover up and sleep with them, out there in the barn with them. When I do, they calm down immediately, you know? And they'll come over and sniff me, and eventually they'll start eating the hay I'm laying on and things like that. You got to have that rapport with them to understand them.

BIANCULLI: Former stuntman Hal Needham speaking with Terry Gross in 2011. He died in 2013.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILL LEE'S "WE LOVE ROLL CALL Y-ALL")

BIANCULLI: On Monday's show, we conclude our series of Classic Films and Movie Icons with interviews from our archive with Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, who has been in Spike Lee's films "Jungle Fever, "Do The Right Thing," "Mo' Better Blues," "School Daze" and "Chi-Raq." I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF BILL LEE'S "WE LOVE ROLL CALL Y-ALL")

BIANCULLI: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.