Clint Eastwood: "I say it with all the respect in the world, but I know what I'm talking about when I say that you should never trust anyone in an Italian film"

ELLE

By Fernando Sanchez

3/29/2026

The legendary American actor starred in a total of three spaghetti westerns directed by Italian director Sergio Leone, shot in Spain.

The first project to give visibility to Clint Eastwood in the audiovisual industry was the television series Rawhide, aired in the United States in the late fifties and set in the Wild West. For eight seasons, the actor played Rowdy Yates, a young cowboy committed to driving a herd from Texas to Kansas, facing outlaws and extreme weather conditions along the way. A role that, however, ended up pigeonholing him in the western genre, making it more complex to stand out in a landscape already saturated with similar figures.

After five years in television, his career seemed to have stopped, until Italian director Sergio Leone contacted him to propose that he move to Europe and lead a new film trilogy. The project came after the rejection of established actors such as Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and James Coburn. At that time, the success of the spaghetti western was intertwined with the decline of the classic American western, prompting many performers to work in low-budget Italian productions.

Eastwood's agent advised him to decline, calling the offer a "mal paso" (misstep, ed.) in his career — an expression that the actor would later choose as the name for his production company, Malpaso Productions. Eastwood decided instead to accept and left for Europe, taking the lead role in the famous Dollar Trilogy: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966).

In these films he played variants of the same character, known as "the man with no name": an enigmatic, silent and very skilled anti-hero with a gun, which guaranteed him international success

During the filming of the third chapter, Eastwood worked with other American actors such as Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach. The experiences on previous sets had been complicated: actors of different nationalities each acted in their own language and were dubbed, and the management of the production was often disordered, to the point of sometimes putting safety at risk.

For this reason, on the first day of shooting, Eastwood gave Wallach direct advice, which has become emblematic of the spirit of the spaghetti western: "I say this with all due respect, but I know what I'm talking about when I say that you should never trust anyone in an Italian film. Stay away from special effects and explosives."