How Clint Eastwood Really Felt About His Dollars Trilogy

Without the legendary Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood wouldn't be the star as we know him today. Though he had been acting for several years — and was even the leading man in Charles Marquis Warren's classic Western TV show "Rawhide" — before his role in "A Fistful of Dollars" came along in 1964, Leone's second movie skyrocketed Eastwood's career and fame in Hollywood to unforeseen heights. He became a phenomenon in the U.S. through, ironically, a movie that was shot in Spain and directed by a non-American director. Of course, looking back, we now know that Leone was responsible for creating the Spaghetti Western subgenre (a series of films that were deliberately low-budget, shot in Europe, and helmed primarily by Italian filmmakers), which began with "A Fistful of Dollars," the first entry in the Dollars Trilogy.

But back then, even Eastwood himself had no clue how much of a box office juggernaut and culturally influential flick "A Fistful of Dollars" would become in both the near and far future. In fact, he only agreed to do it because he had pretty much exhausted what he could do on horseback in "Rawhide," and saw this as an opportunity to tackle something different. In an interview in the book "Clint Eastwood: Interviews, Revised and Updated," he explained, "I took a hiatus and went to Spain to make 'A Fistful of Dollars.' I had nothing to lose. I had a job waiting in TV and I knew if it was a flop nobody would ever see it anyway."

Although the premises for all three Dollars films ("A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly") were derived from Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, they were hardly as serious as those Japanese classics. Rather, they were more like campy, action-ridden cowboy spectacles that relied on Eastwood's steely charisma and overflowing machismo as he shot bad guys and fired out one-liners in equal measure. And he treated them accordingly, too. As Eastwood put it:

"They weren't movies you got acclaim for, but they were harder to do than a lot of the better roles I've had lately. I look back on them as satire, which was difficult to do without lapsing over into slapstick — and I also learned from watching the Italians how to make only a few dollars look like 10 times that much on the screen."

Yet, despite being relatively cheap to produce, these three movies (along with "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "A Fistful of Dynamite," both of which were also directed by Leone) have become pinnacles of the Western genre and film history. They also created a boom at the time and inspired other Italian directors, like Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima, to follow in their footsteps and put their own distinct spin on the Spaghetti Western. All in all, Western lovers can never thank Eastwood enough for taking a chance on "A Fistful of Dollars" (or Leone for turning him into a superstar and giving us a half dozen movies of the highest pedigree).